Feminism and Food Will Save Your Sanity: A Conversation with Michelle Davis

A free-ranging chat with the recipe creator and NYT best-selling cookbook author.

On a chilly spring day two years ago, I had a lunch date with Michelle Davis. We’d met when we were guests on each other’s podcasts, and I immediately fell for her wry wit, warmth, and sparkling intellect. She’s fucking funny. And she’s passionate about what she does, which you know if you own one of her bestselling cookbooks (she’s got five of ‘em). Michelle has been at the forefront of digital food culture and veganism since 2012, when a Tumblr featuring her food went viral. She headed the award-winning brand Bad Manners for 12 years, and wrote the brand’s wildly popular weekly newsletter, The Broiler Room. She now heads up her own newsletter, Stir the Pot, which is chock full of fabulous recipes, and plenty of Michelle’s trademark humor, playful swearing, and helpful tips.

I’ve hungered to have a community of female friends since I moved to Los Angeles seven years ago, so I was giddy about that lunch date. When I lived in New York, I had an incredible group of girlfriends. We’d gather for book club, or cooking club (a disaster — one time the theme was, horrifyingly, “crock pot”). Once, we threw a Lady Palace party in the backyard of the amazing garden apartment I shared with my boyfriend, who quietly, sweetly, disappeared for the evening. We ate and drank and smoked and laughed until we cried, lying in a sweaty tangle of limbs on our massive hammock, which eventually broke. It was one of the best nights of my life.

I was fleeing a bad relationship when I moved to LA, and it took me some time to find my feet here, but I’m happy to report that I now have a circle of badass girlfriends – and I’m honored to count Michelle as one of them. She’s fed me, given me advice, made me laugh, allowed me to weep, and she’s invited me to rage along with her about all the fucked up things in the world. I’m a stronger, better person for knowing her and her brilliant, extremely fucking funny wife, Kyria. 

Photo by Lauren Hurt

I’ve wanted to chat with Michelle for this newsletter since I started it, because she truly stands for everything My Sandwich, My Choice is about: feminism, feeding yourself, and not taking any shit from assholes. And I’m thrilled to tell you that she and I are working on some stuff together that we’ll be launching soon!

We met up for this convo via Zoom on a rainy day. Michelle had the coziest vibes in her living room, with her cat Clementine floofing her tail on the back of the couch, and Harlow the dog protectively snuggled up at her back. Creatures of all kinds want to be near this woman — she’s undeniable. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length. Stick around for a recipe at the end!

MaryJane: I feel so fortunate to be friends with you, and I know a little bit about your background, but can you tell me about how you came to be such an educated, committed feminist?

Michelle Davis: Well, I’m the oldest girl, and I was always obsessed with equality between me and my sibling. We're 21 months apart. I was older, and I was always a big kid. So there weren't a lot of physical limitations on what I could do as a child, because I could hang. But as we got into our teen years, all of a sudden there were different roles for my brother versus for me, and I was like, “I'm the more capable one. How come he can stay out later? How come he can do this?” And because my parents had treated us very similarly until that point, I just couldn't get fucking over it. I was like, I was out here mowing the lawn because girls and boys are the same. But now my curfew is 10, and his is 12, and I'm two years older? What the fuck are we doing? 

So there was always that kind of commitment to treating people based on their own capabilities rather than any externalized factors. Then I started college in 2003. This is [the era] of Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” This is “Girls Next Door.” The O.C. had just started. Being a feminist was definitely not cool. 

MJ: I remember when the Pussycat Dolls were popping off and I was like, what the fuck is going on?

MD: Yeah. I went to San Diego State. It was a party school. They had Playboy scouts on campus all the time. But I was lucky, because it was the first university in the country to have a women's studies program. It was a huge school — 30,000 kids. The women's studies program was the only program that was intimate feeling. I was a double major in history and women's studies, so my [history] classes would go from a fucking sausage fest to these really fun classes that informed my historical scholarship, and made me think critically about the world around me.

We were studying intersectional feminism, talking about white privilege, and all the stuff that didn't come into the mainstream until very recently. I was fortunate to get that experience as an 18-year-old, when so many of my girlfriends were in the tanning booth with the little Playboy bunny sticker.

MJ: I did not know that was a thing.

MD: Everyone's going to frat parties. I'm working full-time at Whole Foods. I'm going to school full-time. I took ancient Greek. I was just a nerd who was happy to get to learn. Then I got a scholarship to go to grad school at William and Mary in Virginia, so I packed up my bags and moved to Williamsburg.

I wanted to prove my academic prowess because I came from a school that wasn't super academically focused, and I got there and I thought, “Wow, this is really going to be it.” But I was challenged in a different way. My classmates came from more privileged backgrounds, and they definitely couldn't exist in the real world. They had to be in academia; they had never had jobs.

MJ: I'm getting The Secret History vibes.

MD: Exactly. I was the only person who had a real job, and social skills, with a few notable exceptions. I just didn't really vibe there. And it was a hard time to be away from California. Proposition 8 had passed, which outlawed gay marriage after it had been legalized. Then it got reversed. This is when Palin and McCain are running, Obama's running. It was a weird time to be in a swing state. It further cemented my politics. Then I moved to LA on a whim during the recession; no hope in the world. Couldn't get a job, so I went back to the grocery store.

MJ: What was your Masters degree in?

MD: Comparative history. I talked about what foods informed the female experience in colonial Mexico — drinking chocolates, and tortillas, and what could be the body of Christ and what couldn't, because the only scholarship from that time is from religious women. 

MJ: Fascinating! I could hang like this all day.

MD: I'm just a hardcore weirdo.

MJ: I’m tracking our evolution — I'm a little bit older than you are, but I also grew up with that total belief that I could do anything. My dad had my sister and me fishing, doing everything with him. It was a rude awakening when I came into the real world when I was 16, and moved to Montreal, to realize, “Oh, that's weird, I'm being treated differently because I’m a girl.”

MD: I feel the same way about the jokes that women can't be funny, or we’re bad at math, or bad drivers. I'm sure I heard them, but I didn't hear them in any real way. So it was strange to get into college and be like, “Why are these guys trying to talk over me? They don’t know fucking anything.”

MJ: I wish I had known about Susan Faludi’s Backlash at the time. I only learned about it in the last few years, and it's crazy to me how much I’ve felt things that I never knew people were writing about. You’ve opened my eyes to so many feminist pieces of work that have existed for a long time. 

MD: It's amazing how much of it will save your sanity, like Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. I remember reading it in college, how she wrote about how she doesn't go outside to solicit praise from strangers. As women get older, obviously the cat-calling goes down, but we think that has something to do with our age and our level of attractiveness, and it doesn't at all. It's because you're a young girl, and the things adult men feel comfortable saying to you change. Now, I'm almost 40. I'm a handful. It has nothing to do with whether I'm beautiful or not. 

I had a friend whose mother died in high school. We were 16 at the time, and we're standing in front of the funeral home, all of us dressed in black. We're crying. And we keep getting honked at and catcalled. And I remember thinking, this has absolutely nothing to do with what I fucking look like. This has everything to do with the fact that I'm a young woman surrounded by other young women. Stumbling on feminist writings through my women's studies program helped me not feel insane.

Photo by Lauren Hurt

MJ: I’d love to talk about your becoming vegan, and the intersection of veganism and feminism.

MD: I went vegan at 18. It's funny, I don't think of myself as a sensitive child, but I obviously was. The part where I let myself feel those feelings was towards animals. I really identified with them. So when I was watching Charlotte’s Web, and then we'd have pork chops for dinner, I couldn't fucking hang. I just couldn't. 

My poor parents. My mom worked full time, as did my dad.They didn't have the luxury of cooking towards people's tastes. Dinner was dinner. They're like, “Okay, you don't want to eat meat, then I guess you have to cook for yourself.” Which would stop that for most kids, but not me, because I'm an asshole. 

When I got to college, it didn't make sense for me to stop there. I didn't agree with our food system in this country, and the exploitation that it took to make vegetarian products available. I had to opt out of the whole thing. The idea of exploiting vulnerable members of our society for our own betterment, and how that relates to our diets, and philosophy, and feminism, just happened to be something that I felt drawn to. I think it comes with always looking for equality and equity throughout the world, in a constant competition with my little brother.

MJ: When people ask me, “How can you possibly eat eggs or dairy if you're a committed feminist?” I always say I'm an omnivore and a feminist, and those things are not mutually exclusive. If everyone who was a feminist was required to be vegan, then we're in big fucking trouble.

MD: Absolutely. And I wish we had a little bit more grace for people where they are on their journey. I happen to have been a feminist and vegan for a long time now, but there was a time where I wasn't, and there was a time where I could have used people leading by example. I feel like people respond better to being invited to the party than being shamed for their choices.

MJ: Can you talk about your work to help people make those better food choices on a budget? You’re one of the first people I've encountered to talk about cooking plant-based food in a sustainable way.

MD: Part of that comes from where I grew up. I come by it honestly. We shopped at Food for Less. I had a lower middle class childhood. There was no spending bazillions of dollars. Then, when I was out on my own, I'm working at a grocery store, so we know I'm not making a shit ton of cash here, people. I think my best year I ever had at the grocery store, I made $25,000. I had to live on a budget.

But I was vegan, and all my coworkers would say, “It's so expensive. How can you do that?” And that's because people think of all the replacement meats, and fake cheeses. But I want to cook as much as I can from scratch by myself. That's how I saved a shit ton of money growing up, and working at the grocery store.

When it comes to showing people how to be vegan, I'm like, let me show you how to shop at your standard big box grocery stores and get stuff to make vegan meals that are exciting, and that are things you want to eat. I want people to feel like you're not going to spend an arm and a leg, or go into a grocery store and embarrass yourself. You can just be goofy and a little broke and still give a shit about what you eat. I hate the way that people on budgets have been excluded from the conversation around food in this country, because there's way more of us than there are people buying bee pollen.

Especially in this time of climate crisis, people want to feel good about the choices they're making on their plate. If you can let them feel good, and it's not costing them any more money, and it's something that they want to eat and they want to share with people they love, people are going to make that decision.

MJ: As you move on from Bad Manners to build your new brand, I wanted to touch on how, as friends, you and I have shared a fair bit about dealing with difficult people. I think we both have a high tolerance for holding space for someone who’s not necessarily treating you well. How will you take what you’ve learned about yourself into this new venture?

MD: It's funny, I've been thinking about the idea of emotional labor as real labor. So much of my work with the previous brand was emotional labor, done in private. I think, moving forward, I could use that same skill set. I can use that habit of holding space for difficult people and personalities towards building an audience. I want to make people's choices easier for them. I can offset this habit of mine that's usually behind closed doors, of doing all of the work of designing recipes for real life, for all the things people complain about — too many pots and pans, too long a cooking time, too much dicing. I'm trying to hold their hand through doing something that they might view as a chore, something that they don't want to do, but they know that they should. And they need somebody to perform that emotional labor for them, to get them a little bit closer to their own goals. Once we start viewing emotional labor as real labor, we can offer those skills for consumption, and also for monetary contributions, if that makes sense.

MJ: It does. I think it's so much in keeping with writers like

lyz

.

MD: Yes. Her book This American Ex-Wife came out this week!

MJ: So excited to read it! Using emotional labor as your work, to provide it to other people, and have it be helpful is so interesting. Through my journey of dealing with difficult people, difficult men, other women's stories are what have saved me. I look forward to seeing how your work will reach people in a restorative way.

MD: Because I'm a recipe creator, and I'm in the kitchen, it’s this very traditionally feminine space — and so often, because I had a male business partner, it was assumed that he was like the puppet master of everything else, which just wasn't the case. But it also just shows how my labor in the kitchen can be erased because of how people perceive me based on my gender.

My audience has always been predominantly female, even though people assume because I'm swearing and stuff, that it would be more men — but it's women, because we're the ones in the kitchen by ourselves looking for somebody to tell us all the things that we're thinking while we're alone. And I’m really looking forward to leaning into that space of being like, “Yes, I love to cook. Yes, I love to make everything from scratch — but bitch, you should get paid.” And don't fucking tell me to shut up and make you a sandwich. 

I think a lot of the right criticism of the second wave feminist movement is that women tried to adopt the same ideologies and sense of self as men by devaluing female spaces. And we've done so much better to get away from that, but I can still see that in a way, particularly male journalists and writers speak about veganism, and cooks, and wellness as somehow being superfluous to the human experience. 

What is more human than the need for food, at least three times a day? This is the foundation of the human experience. And to put it in the space of one gender, and not thinking of it as creative work. People don't think of it as a meditative practice. Where else are you more present than when you are frying something? You know what I mean? You're fucking right there.

MJ: So, what's next for you?

MD: I'm starting with the

Stir the Pot

Substack where you're getting paid recipes, and going through some of my older recipes, and giving people great tips and free recipes in the weekly general newsletter. I want to build towards cooking classes, and courses, and design menus for people. I want to give people instruction where they need it.

MJ: I hear Masterclass calling.

MD: Oh, my God. I mean, they have no vegan stuff on there. Guys — hello. I'm available. I've written some books. You might own one!

Follow Michelle at

Stir the Pot

on Substack, on Instagram at @mdavisfoods, and on TikTok at @stirthepot. Her website mdavisfoods.com has tons of free recipes and info on Michelle’s latest projects. Here’s a recipe for one of her delicious dishes!

LASAGNA STEW by Michelle Davis

Makes enough for 4-6 hungry people

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• 1 sweet onion, diced

• 2 carrots, peeled and diced

• 3 ribs of celery, diced

• 8-ounces cremini or button mushroom, destemmed and diced (one typical container from the store)

• 1 tablespoon Bragg’s Liquid Aminos or soy sauce

• 2 teaspoons chopped fennel seeds

• 1 teaspoon oregano

• ½ teaspoon smoked paprika

• ¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes, optional

• 4 cloves of garlic, minced

• 2 tablespoons tomato paste

• ¾ cup black lentils (they hold their shape best)

• One 28-ounce can diced fire-roasted tomatoes or regular

• 7 cups vegetable broth

• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

• 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast

• 8 ounces of dried trumpet pasta, your favorite shape, or broken up lasagna noodles

• Salt and pepper

• Basil or parsley to top

Grab a large stock pot and place it over a medium-high heat. Add the olive oil and once it’s warm, throw in the onions. Sauté these around with a pinch of salt until they start to get some color on them, about 5 minutes. Add the carrots and celery, stirring occasionally, until they start to soften, about 3 more minutes. Fold in the mushrooms, then drizzle over the Braggs. Next, it’s time to start really building some flavor. Add the chopped fennel seeds, oregano, smoked paprika, and red pepper flakes and stir so that everything gets incorporated. Let this cook together for a minute so that the spices can start waking up from their long nap in your spice rack. Next, fold in the garlic and tomato paste, making sure to break up any chunks. Toss in the lentils and stir it all up. By now everything should be smelling delicious. People will start showing up at your kitchen window. Tell them you’re fucking busy and get back to your stew.

Now pour in the can of diced tomatoes and vegetable broth and let the pot come to a simmer, stirring every now and then. Once the pot is simmering, turn down the heat to medium low and add the red wine vinegar and nutritional yeast. Keep it a low simmer, stirring every couple minutes to keep the lentils from clumping to the bottom, until the lentils are tender, about 20-30 minutes. Once they taste right, pour in the pasta and cook until the noodles are tender. This time will depend on what kind of pasta you’re using so check the box.

Want a brothier soup? Just cook the noodles in a separate pot and fold them into the bowls as you serve the soup. Either way, when you are ready to serve, turn off the heat and taste the soup. Add more salt or pepper, whatever you think it needs. Top with some fresh basil leaves or chopped parsley and serve right away.