Emma and Nona went on the excursion without a guarantee of a publisher or knowing if anyone beyond the blogosphere would ever read their work, but words of an agent made them throw caution to the wind and take the risk. “We were told that we needed to just go on the trip and have a blog’s worth of work before we could even dream of getting a publisher since we were two unknown 22-year-old girls,” says Nona. “I was a waitress, and at one point had a summer job at the Board of Education. Emma was a barista and an art teacher. We were sort of in purgatory and knew that if we didn’t go now, eventually our careers or families or whatever else would get in the way. It was a perfect time to go on an adventure because we had nothing to lose.”

They got in touch with the women they visited by sending a call out via email asking to hear from cool, opinionated, motivated, smart, twenty-something women who had a story to tell. They weren’t specifically asking for feminists, but that’s what they had in mind. When they only heard back from white liberal college students, they sought out women to speak to from a broader spectrum, but not as broad as they would have liked. Nona explains, “Trying to include everyone was a very daunting task. I regret not talking to more rural women, and I wish we’d talked with more women in traditionally male jobs, like firefighters and construction workers. But that would have required a lot more money and time than we had, so we mostly focused on cities.”

The pair hit the road in Chicago, drove northwest to the Dakotas, jumped over to Seattle and Portland, down the length of California, through Las Vegas to the Midwest, back around to Texas, across the South, and ended up in NYC. As they stopped in city after city, Emma and Nona chatted informally with the women they met in various states of sobriety and inebriation, but taping the conversations throughout. They used the interviews to construct a narrative written filtered their own feminist perspective that traces the pair’s experiences and revelations while traveling through places — literal and metaphorical — they had never been. Instead of focusing on thematic analysis, Girldrive is an interwoven collection of stories: “We didn’t want to be feminist evangelists. We wanted to actually listen and allow these women to speak for themselves.”

But they couldn’t include everything. “It was hard to narrow it down,” Nona says. “There was a lot of repetition in our interviews, and we showed some of that to illustrate themes, but we tried to include women whose opinions aren’t part of the mainstream narrative of feminism. There were a lot of educated white girls we talked to who don’t appear in the book because we didn’t want to give disproportionate weight to their voices. Obviously, we didn’t take them out altogether.”

With a desire to mitigate a feminism that is well-worn and cliché and bring new knowledge about the relevancy of feminism for young women today, Girldrive ultimately positions feminism as “less as a movement and more of a sensibility.” When we asked Nona if that was another way of saying the feminist movement is dead, she laughs and responds, “I think feminism as a ‘movement’ may be dead, but that’s not a bad thing. Feminism exists as a lens, as a codeword to start conversation about the fact that our ‘choices’ are influenced by gender roles and societal expectations and bring an awareness of gender into women’s lives. Once women — or anyone really — start to see the world through that lens, it inevitably affects politics.”

Despite a movement not existing on a societal level, Girldrive is proof that sisterhood exists between women in smaller ways; Emma’s and Nona’s friendship is evidence of that. In the months after Emma took her own life after losing her battle with major depression, Nona pushed on to finish the project she began with her friend — a tribute to the person she calls her “intellectual soulmate.”

Now the book will take on a life of its own. “Girldrive opens up a whole rich history and tradition that people should learn about,” Nona says. “Beyond that, if a woman needs to put a qualifier before ‘feminist’ (i.e., queer black radical feminist) or choose a different word like ‘womanist,’ I don’t care so long as they’re educated about what feminism is all about and they have gender consciousness.”

Watch a trailer for the book below, and learn more on the Girldrive website.

Girldrive trailer! from Girldrive on Vimeo.

While The Smiths, Jane Austin, and Søren Kierkegaard provide Bauer with much fodder for questioning the righteousness of the Lord, the final, ahem, nail in His coffin actually comes from the Bible itself. (How Marx!) Unable to resolve the Good Book’s many irreconcilable contradictions, in the end Bauer chooses to opt out of the flock and join her fellow city dwellers in the realm of the spiritually unknown.

Flavorpill: You have a knack for making mention of quirky things — like inept rock music rip offs and the dogmatism of the newly converted — in succinct ways that may be lost on those raised outside of fundamentalist Christianity. Are these intended to be a sort of shout out to other lapsed Christians?

Carlene Bauer: Yes. I wrote of evangelical culture for those who had been through it and laid it aside, and also for Christians who believe but struggle with the culture of the church. Growing up I felt I must have been the only person in whatever situation I was in — youth group, Bible study, retreat van — who believed but did not think we had to believe everything. I felt I was the only person having these critical thoughts. So I wrote the book in part for others who might have felt or feel those tensions. For those who might not have gone to a Jesus Camp or Patrick Henry College, but felt as shaken, or as confused, by trying to reconcile the demands of religion with one’s desire to belong to the world.

FP: This memoir’s title is an obvious reference to religion’s influence on morality, but my sense is that it also speaks to your feeling as though you never fit in anywhere. Did you intend it to be multi-layered?

CB: I say the phrase to someone in the book — I blurt “I’m not that kind of girl!” to a perfectly nice young man who’s taken me on a date. So when it came time to choose a title, I liked the idea of it coming from somewhere in the text. And yes, I liked that there was a more layered meaning if you looked at the book as a whole. I’m not exactly a libertine, but I’m not exactly a blameless sinner.

FP: Desire for perfection, particularly from God and yourself, is a prominent theme in Not That Kind of Girl. Did this spring from your rigidly religious upbringing?

CB: I think the desire for perfection was congenital — something that would have informed me whether or not I’d gone to church. Religion gave me a framework in which to practice that perfectionism.

FP: Your departure from Christianity was, in part, prompted by your inability to reconcile things you believe are important — a progressive political stance, for example — with the contradictory teachings of the religion. How did these ever-present contradictions factor into losing your faith?

CB: I think they were what finally led me to leave off believing, although I have been chastened recently by Flannery O’Connor. In her letters she says to a friend who is dismayed by the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church that “you do not have any real imaginative vision of what the Church is.” So I’ve been wondering occasionally whether I gave up too soon because I couldn’t see past the hypocrisies and contradictions. Only occasionally.

FP: Rapture anxiety is common in those who grew up in evangelical traditions and you mention throughout the book a feeling of not being able to shake the looming threat of apocalypse. Is this something you still experience?

CB: No, although my sister and I still wonder if someone has gotten raptured if they go missing for a few minutes in stadiums, Target, or our parents’ house. We laugh about it, but it’s pretty frightening how ready we are to think it, even for a few seconds, these many years later. Sometimes I think that for a certain sort of person, raised with a certain sort of Christianity, one may never fully cede one’s mind to reason. There might always be a tiny, fearful corner of the mind given to wondering if the imaginary isn’t in fact the real and the true after all.

FP: You are obviously a bibliophile and a music lover. Can you talk about how you came to the decision to structure this memoir around classic works of literature, indie music, and German philosophy?

CB: Well, I guess it wasn’t a decision as much as an inevitability. Books and music were as important to me as religion, and I couldn’t write the book without discussing them.

FP: I see this book as a love story. The bulk of the book is about your falling out of love with God, so it’s suiting that when you finally do break up with Him, it’s on the cusp of finding a more practical kind of human love that’s not at all flawless, but meets your needs. What did you learn about yourself while writing this memoir?

CB: Thank you. I saw it that way, too. It may sound strange for someone who has written an account of one’s own life, but it’s hard for me to say what I learned about myself through the writing. Being afflicted with crippling introspection, when it’s not clouding your vision, can keep you cruelly intimate with your feelings-slash-failings, and the book allowed me to shape those feelings (I hope) rather than access any new ones. I definitely shook my head at myself a lot while writing, but I tried to turn that into comedy. I did learn, however, that there is such a thing as too much NPR (the reclusive writer’s home companion) and too much coffee.

The décor is decidedly un-Starbucks-like (no hunter green sterile environs here), and instead resembles something you might see in New Orleans’ French Quarter: distressed wood, tin walls, mismatched furniture, a pastry counter, actual teacups and mugs. Add to this a menu of imported beer and wine, poetry readings, and manually served coffee beans and tea, and you’ve got what some are calling the appropriation of the local café culture and boutique environment.

But here’s what I’ve been wondering: Is Starbucks opening these stealth stores in an attempt to fool customers who dislike the chain into patronizing their company as business has taken a turn for the worse? Is the overall increase in anti-corporate sentiment potentially leading to an un-branding trend?And with two more locations already planned in Seattle, when will a stealth Starbucks make its way to the East Village?

You know it’s just a matter of time.

Related post: The Kool-Aid’s in the Coffee: An Interview with David Latourell of Intelligentsia Coffee Roaster

You see, Trash Talk is made almost solely from the materials leftover from the process of making the company’s other shoes. By using the manufacturing waste to create an entirely new product, Nike has “made this shoe the holy grail of consumption.”

At least that’s how design innovator Valerie Casey put it. Whether it’s spectacular enough to warrant a biblical description remains to be seen, but Trash Talk did manage to walk off with the Best in Show title from the other 1,630 entries.

Nike isn’t the only company to wow the IDEA judges; a total of 150 awards — 31 Gold, 47 Silver, and 72 Bronze — were given out. And the contest winners weren’t limited to the United States either. Fifteen countries and 66 designs are represented among the award recipients, and awards were not simply awarded based on sleek style. There were eight criteria: design innovation; benefit to the user; benefit to the client/business; benefit to society; ecological responsibility; appropriate aesthetics and appeal; usability testing; rigor and reliability; and internal factors, methods, and implementation.

“Design is not just about making things pretty,” says Claudia Kotchka, an IDEA judge and former head of design at Procter & Gamble. “Designers are about making the world a better place.”

So what other goodies nabbed the spotlight? Well, they haven’t announced all of the winners just yet, but I was able to dig up a few that may hold some relevance to your life. If you’re tired of the Mac crowd’s monopoly on cool computers, the Dell Studio Hybrid desktop’s ultra-compact, versatile design and multiple color options may just give Apple a run for its money.

Though I don’t fully understand the method by which this works, the publicly placed Energy Seed bin encourages proper battery disposal and provides streetlamp light, all while resembling a potted plant.

Something with the potential to revolutionize HIV testing, particularly in countries where the stigma is quite high, is the Project Masiluleke Home HIV Test, which allows a saliva-based test to be administered outside of a clinical setting.

And perhaps the invention most likely to make you go “why didn’t I think of that?” was Eva Solo Grating Bucket. All these years I’ve been picking up tiny strips of cheese from my kitchen floor, and now my hardwoods can be cheese-free!

I wasn’t impressed with Coca-Cola’s Refresh Recycling Bin, and in fact, I’m a little irked that it even received an award. A folded container made from recycled soda bottles. Come on, Coke, where’s your innovation.

My annoyance was forgotten the second I saw this: ICON A5 Amphibious Sport Aircraft. With absolutely no practical usage and very little chance I will be able to experience its glory, this little land and water plane with folding wings (folding wings!) makes my knees a little weak. I know I should be more critical of A5 — the unnecessary waste it creates, the false hope it gives to the average consumer — but it’s awesome!

If this is what they start with, who knows how this will end? An interactive full list of winners can be found here. Go ahead, waste your Friday afternoon on the job. You know you deserve it.

Note: It’s also worth checking out Fast Company’s IDEA coverage; Valerie Casey notes that many of this year’s submissions look suspiciously like the winners from back in 2000.

For those of you who may enjoy a few new additions to your summer reading list, here’s a cheat sheet to help you navigate the thirteen nominees.

A.S. Byatt: The Children’s Book

Byatt has won the Booker Prize previously, and her nominated novel has yet to be released in the US, so you’ll either have to wait until October to read this dark 19th century tale of family, secrets, and survival — or nab it during an overseas excursion to Canada or the UK.

J.M. Coetzee: Summertime

The New York Review of Books has done us a solid, friend. A couple of weeks ago, they excerpted this two-time Booker Prize winner’s upcoming novel so that we don’t have to describe it to you. Wasn’t that kind of them? Check it. Note: If he’s victorious this year, he’ll be the first author ever to win three times.

Adam Foulds: The Quickening Maze

Remember that story you used to tell at slumber parties about the two girls who were home alone in a big, creaky house on a rainy night and heard on the radio that a crazed murderer has recently escaped from an asylum? Well, this book has a similar plot, except that there aren’t two girls. And the escapee isn’t a murderer. But it is set in England so there’s definitely rain! And the asylum! Don’t forget the asylum! Note: This one is also only available in the UK for now.

Sarah Hall: How to Paint a Dead Man

Art lovers, this book is for you. Death, inhibited sight, landscapes, sexual abandon, madness, and meditative existential meanderings: Sarah Hall has outdone herself with a novel that defies categorization. How postmodern.

Samantha Harvey: The Wilderness

On her first pass out of the gate, Samantha Harvey beat out Toni Morrison for the Orange Prize for Fiction, so you know this work is going to be soul shaking and complex. Bringing to mind Sarah Polley’s painfully beautiful film Away From Her, this story centers on a 65-year-old architect’s descent into Alzheimer’s. You’ll either need tissues or a Philosophy 101 refresher course for this one.

James Lever: Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood

Wow. The world never knew it was missing an autobiography of Tarzan’s chimpanzee companion, Cheeta. The author of this novel thought it was so good that he hid the fact that he’d written it… until it was nominated for an award, of course. Who knew a monkey writing his Hollywood tell-all story could be so good? Allegedly this one’s hilarious.

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall

The Tudors have staying power in popular culture, that’s for sure. From the Portman-Johansson blockbuster to the currently running Showtime series, Henry VIII’s reign provided an endless supply of dramatic material for creative types to choose from in their respective craft. Mantel writes this tale of Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, for the tragically power hungry.

Simon Mawer: The Glass Room

As an itinerant military brat, it’s no surprise that Mawer is into history. When one spends one’s youth shifting from place to place every few years, it provides the opportunity for reinvention, as well as a kind of constant loss of self since humans are largely defined by consistency of place and memory. This novel is about re-invention from someone who has no doubt mastered the feat.

Ed O’Loughlin: Not Untrue and Not Unkind

Since newspapers are dying, some journalists are trading in their notebooks for a typewriter. Well, maybe not a typewriter, per se, but you get my point. Former Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald Ed O’Loughlin is using the subject he knows best (journalism) to craft a gripping story of an Irish newspaperman dropped into the midst of a war torn African country. Think Jennifer Connelly in Blood Diamond — except that was Sierra Leone in 1999 and this is the 1996 Rwandan-Congolese conflict — in the mood of The Constant Gardener.

James Scudamore: Heliopolis

A child in a Sao Paulo favela is yanked from poverty’s grasp and adopted into the family of an uber-wealthy businessman to see what happens (what?) when people stop being deferential and start getting real. We can hear the critics’ screams debating authenticity now, so read this before they ruin it for you.

Colm Toibin: Brooklyn

We know. We should have started with this one given its NYC-centric title, but we wanted to maintain the bias-free alphabetizing of the list, which actually isn’t bias-free at all since those with surnames beginning with a letter closer to the front of the alphabet tend to get first dibs on everything. Toibin’s tome traces a young Irishwoman’s escape to Brooklyn to make a new life as a 1950s shopgirl. Read our interview with him here.

William Trevor: Love and Summer

What a name for a beach read! Though this novel has all the makings of a Harlequin romance — a dark-haired stranger on a bicycle, a newly-liberated daughter, and a young convent girl in a quite country hamlet — something tells us this passion-filled summer won’t be the hot and steamy kind.

Sarah Waters: The Little Stranger

This dark and somewhat humorous mystery is a little stranger than the other books on this list, that’s for sure. Sarah Waters presents a psychological supernatural thriller that departs from her past work, which has earned her the label of “lesbian writer.” Indeed there are no lesbians in this book at all. How nice of Waters to supply us with the first two chapters to whet our appetite.

Now go forth and read people; the winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced on October 6th.

Seriously folks, this “breaking news” from Comic-Con sounds like a nefarious marketing plan cooked up to sell DVDs. The Family Guy can get away with making intentionally offensive jokes about any and everything that gets people in a tizzy from racism to rape to Sarah Palin and John McCain being Nazis, but somehow we’re supposed to believe that a new episode about abortion was relegated to the cutting room floor? Come on, Seth. We’re not buying it.

“Partial Terms of Endearment” isn’t the first FG episode to get the snip; that honor goes to “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein,” a Jew-centric episode that was pulled from the 2000 season. To make our argument a little more convincing, the episode ended up airing three years later after it had been released as a bonus episode on the Season Three DVD box set.

While “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein” did result in a money-seeking lawsuit — which the judge dismissed — from the publishing house that owns the song “When You Wish Upon a Star,” there was little fanfare otherwise. At least not more than usual. But how many Family Guy fans do you think bought that box set because they knew they’d get that never-before-seen 23 minutes of MacFarlane’s raunchy comedy?

“20th Century Fox, as always, allowed us to produce the episode and then said, ‘You know what? We’re scared to f–king death of this,’”MacFarlane has said. FOX says that no such decision has been made.

Listen, Seth. We get the joke, and despite the cringe-worthy moments now and again, we love your show. Now don’t patronize us with your little “FOX and I don’t see eye to eye” ratings-boosting schemes. Leave that kind of drama to ABC.

In the years following, Get Your War On managed to spread around the world wide interweb faster than the swine flu, and it didn’t take long for a compilation of seven years of the hilariously un-PC drawings to be released by Brooklyn-based publisher Soft Skull Press, and for Rude Mechanicals to tour the country acting out the snarkified, curse-laden dialogue Rees was famous for.

After a brief hiatus, Get Your War On is back… sort of.

For their new animated Cubicle Picnic ad campaign, Jamba Juice has used the same clip art as Rees’ snarky, foul mouthed office-dwellers, but replaced the dialogue with their pro-Jamba corporate marketing nonsense. The intent was to capture a young, web-savvy demographic through the use of ironic imagery — and irony is exactly what they got.

Rees supporters were so outraged that they began speaking out against the image duplication for the purposes of selling Jamba’s Summer Bliss, which prompted Jamba Juice to issue a statement disassociating the company from Get Your War On. Sounds like a lesson in how to alienate just the audience they intended to corral. This explains why now they’re literally giving the stuff away.

Rees’ response to the drama? “Juice Sucks. Drink wine!” (Listen to an interview with him about it here.)

If you want to know what a Jamba Juice marketing meeting looks like, here is 40 seconds of your life you can never have back:

Though Senna does ultimately finds something that resembles acceptance and understanding, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? does not have a tidy ending, which only lends the book its charm. Flavorpill talked to Senna about the challenges of writing such a personal story, and what she gained in the process.

Flavorpill: What was the impetus for writing this book?

Danzy Senna: I started the book in a spirit of curiosity. On one hand, I had the fact of my mother’s WASP family history — illustrious, compulsively documented. On the other, I had the complete mystery of my father’s origins. And behind my rather intellectual curiosity was a more emotional quest: a desire to understand my father, a man who I loved, but who had disappointed me quite profoundly in my life.

FP: Was it difficult for you to discover your father’s family history as an adult?

DS: I think I wanted to understand the origins of some of our present day problems. My family is quite fractured. My parents’ marriage was a profound failure, in so many ways. It was a romantic and highly symbolized union of an interracial couple, two writers who met and wed at the cusp of the Civil Rights Movement. Their terrible divorce affected me and my siblings quite profoundly. In some ways we have lived the past thirty years in the shadow of what happened between them. So it was important for me to understand the context out of which they — and especially my father — arose. I needed to understand him in order to understand my own childhood.

FP: What did you gain from researching and writing Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

DS: I began to understand how pathology is passed down from one generation to the next. I came to understand that unless you really take it on — the problem of your family’s legacy — you will pass down the trauma (yours, your father’s, your grandmother’s, your great-grandmother’s) to your children.

FP: How did having a child influence your writing this book?

DS: I began this book when I was single and childless, living in New York, and finished it four years later: married, with two young sons, living in Los Angeles. The connection between these simultaneous births — the book, the marriage, the sons — was not entirely clear in my mind as I was writing, but after I’d finished I saw that in some sense I was shedding one narrative, of my birth family (the act of writing about an experience in some ways distances you from it), while I was trying to construct a new narrative in the form of a new family. That said, having children is also incredibly humbling. I really found myself awestruck that my mother raised three children on her own, without the support of a partner — financial or otherwise. I’m not sure how she did it.

FP: The tone of this book is somewhat melancholy. Does this reflect your own feelings about your upbringing?

DS: No, not entirely. There was a lot of comedy and joy and love in my childhood. This more melancholy and difficult material was just one aspect of my childhood. I was writing about the saddest and darkest elements of my upbringing. That was my subject.

FP: The book has a large focus on your tumultuous relationship with your father, including some of the issues that are central to that conflict: money, his instability, his somewhat contradictory messages about race (e.g., bonding with strangers he met on the street, but also speaking negatively about black male writers and not dating black women… a sort of horizontal violence). I wonder if you’d talk a little about how your father shaped your view of family and race, both personally and in the US.

DS: My father definitely shaped my view of race. He saw it everywhere — and I, in turn, came to see it everywhere. He also gave me a great sense of racial irony, racial humor — I understood, implicitly, that to laugh at a situation, to see the absurdity in it, is to survive it.

In terms of family, while I was writing this book, my father told me at one point that he believed the greatest casualty of slavery was the black family. He also said that in the black community he grew up with down South, family was a fluid, amorphous thing — people considered one another family who were not in fact blood relatives — in part because so much had been shattered, erased, and destroyed in slavery. People often didn’t know who their real, blood relatives were. Paternity was often — as was in my father’s case — unclear. So people turned to each other electively. The people my father considers family down South are not even necessarily blood relatives, but they brought him in, they brought his mother in, and raised them.

FP: You didn’t have much exposure to the South before researching your family. I grew up in the South and think you do a really great job capturing many of the complex conflicts about the region: the trap of poverty, past and current segregation, the (positive) influence of religion in people’s lives, complicated, and interwoven family relations, the ease with which some people will welcome you into their lives combined with the nearly tangible judgment of others, the importance of food to Southern culture(s). What did you learn from the time you spent in the South?

DS: I felt like I was pretty ignorant about America when I went down South for the first time in order to research this book. I’d only ever lived in the northeast and in California. I was a typical coastal snob. I felt when I went down South that I was really getting my education about America. It’s sort of like when you go to Europe and you feel the ghost of World War II everywhere. When I went down South I felt the ghost of slavery, the ghost of Jim Crow, the ghost of the Civil War, everywhere. It was much more palpable. And I also felt the presence of religion everywhere, which is such a huge part of the country. I’d been raised in a kind of bohemian artsy household in Boston and had been raised eating mostly a diet of WASP food: salmon and arugula. I remember during my trip down South one evening sitting in one of my cousin’s houses eating ribs and mac and cheese and drinking sweet tea with the family and watching American Idol with them and feeling that I was finally in America.

FP: You write “oppression is so often an act of intimacy.” What do you mean by that?

DS: What I was referring to was the fact that we always use this word “segregation” to describe the oppression of black people in this country, but as my father pointed out to me during this book, so much of the oppression happened not in the separation of the races but in the coming together of the races. So much of the violence and the denigration happened on a sexual level, between white men and black women. And so much oppression happened, as I describe in my book, between blood relatives — fathers denying the existence of sons because they were not the same race. Of course, a different kind of intimate oppression also happened in my own family — in the way my father treated my mother. So it’s an idea that is woven throughout the book in so many different ways.

FP: I like that you don’t end the book with a pat “happily ever after” message about race and intimate relationships, despite your family’s current multicultural make up. What do you want the reader to take away from this book?

DS: I can never tell the reader what to take away. I really feel strongly that at a certain point the author’s take on the book is irrelevant and that the book is a text that belongs to the readers. They will bring their own experiences and thoughts to the book, without my input. That said, yes, there is so often the expectation with memoirs that they will be redemptive — that they will end with some kind of closure and perhaps healing. And while I hoped that might come about when I began the book, it’s not what really happened. There were no easy answers and there was no resolution, really, to my difficulties with my father. There were other rewards, but they weren’t necessarily the ones I’d expected when I set out on the journey.

Flavorpill: You’ve put out several cookbooks and have a public access cooking show. How did you get into this line of work?

Isa Chandra Moskowitz: I was actually just doing the cooking show and the website for the pure love of it. I didn’t intend for it to become my line of work, although I’m so incredibly happy that it did. I lucked out when a wonderful literary agent contacted me, and it just kind of flowered from there.

FP: Where does your epicurean interest come from?

ICM: Well you’d be hard pressed to find a cook who doesn’t like to eat too. I’ve just been obsessed with cooking since I was a teenager. When I went vegetarian there weren’t many options for eating out at the time, so I had to learn how to cook for myself; otherwise I would be living on Chinese takeout. I loved the time I spent in the kitchen and everything that went along with it: shopping for food, cooking for people, reading about food.

FP: I know you address this in the Intro of the book, but why did you choose to focus on brunch instead of breakfast? What’s the difference?

ICM: Breakfast isn’t an event the same way brunch is. Brunch is about getting together with friends. It’s warm and fun and exciting. Breakfast is granola or a bagel to go. Who needs a book for that?

FP: Though recipes for these are included, you diverge from a well-worn path of tofu scramble and banana pancakes in Vegan Brunch — like tacos, dosa, and risotto! How did you decide which recipes to include?

ICM: A lot of it was just stuff that I’ve had for brunch in NYC. Pierogis and dosas aren’t necessarily brunch fare to everyone, but they’re things my friends and I love for brunch, so they’re included. I didn’t really stress over if something were a traditional brunch item or not. I just followed my instincts and did what made sense to me.

FP: You also divide the book into “savory” and “sweet”. How did you make that choice?

ICM: That’s always the big questions at brunch! It seemed a natural way to categorize things.

FP: Why did you include a bit about brunch etiquette at the beginning of the book?

ICM: I’ve been hosting brunches for a long time, so I just wanted to share some of the things that I learned. It’s never fun to run out of coffee or have people scrambling for seats or silverware — unless you like to watch people scrambling. I just thought that since brunch is an event, not just a meal, let’s make it the best event it can be.

FP: I found some of your tips to be super helpful, like the idea of freezing extra waffles for tomorrow’s breakfast and or revamping leftovers for a completely different meal. Can you share a few basic vegan cooking tips now?

ICM: Sure! Well, firstly, those aren’t necessarily vegan cooking tips, they’re just cooking tips! If you’re like me and like to have as few dishes to wash as possible (who doesn’t?!), the next time you’re using your food processor, place a piece of plastic wrap over the work bowl before snapping on the top. This will protect the top from getting dirty.

FP: The pictures in the book are fantastic. How did you convince the publisher to include so many photos?

ICM: Well, thank you for the compliment: I took them! No cost to the publisher is pretty convincing.

FP: I love that you use non-traditional ingredients, like black salt, which I eat all the time in India. Do you have any particular method for experimenting with new ingredients when you’re coming up with recipes?

ICM: Ooh, it’s cool to know that you know about and love black salt! I don’t have a method for experimenting. It’s usually just tasting the dish and seeing what it needs, or tasting an ingredient and figuring out what it will be good in. That’s part of what I love about cooking: unexpected things happen all the time.

FP: One thing that I was happy to see is the way you leave it up to the reader to experiment on her or his own, whether it is including recipes for multiple omelet fillings, several variations on roasted potatoes, or the amount one should use of a particular spice.

ICM: That’s how I cook, and I know that’s how a lot of other people cook too. Whether you’re cooking seasonally, or just using what you’ve got in the cupboard, it makes sense to have options.

FP: Your television show The Post Punk Kitchen has been on hiatus for a while. What’s the status of its return?

ICM: I plan on doing some short online videos. They won’t be anything like the original show because people have a shorter attention span on the Internet.

Flavorpill: You work for a pretty unique person. How did you land a gig working with one of the biggest names in the alternative health industry?

Jen Shag: Gary Null announced on his radio show that he was in need of a personal assistant. My mom begged me to go interview. For the first time in my life I listened to her; I went in and interviewed via Skype while Gary was in Africa. I told him that I tour constantly and was not in New York for all of the year, but that when I was I would work hard for him full-time because I believe in his work, and I’m a good worker, and blah blah blah. To my surprise, I got the job!

FP: Pimpin’ good health ain’t easy. What exactly do you do on the day-to-day?

JS: Gary has the longest running radio show on health and nutrition — 91.5 FM in the New York area everyday at noon. [Laughs] He has put out around sixty books and forty documentary films on health, nutrition, vaccines, Gulf War Syndrome, autism, etc. He owns a health food store and puts out his own line of vitamins and food. So I help with all those things.

On the day-to-day, I book his lectures. I book doctors for films. I do research and go on the radio with him. I run errands. I submit his films to festivals.

FP: Were you interested in health and nutrition before you got this gig?

JS: Off and on, yes. I have learned a lot from working for Gary — way too much to tell you! He’s very political, and we dig deep to find the truth behind our government’s lies about health. After all the research I have done, it is safe to say that any paranoid notion you have ever had about “the man”, was probably 100 percent correct, and anyone that tells you that you’re being paranoid is in full-on denial.

I have learned to look up all available facts from credible sources before making up my mind about something. For example, when looking up all facts — not opinions — on vaccines you would find that they have actually not been tested properly and don’t really work. Popular opinion suggests they do, but facts and statistics prove that they do not.

FP: Do you lead a healthy lifestyle now?

JS: Yes and no. I am vegan and I do yoga, but I also do other things. I try to maintain a balance.

FP: How does this job influence your music?

JS: This job is really a dream situation for me because Gary and I respect one another, and he is very supportive of Shellshag and Starcleaner Records. I can tour as often as I want and know that I always have a job to return to New York City. The stress of making ends meet is gone so I can play more often for free and just have fun with it without the pressure of making money from my music.

FP: Not many people have the kind of “dream situation” that you do. Are there any drawbacks?

JS: Honestly, not really so far. So far, it’s been pretty cool.