Stop Calling It Plant-Based

The phrase “plant-based” did not exist before 1980.

I want to start there because almost everyone who uses the phrase assumes it is old. The phrase has the cadence of something that came down from a slow culinary tradition — like al dente or en croûte — and so we use it without thinking, the way we use any inherited piece of vocabulary. We treat it as a neutral descriptor of food. As if it had always been around. As if it described something stable.

It did not. It does not. It is forty-five years old. It was coined for a research paper. And the path it traveled — from clinical literature, to public health, to grocery store marketing, to dinner-party apology — is the single most damaging thing to happen to the cooking of plants in the entire post-war era.

The origin is easy to look up. Dr. T. Colin Campbell, a nutritional biochemist at Cornell, coined “plant-based” in 1980. The reason he coined it was specific and worth understanding. Campbell was running clinical studies at the National Institutes of Health that compared diets dominated by animal protein against diets dominated by whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruit. He needed a term for the latter that could survive a peer-reviewed journal. “Vegetarian” had connotations — religious, ethical, lifestyle — that he didn’t want in a clinical paper. “Vegan” was too narrow and too philosophical. He wanted a word that described the food on the plate, neutrally, in the register of nutrition science. He called it plant-based. The phrase served its purpose. It got the paper published. It became standard in the nutrition literature.

Then, slowly, over the next twenty years, the phrase escaped the journals. It moved from clinical research into popular nutrition writing. From popular nutrition writing into the wellness industry. From the wellness industry into health-food marketing. From health-food marketing into supermarket aisles. By around 2015, “plant-based” had completed the journey from clinical descriptor to consumer-product category, and was being printed on the side of packages, on menus, on signs above grocery store sections, on the bibs of athletes in television ads.

Somewhere in that journey, the word stopped describing food and started describing a posture.

This is the thing nobody says out loud. “Plant-based” is no longer a neutral descriptor. It is a posture. It tells the world, before you take a bite, that the food on the plate is health-coded. It is wellness-coded. It is clinical-coded. It is morally-coded. It is signaling. The word does work that has nothing to do with how the dish tastes. It tells the diner: this is a serious nutritional choice you are making. This is not just dinner. This is medicine, this is virtue, this is identity, this is a position in a debate.

A risotto is a risotto. It is not medicine. It is not virtue. It is not a position in a debate. It is butter and rice and stock and time. When you call it “plant-based risotto,” you have added a layer of clinical and ideological framing that the dish never asked for and the diner never needed.

There is a useful test for this. Try saying the phrase out loud, in the kitchen, to a real person, while serving them dinner.

“Tonight I made a risotto.”

Then try:

“Tonight I made a plant-based risotto.”

The second version invites the question that the first one does not. The second version says: there is something different about this risotto that I need to flag before you take a bite. The second version positions the food. The second version asks the diner to recalibrate, to set expectations downward, to brace for the version that is not the original. The second version does, in two extra words, the entire damage that this essay is about.

A risotto is a risotto. If it has rice and stock and a long stir and a final knob of fat folded in at the end, it is a risotto, and the kind of fat is not a categorical distinction. A risotto with butter is a risotto. A risotto with olive oil is a risotto — the risi e bisi tradition in the Venetian lagoon uses olive oil more often than butter. A risotto with cashew cream finished with miso instead of parmesan is a risotto. The technique is the technique. The dish is the dish. The fat is whatever you have in the kitchen.

The qualifier “plant-based” is doing a thing the food itself doesn’t need. It is doing the work of a disclaimer. It is doing the work of a defensive crouch. It is doing the work of an apology before the apology has been asked for. And the moment you put that word in front of the dish, you have made the dish smaller. You have invited the diner to compare it to a non-plant-based version that doesn’t exist on this plate. You have made the conversation about absence instead of presence.

I will go further. I think the word has cost the cooking of plants ten years of progress that should have been spent on technique.

Hear me out. Look at the plant-cookbook section in any bookstore. Almost every cover, almost every title, almost every blurb leans on the “plant-based” qualifier. The food is not described as Italian, or French, or Mexican, or Japanese. It is described as plant-based. The thing the cookbook is selling is not the cuisine. The thing it is selling is the diet. The thing it is selling is the absence. And the result, in the kitchens of millions of home cooks, is that the food gets cooked badly — because the books are organized around what is being avoided rather than what is being made.

A book of Italian recipes, written without the word “plant-based” anywhere on the cover, that happens to be made with plants, would do more for plant-cooking than every book with “plant-based” in the title combined. The Italian framing puts the cook in the right register. The technique register. The cuisine register. The framing where you ask: what is this dish? How does it want to be made? What does the acqua di cottura do for the sauce? How long should the dough rest? What does the olive oil need to be? The framing where the dish is the dish.

The “plant-based” framing puts the cook in the wrong register. The compliance register. The substitution register. The framing where you ask: what am I leaving out? What’s the swap? What replaces the parmesan? What replaces the egg? The framing where the dish is the absence.

I have watched this in friends’ kitchens for years. Smart people, good cooks, who could have made a real pasta al pomodoro — fresh tomatoes, sweated garlic in olive oil, a small handful of basil, the right pasta with the right salt-to-water ratio — instead make a “plant-based pasta dish” that involves substituting things that didn’t need substituting and adding things that didn’t need adding. The dish gets worse in proportion to how seriously they take the plant-based framing.

The fix is the same fix as the rest of this site. Drop the qualifier. Cook the dish. Make a risotto. Make a pasta al pomodoro. Make a cassoulet. Make a pesto alla genovese. Make a ratatouille. Make a milanesa. Each one is the dish it is, and the cuisine it comes from is what determines how it should be cooked, and the absence of an animal product is not a categorical difference that needs to be flagged on the menu.

I know the counter-argument. People who are vegan want to be able to scan a menu and know what is safe for them to order. People with restrictions need a search term. The qualifier is useful in a database. I’m not arguing that the word should be banned from the world. I’m arguing that the word should not be the descriptor on the plate. There is a difference between a filter in a database — vegan-friendly, gluten-free, nut-free — and a name for a dish.

The filter goes in the metadata. The name goes on the menu.

When I am writing a recipe for this site, I am tagging it for searchability. The HTML behind this page contains the word “vegan” in the SEO metadata so that someone looking for a vegan milanesa can find the milanesa. That is the appropriate place for the word. In the metadata, in the search filter, in the dietary tag at the bottom of the menu — invisible, structural, doing the technical work of accessibility.

The qualifier does not belong on the dish. It does not belong in the headline. It does not belong on the tongue when you are serving someone dinner. The risotto is the risotto.

The word “plant-based” was coined for a 1980 clinical paper. It was useful for a clinical paper. It is not useful for a kitchen. The food on the plate is not a research subject. It is dinner.

Drop the qualifier. The dish has been waiting for forty-five years to speak for itself.

— Alexandre Teulade Washington, D.C.