I have been a vegetarian for a while now. Until recently, when my editor asked me to dig deeper into my past as a meat-eater for an essay in my upcoming cookbook memoir, Eating Again (out January 25th, 2022, with Heliotrope Books), I missed meat a lot—especially during the holidays.

“What do you miss about eating meat?” she asked in a comment next to an essay about my childhood, where I mentioned a rabbit recipe that my grandmother Silvana would make on special occasions.

I had never asked myself that question. And, surprisingly, the answer came fast and very clear: I didn’t miss meat, I missed that state of childhood when I didn’t know any better, when it was okay not to know, when innocence was in full swing, when, in the early 1980s in Avigliana, the small town at the foothills of the Italian Alps, where I was born and raised, we didn’t know how the industrialization of animal farming was inhumane and a threat to the environment. I didn’t understand how much cows suffered when constantly milked for a bite of cheese, a gelato, or butter.

I don’t regret my awareness and commitment. Knowing what it is that I miss, I can channel the feeling in my cooking, in my plant-based recipes, for new sustainable traditions that my daughter will remember and be able to pass on without renouncing ingredients, scents, spices, or textures.

My editor’s question came back to haunt me this past summer, which I spent in Italy, where my parents and my 99-year-old grandmother still live. There, in fact, I was still eating cheese, and a lot of it. On a practical level, in Italy it was often the only alternative to not eating meat. So for the 10 weeks we spent there, we ate it all: mozzarella, burrata, Parmigiano, asiago and fontina, goat cheese, sheep ricotta… you name it. What was it about dairy that I couldn’t give up? Having been through the understanding process with meat, I suspected it wasn’t about the food.

It was about my maternal grandparents, in fact. It was about a specific time in my childhood and growing up with them up in the mountains, when I was around seven; it was about how much my grandfather Arigo loved toma (aged cheese from the Alps) and fontina from the Aosta Valley, where I spent every summer, with them, until the age of eighteen. He loved Parmigiano so much that—it became a joke in the family— he could even grate it on his caffe latte. It was about the mountains, the memories, a life that was still untouched, innocent, and devoid of the suffering I would go through when I ultimately did leave the mountains— life before I began my journey of recovery from eating disorders.

So, when we returned to Los Angeles, where we live, I embarked on a mission: letting go of my old ideas about what “good food” means and exploring the plant-based world with a new eye. I wanted to eliminate cheese from our diet because of the suffering animals go through for the production of dairy products. In doing so, I hope not to expect the same flavor as I discover cashew cheese, oat butter, and the like.

As a recovering anorexic and bulimic, however, I must be careful when it comes to cleanses, eliminating food, and diets. So, I turned this project into an adventure, a creative endeavor, rather than a drastic food regime.

And just like it tends to happen in life, when I am ready for something, when I am ready for change, things line up for that to happen: I had heard of homemade cashew cheese, nutritional yeast, and aquafaba (the liquid from a can of chickpeas, or the water in which you cook them), of course, but I had never tried cooking and baking with any of those until this time, when I was ready for the challenge. Maybe it’s the season change, maybe it’s the effect of motherhood, but I am fully embracing the new while honoring the old.

Aquafaba, it turns out, became a key ingredient in my Italian-inspired lentil and black bean meatloaf, that I will be serving for Thanksgiving, with sautéed rapini.

Photo Credit: Italian-Roast-Style Lentil and Bean Meatloaf. Photo by Roman Cho. Courtesy Chef Alice Carbone Tench.