AC Response | Elle Lynch
Elle L. Lynch is a Mother, Writer, and Interdisciplinary Artist who creates experiences that foster community and raise social, cultural, and environmental awareness. With each project her intention is to create something of beauty that brings us together and makes space to consider what it means to live slowly, to live in partnership with the natural world, and to live with an appreciation of the sublime in simple everyday things. Elle’s writing has appeared in newspapers, magazines, blogs, scholarly journals, and chapbooks. She is currently at work on a collection of essays and public art projects exploring the importance of wild and green spaces to our individual and collective well-being.
It is with no small amount of frustration that I confess to being one of those “slash” people – writer/cook/designer/artist/activist/gardener/educator. I’m frequently described as an entrepreneur, but (again with frustration) I’m lacking one essential component to pull off this moniker – I am horrible at making money. An example? I opened a restaurant that wasn’t really a restaurant.
I opened this not-a-restaurant because I wanted to share what I made, to feed people, to experiment with food, to create space. I was jealous of the visual artists I knew who could do this. So I rented an old dive bar and converted it into a small kitchen/dining area. A studio for my kind of practice.
Daily Grub’s cook space operated on two small electric burners I bought at Menards, a mini fridge, and a toaster oven. I’d spent time in Mexico visiting with women who made food in their front yards to serve to passersby. I’d worked in Buvette’s haphazard kitchen. I knew how to make a lot with a little.
So, I made food with what I had on any given day and I hoped enough folks would come through the door to cover expenses. In that day-by-day way I kept things afloat and continued to make and share what I loved. Less a restaurant, more a community art project.
There were big ideas underpinning that art project – the value of “third spaces”, the self-empowering DIY ethic of anarchism. And Daily Grub - just like Clean Plate, the Little Italy brunches before it, and every food project I’ve taken on since - served vegan food.
Back in 2009, I very intentionally chose not to use that word “vegan” too much. In Omaha in 2009, “vegan” was still a scary, alienating word. (The day we opened, raw hamburger meat was thrown at the front door.) My goal was to draw folks in with the lure of a new creative experience, to present them with a warm, inviting atmosphere, serve them delicious, beautiful food, and let them discover after the fact that it was free of animal products. But despite my discrete language and my honey strategy, veganism was the point. Still is.
I don’t remember why I first became vegan. I don’t have an origin story. I do remember I was sixteen. I took the fateful pact with my best friend Ed. We sealed the deal by smoking a bowl in the back of his Sebring convertible and taking one last trip to the Burger King drive through.
I do know my reasons have evolved over time. Moral and ethical objections to meat grew to include a critique of an industry that is exploitive of labor and environmentally dangerous. Today, the reasons are ever present to me. Now it’s a choice I commit to each day because the planet is on fire. Because I believe all living things are interconnected. Because I believe there is no other individual contribution with greater power to impact climate change than to choose to not eat meat.
It’s not always easy. As a cook, my veganism has been an occupational hazard. (I had to start my own restaurant to get a job. When that closed I had to move to another town to find a new one.) And as someone who is Midwestern to the core - terrified of taking up space, frequently mumbling to strangers in a squeaky, soft mouse voice, “Can I just scootch by?” – my no meat line in the sand feels horribly loud. Rude. Uppity.
It’s perhaps for this reason that as much as my work is grounded in a commitment to sustainability and to raising environmental awareness, it is also rooted in radical hospitality and good old-fashioned kindness. I have no expectation of creating converts. I only want to make things that are meaningful for me and share them in the hope that they add to someone’s day a bit of beauty, or comfort, or nourishment, or a simple sense of being cared for.
It’s nothing revolutionary, but “the work of the world is common as mud” and my way of making change is the simple thing of baking bread for my neighbor.