I'm Frances Lamb, and this is The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media, the show for curious cooks and eaters.

When we were recording in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, we ate so much pork and fried fish and lamb that we kind of felt like, you know, at some point we need to give a little love to some plants, you know?

And luckily, Philly is home to one of the best vegan restaurants in the country.

It's called veg, and we showed up at their door for a little lesson on the three things they think everyone should know how to cook by heart. After that, we'll turn to the beloved cookbook

author Diana Henry to talk about how to plan a meal around vegetables, and America's Test

Kitchen gets into it with their recipe for smashed cucumbers. But first, we're going to hear

about giving a little love to plant eaters.

What does being a vegetarian have to do with a family's love?

Or being gay, or being black or Latino, or being a man?

Well, maybe nothing, but for some people, they're all part of the same thing.

Discovering who you really are and how people see you.

Choa Webb was a young man, a student at my alma mater, the University of Michigan, Go Blue,

on the verge of graduating when he decided to come out to his family as a vegetarian.

And it got complicated real quick. Producer Renee Gross followed Choyah's

journey for this story from Gravy, the podcast from the Southern Foodways Alliance.

At home in his apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Choyah Webb shifts easily from the serious to the silly

and from the political to the goofy and back again.

But he dislikes people thinking of him as just another liberal college student going to school in Ann Arbor.

And although he doesn't eat meat, he even dislikes the term vegetarian.

He says the label comes with too many assumptions.

You probably do yoga, and I do do yoga, and you probably drink coffee at the local coffee shop across from your house, and I don't do that actually.

Troia is biracial, black and Latino.

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