Alicia Silverstone is Anything But Clueless

Alicia Silverstone earned her place in the silver screen's pantheon of do-gooding ditzes with her performance as Cher Horowitz in Clueless (1995). In the years since, Silverstone has kept up the do-gooding, minus the ditziness. An outspoken animal rights activist and committed conservationist, Silverstone has spent much of her post-Clueless time in the spotlight advocating for veganism, a diet she sees as marrying both causes. According to Silverstone, eating vegan is the healthiest choice, too—and the silver bullet solution to clingy pounds and problem skin. Silverstone has distilled her food wisdom into a new book, The Kind Diet, which offers ideas, info and encouragement to people ready to test out the veg lifestyle. "I’m really trying to nudge people into making better choices," Silverstone explains, between bites of her homemade vegan cheesecake. "The more good choices you make, the better. But it’s not all or nothing." Here, Silverstone talks about opening people’s minds to the pleasures of eating kind.

People know you as an advocate for animal rights and for veganism, but I think people also have a sense that those causes are off to one side of the sustainability movement, if not entirely separate from it. But you seem to see all these issues as profoundly intertwined.

They're so connected. I’ll tell you a story: I was in the rain forest not long ago, on a conservation trip, and I’d say the people on the trip were about 50/50, veg and meat-eaters. Now, these are all very committed people, they care about what’s happening to the planet and they want to make things better. But the people who ate meat, you know, they’d kind of chide us, saying, "Look, this isn’t about the environment; you guys just love animals, that’s all." Well, that’s true, I love animals. Guilty as charged. But you could literally point at land that, until just recently, had been rain forest, and it had all been cleared away for cattle ranges. That is rain forest that is never coming back. I mean, the way a herd of cattle grazes the land, the way they tread on the ground, they turn soil into desert. And that land won’t be fertile again—not in our lifetime, anyway. So you’ve taken out rain forest, which sponges up the carbon in the atmosphere, and you’ve replaced it with a cattle range, and soon, that range is going to be dead ground. That’s the trade-off. And I’d go through all of that with the meat-eaters on the trip, and they’d sort of stick their fingers in their ears and say, "Noooo…."

Of course, the rejoinder you often hear to that kind of argument is, well, the people who live in and around the rain forest deserve access to good protein.

The rainforest has so much food in it—wonderful, healthy food. You can absolutely thrive on what can be harvested from it. Look at it another way: You’ve taken land that is naturally flourishing with nutritious food for people, and you’ve turned it into land that feeds animals that are then supposed to go back and feed the same people, only much less efficiently. That doesn’t make any sense.

Read more of Alicia's interview after the jump.

To get Alicia's eco-friendly style, shop the Alternative Earth collection.

Alicia Silverstone continued...
I was setting up a straw man, there. I think anyone who’s dipped into The Omnivore’s Dilemma or seen Food, Inc. ought to have a pretty good handle on the stunning inefficiency of beef production.

All the water that goes into the corn they eat, the land used up growing the corn, the land used up herding, the oil running the trucks that ship the feed to the lot and the cattle to the market. And then you’re looking at simple things like the grain we use to feed one animal, that grain could have fed an entire village.

Not to mention the health issues around the antibiotics they give the animals, and the conditions they keep them in. It’s a mess. But Michael Pollan and his acolytes tend to come down on the side of, ok, we’re humans, we’re supposed to eat meat, so let’s be more conscious of where it comes from and how it was raised, and reduce the amount of it we’re eating. You’re a little more radical, no?

Yes and no. I don’t want people to get scared off by the idea that they absolutely must give up meat. Though I do feel that if you want to be your healthiest self and do best by the planet, then ultimately, you’ll come around to that. But I like the idea of aspiring vegetarians. You know, I’m always meeting people who are, like, "I’m curious about this. I’m interested in a healthy lifestyle, I’m interested in the planet, but…." I have a whole section in The Kind Diet that addresses those people. I call it "Flirting." I want to make it really easy for people to do the best they can. It’s a very positive thing.

So, what are some "kind" foods?

Well, grain is the foundation. It gets a really bad rap, but if you just start eating more whole grains, you’ll notice your body change, your heart change, your being change. Even your eyes. Everything will change, even if you do nothing but add a whole grain into your life. Something like having brown rice every day. Or you can experiment with seitan—that’s wheat gluten—and there are so many delicious things you can make with it, and it’s got more protein than tofu. We all know how amazing fruits and vegetable are, of course, and then beans, which are so inexpensive and versatile and nutritious and filling…I could go on and on.

I think most people pick up a book with the word "diet" in the title because they want to lose weight.

This isn’t that kind of diet book. But I will say, if you eat this way, you will be skinnier. That just sort of happens automatically. But there’s so much more than that happening. I have medical and scientific data in the book that backs this up, but fundamentally, this is how I live, how I nourish myself every day. And every day, I feel myself getting stronger and clearer and more beautiful. It’s like I’m aging younger. And my soul feels good, too.

Comments

[Advanced Acai]

Wonderful post... Very informational and educational as usual!