Hail Seitan! (And Other Fake Meats)
How Syracuse became a birthplace of hardcore veganism
I got my first job in the restaurant industry when I was 18, cooking at Mr. Arnold’s Vegetarian Café in Syracuse, New York. At that point, my kitchen experience was limited to mixing pancake batter and brewing tea, so I wasn’t hired on the basis of my culinary skill. But my intense commitment to the animal rights movement and the local hardcore music scene was enough to land me the gig.
You see, it was 1994 and I had recently “gone vegan,” in the parlance of the time. I quickly enlisted myself in the movement with the zeal of the newly converted. Actually producing vegan food for people to eat seemed like an important component of that lifestyle.
At that time, militant animal liberation activists were operating across the country — raiding fur farms, removing animals from medical laboratories, and protesting factory farm conditions. The soundtrack to that movement was a relatively new brand of metalcore led by Syracuse heroes Earth Crisis. The band practiced and preached a “vegan straight-edge” lifestyle that eschewed alcohol and other intoxicants and advocated a strict plant-based diet. Earth Crisis’ music was aggressive, caustic, and unlistenable to most people. Their politics were controversial, disdainfully mocked, and highly revered with…
