Lagusta Yearwood owns and operates a small vegan chocolate business in New York, an enterprise that includes a shop as well as a vegan café (and, following the legalization of marijuana in New York, also one of the country’s only woman-owned vegan cannibas companies). These she refers to as “a little bit of a small empire.” Yearwood’s career embodies the difficulties of living vegan feminism in the real world, as she explains it, “trying to be sustainable and not play the ‘man’s game of capitalism’,” while also “trying to keep my roots of a cook and keep myself in the kitchen. It’s all about balance.”
Yearwood understands vegan feminism in what she calls the “textbook” way: “All oppressions are connected” and “no one is free when others are oppressed.” “We need to work for all these things simultaneously,” she concludes, and this entails “continually looking for ways [to] go deeper into our politics.” This, for her, means finding joy and satisfaction in all the small everyday behaviors, relationships, choices, purchases, and business decisions that support the vegan feminist world we aspire to.
Yearwood, who has a degree in woman’s studies, has striven to run her business “through a feminist lens,” by questioning “how do we use power and how do we look at power dynamics in our space?” These beliefs and values have been worked out somewhat democratically through collective staff meetings, but she has also necessitated some negotiation as the political climate has shifted. Her primary business, Lagusta’s Luscious, is not only vegan but uses only ethically sourced chocolate and, if only incidentally, exudes queer and anarchistic qualities as well. Although these business ethics may have manifested naturally, she has not necessarily been achieved with ease:
Over time, when the businesses kind of grew […] we attracted a lot of people who were very, you know, leftist, and had a lot of problems with capitalism, as I do also, and it just started to feel a little bit weird of having this business that is a for profit business that is, was being promoted as having this anarchist like ethos, so we pulled back on that in response to like eh some, I would say, not very nice feedback as tends to happen in leftist spaces.
Doing vegan feminism, in other words, comes with some degree of uncomfortable compromise. Explains Yearwood, “What I want to do is make good money, pay everyone super well, and just continue existing, and those three thing are incredibly hard.” Indeed, operating a vegan feminist business is difficult in the best of times, she adds, but this is all the more challenging in the toxic political climate of Trump’s presidency. Ethical business ideals often moderate in the face of real limitations, and it can be especially hurtful, she admits, when allies make her feel as though her efforts are not enough: “I just want to be like, babe, I’m tryin to keep the lights on, just ive me a second.”
Nonetheless, she does see a positive side to the political crisis, as it can create opportunities for making connections and reestablishing community. For instance, when Trump was re-elected, the café was used that night for a space for folks (and passerby) to literally scream it out and release grief. In light of these limitations and possibilities, renegotiated business goals can also continue to inspire:
I feel like now it’s like, okay we’re surviving, that’s a victory. It’s been a real journey of not walking back what I actually believe in my heart but kind of um refining how I talk about it.
The “beautiful ideals” of vegan archaism, she feels, have not been necessarily compromised, but rather reimagined. By way of an example, the business had originally eschewed hierarchies, but this was quickly abandoned given the confusion and inefficiency it caused. Hierarchical arrangement with agreed upon, equally respected, and fairly compensated roles is not necessarily oppressive, she explains: “everyone knows her job.” The organizational approach of “everyone does everything,” she adds, proved too difficult: “we’re getting a little bit too big for that.”
Indeed, the politics of creating a fair business plan, Yearwood insinuates, reflects larger social movement ideals of the left. With social justice activists allowing themselves to be bogged down in the idealized processes of decisionmaking, the much needed qualities of security, predictability, and progress are undermined. Yearwood admits to frustration with the left’s slow progress given the excessive time spent on self-critique and collective deliberation.
Yearwood pursued the food industry after graduation following a visit from Carol Adams at her university in Rochester. “I reached out to her, I think in my senior year […] of college and asked if she wanted to come and speak. So she came and spoke, it was really great; it was realy wonderful,” Yearwood reminisces. She had actually been considering graduate school on the topic of feminist poetry and a possible career in academia, but she had also been considering culinary school as a means of “looking at food in this like feminist lens” to counter the popular macho culture of food of the early 2000s. This machoistic approach to “good food” celebrated angry outbursts, drug and alcohol abuse, and high pressure working environments, something Yearwood saw as neither necessary nor admirable: “Right from the start I had this idea of like, what if I could run a business that, like, did not have anything to do with that?” Adams advised her to pursue the latter career aspiration. “It’s great to be an academic,” Yearwood remembers of her advice, “but it’s also great to be, like, out in the world doing things”
Immediately after university, Yearwood embarked on this path with an auspicious start. As part of her cullinary school training, she interned at the legendary Bloodroot Collective, a vegetarian feminist restaurant in Connecticut. “I learned so much, it was a totally transformative experience,” she remembers. Yearwood reached out to the collective, also in her senior year in college, after having come across their cookbook while working in a bookstore. “It just felt like a whole world was opening up before my eyes,” she adds, “you can do whatever you want in terms of truly living your values in the world.”
Doing food, as it would turn out, would become a more sustainable means for enacting her vegan feminist ambitions. Yearwood became a “hardcore vegetarian” at just 12, but then entered the vegan world at 15: “it was my whole life.” She even started an animal rights club at her high school but quickly progressed to state level advocacy in Arizona with her mother: “My mom, I pulled her into it. She and I became presidents of Arizona’s largest animal rights group at that point.” Yearwood admits that she became burned out by the time she went to college:
I’m so not suited, for like, going to protests and having confrontations and um that was kind of what drove the whole […] vegan chef thing. […] Maybe there’s another way to do this work.
Going into the business of gourmet vegan food, she found, would serve as its own form of activism, by “showing you can be vegan and it doesn’t involve like giving up all these things.” Thus, Yearwood sees herself more on the “supportive side” of activism (her mother, however, remained highly active on the protest side of activism until her untimely death from cancer a decade ago). Yearwood’s work is no less of an achievement, however. By providing vegan products and spaces, this feeding carework is an important, if undervalued type of activism.
Learn more about Lagusta’s Luscious by visiting the website for Lagusta Luscious, Lagusta’s Cafe, Confectionery!, and Soft Power Sweets. Find Lagusta Luscious on Instagram.