Dawn Richard: New Orleans Crawfish Boil
Your Last Meal with Rachel Belle
Rachel Belle
4.8 • 730 Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dawn Richard is a proud New Orleans native and a true Renaissance Woman: singer; animator and Adult Swim creative consultant and owner of Papa Ted’s vegan food truck in New Orleans.
Dawn went vegan back in 2013, in solidarity with her dad after he received a non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis. She talks about getting naked for PETA, the ethical intentionality behind her food truck and what (not-vegan) food she misses the most but will never eat again.
Then we crack into the history & explore the culture of what is, perhaps, New Orleans’ oldest food tradition: crawfish! Food historian Dr Zella Palmer introduces host Rachel Belle to Al Scramuzza, the city’s late Crawfish King, and shares her favorite places to experience a crawfish boil in the city.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Rachel Bell, and this is your last meal. |
| 0:12.4 | The show where celebrities share stories about the foods they love most, |
| 0:15.5 | and we dig into the history, culture, or science of those meals with experts from around the world. |
| 0:21.6 | Today on the program, singer Don Rashard. |
| 0:24.6 | He said he won't get with me because I'm freaky. |
| 0:27.6 | I fold the liquor up, I'm feeling lity, litty, |
| 0:30.6 | he is a such boy with the bank roly. |
| 0:34.6 | That mean he got the time to spin it on a batty. Don has been a solo artist for many years, but her career started in 2004 on the MTV show Making the Band 3, where she formed a girl group called Danity Kane. |
| 0:48.9 | She's also an animator who's worked on projects with Adult Swim and the founder of Papa Ted's, a vegan, |
| 0:55.5 | eco-conscious food truck in New Orleans. Back in the day, she was a cheerleader for the New |
| 1:00.3 | Orleans Hornets. So Don's got range. My family's from New York, and in my head, men are Don, |
| 1:07.3 | and women are Dawn. Dawn. Every time I read your name, I'm like, it's Dawn. |
| 1:12.6 | Dawn is a New Orleans girl through and through. |
| 1:16.2 | And today, we're going to learn about one of the city's favorite and oldest food traditions, the crawfish boil. |
| 1:22.8 | That's coming up later in the show. |
| 1:24.6 | But right now, my conversation with Dawn Richard. |
| 1:28.3 | So you've been vegan for over a decade. Can you tell me the story of what prompted you to go vegan? |
| 1:45.6 | Yeah, my father was diagnosed with non-Hashkins lymphoma with cancer, and I was devastated. |
| 1:52.3 | I'm very close to my father, and he's a very healthy man. And so I just did not understand |
| 1:57.3 | how we got dealt at hand as a family. Living in L.A. I had read that people were |
| 2:03.4 | solving and curing a lot of their cancer through diet, holistic choices. And I knew my father |
| 2:09.4 | wouldn't lean into cannabis. Like I knew he wouldn't lean into like those type of methods because |
... |
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