Not All Immigrants Cook Like Their Mothers
It isn’t uncommon for immigrant cooks to make the cuisine they grew up with—inspired by old family recipes, and using the flavors of their home countries. But that’s not the case for Rockaway-based raw vegan cook and Ayurveda advocate Margarita Estevez. Once she turned to a plant-based diet and began living the raw vegan life, she couldn’t make her mother’s traditional Russian dishes.
“I could not rely on my mom’s trusted ways anymore,” she says. “I didn’t want to. I wanted to try something else.”
Estevez went from chicken kiev, veal orloff and beef stroganoff to spirulina smoothies, green buckwheat salads and chaga mushroom tea. “I realized that our traditional way of cooking food is so heavily meat-based,” she says. “We do not know how to cook vegetables. So, as soon as [I moved to Rockaway], I started to develop my own recipes, just because I had to do it.”
Now, she calls herself a raw vegan educator. She hosts regular workshops and events around Rockaway and makes YouTube videos with vegan chefs and food entrepreneurs, telling people about the benefits of living a plant-based life.
Estevez was just 20 years old when she moved to New York City from Russia in 2009. At the time, she didn’t foresee her move to Far Rockaway. She had no plans to be a chef, or even to be vegan. She came to the city with no particular goal but to “figure [herself] out.”
“I spent a good deal of time in the restaurant and food service industry, and I worked as an English teacher for foreign speakers. I worked in office jobs.” But now, her days are spent working on her YouTube channel, experimenting in the kitchen, searching for more collaborators, organizing events and trying to make the world a better place.
Before moving, she was drawn to the philosophy of Ayurveda—an ancient health practice that, according to the Los Angeles Times, “is based on the concept of an internal ‘vital force,’ or energy, that sustains all life. It details a close relationship between humans and the universe, holding that cosmic energy is manifest in all living and nonliving things.”
“What interested me the most was this theory that food varies by the amount of life force in it,” Estevez explains. There is more “life force” in food that is grown locally and is fresh from the source, hasn’t been harmed or heavily processed. And so, according to Ayurveda, you get more energy from eating fruits and vegetables than from meat.
“One of the reasons I became vegetarian and vegan is that no matter how much vegan food you eat, the food coma is not that bad,” says Estevez.
The fixation on “eating right” and being healthy stems from her personal relationship with food. As a teenager, Estevez had body image issues, and was always on a diet, trying to lose weight. Her interest in cooking, moving past a focus on weight loss and instead finding ways to feed the body with wellness in mind, only began after her first raw vegan experience.
On a trip home to Russia, she stumbled upon a raw vegan restaurant in Moscow, called Avocado. The lunch special—a buckwheat avocado soup, along with fresh orange and carrot juice and a cracker—was an experience that stuck with her. “It rooted me into this idea of the fresh food having more life force in it. And as soon as I moved into my own apartment, I switched to vegetarianism and cooked plant-based meals.”
But going vegetarian or vegan is no easy undertaking, she says. It’s especially difficult when you lack a supportive community. “I wanted to become raw vegan, and the biggest obstacle was, I didn’t know anyone who was raw vegan.”
Estevez had trouble finding other individuals in Rockaway with a burning passion for promoting plant-based living and raw veganism. She had to track down kindred spirits. The first video she made for her YouTube channel was with Emmanuel Loncke, who began Smoothie Haven—a smoothie business in Arverne that is passionate about promoting wellness. Then she connected with Brooklyn-based holistic health instructor Dr. Natural, and they co-hosted a raw vegan workshop.
Despite having at last found her people, the raw vegan lifestyle isn’t always easy. Estevez confesses, in fact, that at the moment she isn’t vegan, although she and her husband don’t cook meat in their home. “I’m going towards less and less and less animal-based products.” She explains, “For me, personally, it’s more important to bring the message of lowering the animal product consumption, and to changing our food chains, than to be a strict vegan or becoming raw vegan.”
Local Taste: Going Vegan Doesn’t Have to Mean Going Without Dessert
To satisfy her sweet tooth, Estevez makes health-conscious desserts she calls “functional sweets,” and she’s compiling recipes for an eventual cookbook. She recently collaborated with fellow Rockaway resident Miriam Kwietniewska on one such functional sweet. Kwietniewska is co-founder of the Paleo and vegan ice cream company MUD (Mindfulness Using Desserts), which uses a coconut mousse base and is sweetened with dates. Estevez makes desserts like “raw vegan power brownies” served à la mode with MUD’s coffee-flavored ice cream.
Smoothie Haven | @smoothie_haven
MUD (Mindfulness Using Desserts) | @eatmudco
