We Are Living Through the Most Exciting Frontier in Cooking

Humans have been cooking with fire for somewhere between eight hundred thousand and one and a half million years, depending on which paleoanthropologist you ask. Cuisine — actual cuisine, the kind with technique and recipe and inheritance — is younger. Maybe ten thousand years old, dated to the first agricultural settlements in the Fertile Crescent. And for every single one of those ten thousand years, every cuisine on earth was built around the same axis: meat at the center.

The Roman cena was meat. The medieval French peasant pot was meat or fat. The Chinese imperial banquet was meat. The Japanese feudal table was fish. The pre-Columbian American kitchen was meat. The Indian Brahminical exception was lentils and ghee and is the only ancient cuisine that built a complete technique stack around the absence of flesh, and even that was framed by what was being abstained from. Meat was the gravitational center. The technique organized itself around the meat — how to soften it, how to crisp it, how to extend it, how to preserve it, how to make a single carcass feed a family for a month.

This was not a culinary choice. It was a thermodynamic one. Meat is calorie-dense, satiating, and shelf-stable when cured or smoked. For most of human history, the question of dinner was the question of where the protein was coming from and how many people you could feed with it before it spoiled. Cuisine grew up around that constraint. Every technique we have inherited — the braises, the reductions, the curing rooms, the sausage stuffers, the smokers, the bone broths, the demi-glace, the jus, the pan drippings, every single one — was a problem-solving response to a meat-centric world.

Then, in the span of about fifty years, the constraint disappeared.

Refrigeration solved storage. Industrial agriculture solved scale. Global trade solved seasonality. And for the first time in the history of the species, the protein question stopped being a constraint and started being a choice. We could eat whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, in whatever quantity. And almost simultaneously — within a generation, maybe two — a small but stubborn group of chefs started asking a question that no chef in the previous ten thousand years had been able to ask seriously: what does cuisine look like if you take the meat axis out?

This is the question I find more exciting than anything else happening in food.

Not because of the ethics, though the ethics are real. Not because of the climate math, though the climate math is brutal. Not because of the health literature, though it leans one way and not the other. The reason this question is the most exciting frontier in cooking is that nobody, in the entire ten-thousand-year history of cuisine, has answered it yet. We are still in the first chapter. We are the generation that gets to find out what’s there.

The most interesting work I know of in this direction is being done by a Spanish chef named Ángel León, in a small town in Cádiz called El Puerto de Santa María, at a restaurant called Aponiente.

You can verify everything I’m about to say. Aponiente has held three Michelin stars since 2017. It holds a Michelin Green Star for sustainability — one of the first restaurants in Spain to receive it. It was named the world’s most sustainable restaurant by 50 Best in 2022. León is called el Chef del Mar, the Chef of the Sea, because for two decades he has been doing something no chef in history has done at this depth: looking at the ocean as if cuisine had never noticed it before.

In 2009, León became the first chef in the world authorized to use one hundred percent food-grade marine phytoplankton in his dishes. Phytoplankton is the base of the entire ocean food chain — the microscopic, photosynthesizing organisms that feed every fish in the sea by being eaten by the things that get eaten by the things that get eaten by the bigger things. It is, by definition, a plant. It is also one of the most nutrient-dense substances on earth, packed with omega-3s and proteins and minerals at concentrations that put even the densest land plants in the shade. Before León, no chef had cooked with it. Now there is an entire register of cuisine that exists because he asked the question.

In 2011, León presented marine charcuterie at Madrid Fusión — sausages, hams, mortadellas, salamis built entirely from fish trim that had been discarded by the fishing industry for a hundred years. The technique came straight from the Iberian charcuterie tradition. The protein came from parts of the fish that had never been considered food. The result was a new category of cured product that did not exist in any cuisine on earth before he made it.

And then, in 2017, came the discovery that I think will end up in the history books.

León’s team — working in partnership with the University of Cádiz, with a reported investment of around three hundred and fifty thousand euros over several years — identified that Zostera marina, a seagrass that grows in the shallow coastal waters of the Bay of Cádiz, produces small edible grains. Sea rice. The grains contain, by analysis, around fifty percent more protein than conventional rice. They contain roughly seventeen times more fiber. They grow underwater, requiring no fresh water and no fertilizer and no arable land. The seagrass that produces them is part of a wider category of marine meadow that — though it covers less than one percent of the world’s oceans — accounts for nearly twenty percent of all carbon sequestered in the sea. And these grains have been growing, for thousands of years, in plain sight of every cook who lived anywhere near the Mediterranean coast, and nobody had ever looked.

Nobody. Had ever. Looked.

Read that again. We are talking about a grain that has been growing for thousands of years, on the doorstep of every Mediterranean civilization that ever cooked, that is roughly as nutrient-dense per acre as anything else humans grow, that produces more food with less water and less land and less carbon than almost any other crop on earth, and the first time a chef cooked with it was nine years ago, in a small kitchen in Cádiz, because one man asked the question that nobody else thought to ask.

This is what the frontier looks like.

I tell this story because I want to push back, hard, on the framing of plant-based cooking as loss. As constraint. As the food you eat when you are giving something up. The framing is everywhere. It is in the marketing of imitation products. It is in the apologetic tone of dinner party hosts. It is in the language of “alternatives” and “substitutes” and “plant-based equivalents.” It is in the way restaurants design a single token dish on the menu and call it inclusion. The framing is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that obscures what is actually happening, which is the most extraordinary opening of culinary possibility in the history of cooking.

For ten thousand years we cooked around the meat axis. We are the first generation that gets to find out what is on the other side of it. We are the first generation that gets to ask: what is a charcuterie made from fish trim? What is a grain made from seagrass? What is a stock made from kombu and dried porcini and roasted onion that hits the palate the way veal bones used to? What is an emulsion built on cashew lecithin instead of egg yolk? What is a braise that tenderizes a Tarbais bean the way it once tenderized shoulder meat? What is a duxelles made entirely from king oyster mushrooms and dry sherry?

Each of these is a question that has not been answered yet. Each of these is a place no chef has fully been. Each of these is a frontier.

León is the loudest example because he chose the ocean. But the same frontier is open in every kitchen. The home cook in Washington who is trying to make a cassoulet without duck is on the frontier. The London chef working out how to ferment koji-based proteins is on the frontier. The Tokyo confectioner figuring out the egg-free meringue is on the frontier. The Naples trattoria owner — there is a woman I worked with in 2015 at a place called Da Concettina, and she had been making pasta e fagioli for forty years without the guanciale, and her version was better than the cured one, because she had spent forty years figuring out exactly what flavors had to step forward when the cured pork stepped back. She did not call it plant-based. She called it her pasta e fagioli. She had been on the frontier for forty years and did not need a flag to plant.

This is the point. The frontier is wide open. There are still grains we have not noticed. There are still proteins we have not isolated. There are still mushroom species and seaweed combinations and koji ferments and bean varieties and ancient grain revivals and sea-vegetable preparations that no chef in human history has cooked with. We are looking at maybe the biggest opening of new culinary territory since the Columbian exchange brought tomatoes to Italy and chiles to India.

And we are calling it a sacrifice.

Eating without meat is not sacrifice. It is exploration. It is being the first generation that gets to find out what was on the other side of the axis that every cuisine before us had to organize around. It is finding the sea rice. It is finding the phytoplankton. It is finding the slow eight-hour kombu-and-porcini demi-glace that hits the palate the way the veal version used to and is also, somehow, lighter and brighter and more itself.

You are not giving anything up. You are at the beginning of a new map.

The map is mostly still blank. Whoever is reading this — there is a real chance that the dish you make this week, in your kitchen, with whatever is in your fridge, is the first time anyone has cooked that exact combination of plant ingredients with that exact technique. There are not enough cooks on the frontier yet. The territory is too big. The work has barely started.

This is the most exciting moment to be cooking that there has ever been.

Stop apologizing. Pick up the pan. Look at what is in your kitchen as if no chef had ever cooked it before. Because in most cases, none of them have. Not the way you’re about to.

The chef of the sea is not going to discover everything alone. He has been showing us for twenty years what the work looks like. The work is paying attention to what was already there. The work is asking a question nobody asked. The work is going to take a few generations and we are at the start of it.

This is what eating without meat is. It is exploration. It is discovery. It is the new world.

— Alexandre Teulade Washington, D.C.