Joanne Lee Molinaro wasn't always known by her now-famous moniker, the Korean Vegan. But the attorney, activist, distance runner, and TikTok star has come to be known to her 3.5 million combined social-media followers for overlaying storytelling onto gorgeous footage of her preparing vegan food. And now Molinaro is hard binding it all in her first cookbook, The Korean Vegan Cookbook: Reflections and Recipes From Omma's Kitchen.
Her recipes are sensational, to be sure, but it's the content of the stories that establishes Molinaro and her family's depth and breadth of lived experience as she shares narratives of everything from vulnerable topics like trauma, illness, immigration, and broken or painful relationships to family stories of her parents and grandparents fleeing North Korea and her own childhood in Chicago. The book takes a similar hybrid form, interspersing chapters of essays and memoirs with Korean recipes that are carefully veganized, honoring and embracing the techniques and intentions of Molinaro's mother and grandmothers. To boot, the photography is simply stunning.
Shondaland caught up with Molinaro to chat about connecting to people and heritage through food, her diasporic childhood, the cooking retreat she shared with the women in her family, and what she's cooking and eating right now.
SARAH NEILSON: You write at the start of the book, "There was no plane in the world that could fly me to North Korea, but my mother's words and her food could transport me to a place as close to it as possible.... What really matters isn't whether the food tastes exactly the way your grandmother made it, but how it makes you feel." How has veganizing not-traditionally-vegan Korean food connected you to your family and cultural heritage?
JOANNE LEE MOLINARO: What I was so nervous about doing when I started veganizing Korean food was stripping all the culture and significance from the food that I grew up eating. The whole point of doing this was so that I could retain my "Korean-ness" even while eating plant-based. I wanted to make sure that when I was developing recipes that were vegan versions of what you call not-traditionally-vegan dishes that I was giving them the respect that they deserved - i.e., I wasn't going and Googling vegan juk or vegan egg roll and just coming up with my own version of these already sort of removed variations of things that I had grown up eating.
I went to my mom and would just be like, "How do you make [this] normally? Even with the meat, even with the shrimp, whatever it is you put in there, just show me or just tell me, and then let me figure out - maybe sometimes with your help - how to replace those, substitute those, or just simply remove them from the recipe." So, in that way, I was learning how to make these things traditionally. Even though I wasn't using that for my book, that was still knowledge that was being filed away. I was understanding why some of these flavors are being added and what their significance was. And then, of course, most importantly, I was spending a lot of time with my mom and my aunts, like way more than I had previously.
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SN: You write about the food of your childhood as diasporic. Can you talk about that, and how the idea of the diaspora shows up in your cooking and food and/or life philosophies?
JLM: For a long time, I felt like I could only be Korean or I could only be American. Like, there was no space for me that was both Korean and American. That was a very confusing time. When I went to Korea, I was told repeatedly I wasn't Korean. And here in America, every single day I was given reminders that I wasn't quite American enough for everyone either. So, we're sitting in a sort of gray area, and that is certainly the case with food. The interesting thing about food and the role that food plays in culture is that line that you read at the very beginning, "There's no plane in the world that can take me to North Korea." And that is 100-percent true given what's happening in North Korea. My family is certainly not welcome there, and I would never be able to go there unless there's a serious regime change that occurs in my lifetime. But food is one of the things that remains sort of preserved when it comes to tradition. A lot of fourth- or fifth-generation Asian-American families may not speak their native tongue anymore, they may not wear their native costumes, they may not do any of the other traditions, but their food still remains sort of intact. Asian-American cuisine, or Korean-American cuisine, is sort of like this homage to the native land because it's one of the few things that we retain as part of our culture even if we speak English and do all the other things that are "American." But for me, there's sort of this unconscious use of American flavors, American cooking styles, American ingredients that really fill out my identity as a Korean-American as a distinct category of identity from just Korean or just American.
SN: Sometimes the stories you share in your videos are intense and vulnerable. What feels important to you about sharing these stories, especially with such a wide audience?
JLM: There are a couple of things that I am always mindful of when I'm putting together a video and thinking about what it is I'm going to share. For the more personal videos, there are two things that I want to get across. Number one is the idea that you are not alone. I struggled with disordered eating for pretty much my whole life. About four years ago, I was reading an article that documented numerous individuals who had eating disorders and the pain that they struggled through while trying to figure out a solution to their disordered eating. The thing that struck me the most was how much their narratives paralleled my own. That was the first time in my life, at 38 years old, that I was hearing somebody else talk about it in a way that sounded so similar to my own story. And what a waste it was that we were all on our individual islands struggling and in pain by ourselves when we could maybe lean on each other.
So, when I do these TikToks or when I do these Instagram Reels or YouTube videos, what I'm trying to convey to people is, number one, you're not alone. The other thing that I want to convey is that triumph is all the sweeter when the struggle is hard. If something's easy to win, then winning it isn't nearly as fun or as meaningful as when the struggle is hard. A lot of times people say, "Oh, your TikToks are so depressing. Why are you always so sad?" I would say 99.9 percent of my TikToks are incredibly uplifting, or at least that's what they're intended to be. Because you've got to go through the valleys in order to really appreciate the peak. That's really what my TikToks are about; it's trying to empower people to muscle through that valley knowing that there's an incredibly amazing peak at the end of it.
SN: What are the intersections between your work in the food space and in the other public-facing aspects of your life, like your law career and distance running and activism?
JLM: I have all sorts of these seemingly random things, I guess, but when you sew them all together, these are the things that make me uniquely Joanne. The objective of The Korean Vegan is to broaden the message of compassion and empower people to make compassionate changes in their own and other people's lives. That's the core mission of The Korean Vegan. And what I like to think is that everything that is me, whether it's the long-distance running and what that says about muscling through tough times and seeing finish lines, or lawyering, which is about advocating and providing counsel while also structuring 60-second narratives in a very concise way, or my background in food and using that as a vehicle for discussing some tougher issues, these are all things that I feel like have uniquely equipped me to execute that vision for The Korean Vegan.
SN: What are some of your favorite stories, or ones that make you feel connected to your family or to your audience?
JLM: One story that I really love to share is the first story I shared about my dad on my TikTok that went viral. It's the one where he meets me at mile 20 of my first marathon, the Chicago Marathon. My dad was ill, he had prostate cancer, he was older, he had never seen a marathon live before, and this was my first one. Also, he and I didn't have the best relationship. When I got to mile 20 and I saw my dad there holding a plastic water bottle, and he starts running with me, and he says, "Can I run with you?" And he starts handing me that water bottle. I just couldn't stop crying after that. That was a real moment for us. It really changed the dynamic of our relationship. It's a small but incredibly powerful moment, and it's one that I will cherish for the rest of my life.
SN: What was the most fun thing, and what was the most challenging thing about creating this book?
JLM: The most fun thing about creating this cookbook was hanging out with my mom and my aunt. There was a two-day period where my mom and both of my aunts who are here in Chicago came to my house, and, together with my cousin, we all just made a bunch of food together and took pictures. We were just kind of doing the girl thing, you know? Folding dumplings, pasting the kimchi, figuring out the best way to do a vegetable broth . it was two days of hardcore cooking and photography, and I had so much fun doing that just because - you know how girls can be when we get together and when we're tired? We just started acting silly and goofy, but at the same time, we were so productive, and I learned so much from that process. It was very meaningful and fun.
The most challenging part about writing the cookbook was the writing. I do so much writing, but doing it in short form is so different than writing long form like essays. It had been a very long time since I had been tasked with writing creative essays and a brief or a motion or something like that at work. I think making that creative switch was very challenging for me. There was a lot of pressure on me because I felt like these are my parents' most precious and most beautiful stories, and maybe I'm not the best technician to share them in the way that they deserve to be shared. So, there was a lot of impostor syndrome and angst and anxiety, and that isn't always the best environment for good writing.
SN: What is something you're eating a lot of right now?
JLM: The thing that I'm eating a lot of these days is my Pecan Paht Pie. It's that time of the year where pecan pie is very popular because the holidays are around the corner, so I've actually been demonstrating it a lot to people, and I have this abundance of Pecan Paht Pie. But it tastes so good that I really don't mind. And it's so easy to make - that's why it's kind of in demand. It's really easy to make, perfect for the holidays, it's a total showstopper, and then it tastes incredible. So, I've been eating a lot of that, and that's fine. I just finished up the Chicago Marathon a couple of weeks ago, so it's pie and ice cream for like a month before you go back to basics.
Sarah Neilson is a freelance writer. They can be found on Twitter @sarahmariewrote.
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