If you were to stop a hundred people on the street and ask them who Martha Gellhorn was, the sad fact is that the very small percentage of people who did know would say, “Wasn’t she married to Ernest Hemingway?”
The thing is, they wouldn’t be wrong. But before she was Mrs. Hemingway, she was an American war corre spondent and author who did some amazing things—including covering the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. She had an exceptional career full of extraordinary moments, such as when she impersonated a stretcher bearer to cover the D-Day landings because she lacked the penis required to get press credentials. She was one of the first reporters on the scene at the Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated. She was even a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. But sadly, to much of the world, she will always be one of Hem’s old ladies.
When I started the Betty Crocker Project, I wasn’t nearly as accomplished as Martha—but I could relate. After years and years in the animal rights movement, I often felt that I was known in the animal rights world more for whom I’d married and dated and what I brought to potlucks than for the projects, campaigns, and victories I’d worked on. The year I started this book was also the year Dan and I found out that becoming parents was going to be more challenging than we had ever expected—which was especially hard because it was also the year some of our closest friends became parents. We had friends move away and get promotions that kept them on the road or in the office constantly. For me, it seemed like despite all my personal success in my marriage, my professional life was stuck in a rut… tracking down animal abusers online and working from home in boxer shorts and hoodies. But it all changed with the Betty Crocker Project and this book.
Two years, several meltdowns, experimental casseroles, hundreds of recipes, first-degree burns, and a very dramatic move to Brooklyn later: we have this book. I had the hardest time writing it—not because of those things I listed or my impossible expectations of myself, but because I never wanted to be finished with it. From that first day, with that first lobster, I have found a way to meet amazingly creative and compassionate people and be shamelessly nerdy in a socially acceptable way, and have become downright obsessed with challenging the myth that being vegan is anything less than fabulous.
This book doesn’t mean we’ll stop writing the blog, of course; there will always be more whoopie pies to bake and casseroles to veganize. There are still billions of animals needlessly being killed each year for food, and countless not-yet-vegans out there who still have no idea that vegans don’t just live off raw tofu and quinoa salads. That’s where we come in.
One of our dear friends gave me a huge cherry red box of circa 1970 Betty Crocker recipe cards to inspire the next generation of Betty Goes Vegan. I won’t lie—there are some real challenges in there that have already gotten me thinking. We’re also taking a pilgrimage to the Betty Crocker test kitchens in Minnesota to see the real “Bettys” in their natural habitat… and who knows what could happen after that? Maybe it’ll be like Narnia, and I won’t come back until after I’ve already lived a lifetime of culinary adventures. I guess we’ll never know until I show up at her door.
But I can tell you this. I was soul sick when I brought home my copy of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. But I’m better now. In the end, Betty Crocker did encourage me to “Bake Someone Happy”—me. I know that sounds unbelievably trite, but sometimes the most sincere statements just do.