Cheri Sicard: Thanks for talking with us today Mollie.

Mollie Katzen: Thanks for inviting me.

Cheri Sicard: There are so many things we want to ask you. Since you are most known as being an author of vegetarian cookbooks, let's start with, how long have you been a vegetarian and was your family vegetarian growing up?

Mollie Katzen: No, my family was not vegetarian growing up, but I came from a Jewish family that was, although not strictly Kosher, had a lot of awareness when it came to eating meat. What that taught me was that it's not bad or wrong to eat meat. But it's very important that if you are eating meat to eat it with compassionate awareness and with an eye towards its cleanliness in a food safety kind of mind.

Cheri Sicard: That's a great attitude.

Mollie Katzen: That is my attitude. I actually am not a strict vegetarian. I eat vegetarian food, that's the mainstay of my diet. That IS my diet. But, I don't believe that eating meat is wrong at all. If someone serves me meat I will eat it. What is a concern of mine, stemming from my upbringing and now it's very big in the news, is food safety and food cleanliness. Organic, when possible in a balanced diet, is also a big concern.

"What got me really serious about promoting organic is learning that very bad, very harmful pesticides that have for decades been banned in this country and were legal in countries like Mexico and possibly South America, were starting to be imported into this country again because the trade barriers came down. And we didn't even have a right to know."

Cheri Sicard: Actually, the subject of organic food was one of the questions I had prepared for you.

Mollie Katzen: Oh goodie! That's my favorite subject these days.

Cheri Sicard: Let's talk about it. How imp[ortant is eating organic foods?

Mollie Katzen: It's extremely important. At this point I'm uncomfortable eating things - fruits and vegetables that are not organic. I will eat them if I'm hungry. I travel quite a bit for my work and I don't have that option as much as I'd like, but it has become so important. I've done very few bandwagons ever. I've had a long career of writing about food and my food is always categorized as healthy or niche. That's fine, although I would like to go mainstream. But in the course of that, even though I have written some of the most basic vegetarian cookbooks, I have never been on a bandwagon about it. But with all the organics legislation that's being discussed, with the free trade, the loosening up of standards around pesticides, I have become very opinionated about organics. I am becoming more of an activist about it.

Cheri Sicard: And that was your inspiration, a loosening of the standards?

Mollie Katzen: My inspiration originally was the free trade agreement. I do keep up on politics. I was following that very closely about twelve years ago when the big NAFTA thing was passed. There was a lot of discussion about that among chefs and food writers. The Chef's Collaborative, which is a big national group, found ourselves discussing it at meetings. It was making everybody more political. What was coming up was the loosening of all sorts of regulations surrounding the use of chemicals in order to take out what they call unfair competition in the world of food trade from one country to the next.

So, if we are importing something from Chile or something from Mexico, even something down from Canada where we get a lot of canola oil, we are advertising that this is pesticide free and it isn't necessarily so. But to label it otherwise is considered an unfair trade practice.

Cheri Sicard: Really?

Mollie Katzen: Oh yeah. As a result of this free trade, the leveling of the economic playing field became the most driving regulating force to the corporations and not the safety of the food and not the cleanliness of the food. It's all about trade and it's all about equal opportunity for the food corporations to make a profit. So, food safety and consumer concerns went out the window because it is so NOT about the consumer anymore.

Cheri Sicard: Those are important things for people to be aware of.

Mollie Katzen: Right. So, what got me really serious about promoting organic is learning that very bad, very harmful pesticides that have for decades been banned in this country and were legal in countries like Mexico and possibly South America, were starting to be imported into this country again because the trade barriers came down. And we didn't even have a right to know. So that any bunch of broccoli that you would buy that didn't say where it came from could well be from another country who cares which isn't bad in and of itself. But it could also be laced with DDT, which is illegal in this country, and because they didn't want to make this trade practice 'unfair,' they didn't have to tell us. With that in mind, I said 'oh great, who knows what we are eating unless it's organic?'

Then the next question was, if it's organic, what does that even mean? What can you rely upon it to be or not be if the label says its organic? That's the battle that's going on now. The USDA has been trying to pass standards of what it even means to have organic on there. I have become an activist about that because they are trying to include all sorts of things like radioactive sludge and bio-engineered products. So the first thing is to make sure that there is an organic standard to begin with. The second thing is what is it? I care very much about that. I suspect very strongly that I'm not alone. I also suspect stongly that pesticides are responsible for people getting a lot of cancer and things like that. Yes, I am going to be out there more as an organic proponent.

Cheri Sicard: That's great. Do you have any resources where people can find more information?

Mollie Katzen: A really good place for that is http://www.purefood.org.

Cheri Sicard: Great, we'll include the URL so our readers can go there for more information.

Mollie Katzen: Great, I would love to send people there.

Cheri Sicard: Your cooking style has really evolved a lot from the early days of The Moosewood Cookbook...

NEXT: Mollie on the evolution of her cooking style and the way we eat.