How Her Mother’s Death Spurred This Lifelong Vegetarian to Reevaluate Her Diet
All photos courtesy of Lily Diamond
Kale & Caramel writer Lily Diamond may have the most fascinating origin story of any food blogger ever before profiled on Yahoo Food. Her story begins with a cult. Well, sort of.
“It was somewhere in between a cult and a commune,” Diamond told Yahoo Food of the northern California community into which she was born, called Alive Tribe. “I think the best way to describe [what they were about] is psycho-spiritual release… they would do a lot of screaming into pillows and rebirthing ceremonies and dancing around naked. There definitely was naked yoga.”
When Diamond was two years old, her parents had reached their naked yoga limit. The family decided to move on to more mainstream pastures. Relatively, anyway. They settled in a hippie-friendly enclave of Maui, Hawaii, where Diamond’s vegetarian parents started a company devoted to all-natural body care and spa products.
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Diamond and her parents cooked constantly, often with ingredients plucked from their old farm house’s sweeping grounds, which were dotted with groves of bananas, passion fruit, black raspberries, Brazilian cherries, guavas, mangos, and all kinds of citrus. Diamond was particularly fond of the enormous fig tree planted just outside her bedroom window, not to mention the 100-foot-tall avocado trees that bore fruit so enormous she dubbed them “football avocados.” A vegetable garden overflowing with kale, chard, arugula, beets, and carrots rounded out the yard’s bounty.
Not to say that Diamond perfectly fit the all-natural-Hawaii-surfer-hippie-girl mold. She ended up studying English literature at Yale University, which delivered a healthy dose of culture shock that Diamond now thinks she subconsciously craved. “In some ways, I felt more at home there than I did in Hawaii,” she reflected. “And I hate to say that, but [I was] the nerdy white theater girl in a room full of tan cool surfer people on Maui. Then I went to college, and I was like, ‘Oh, here are all my people!’”
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At Yale, Diamond began to hone her writing skills. She also met Fanny Singer, daughter of seasonal dining pioneer Alice Waters, whose work in food sustainability and food activism was deeply inspiring. After graduation, Diamond moved back to Maui “super hardcore intent on changing the world through yoga and spiritual activism” and writing about the benefits of a strict vegan lifestyle.
But in 2007, tragedy struck. Diamond’s mother — her role model in all realms of health, wellness, and nutrition — was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. In shock, Diamond moved home to care for her ailing mother. The next two years challenged much of what she’d previously believed about food and nutrition.
“One of my mother’s doctors encouraged her to eat some animal protein, and for the first time in my life, she asked if I could make her chicken broth,” Diamond recalled. “She was really embarrassed to ask me, because I was vegan and she knew how I felt. And I was so horrified that in that moment, she thought that I would judge her. I realized that that kind of worldview, that kind of rigidity, was not serving me at all. In that moment, if someone had said to me, ‘If you go and slaughter a whole slew of animals, then your mom won’t have cancer anymore,’ I would have done it in a second. It was a real wakeup call to me.”
Heirloom tomato and nectarine Caprese salad.
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After her mother’s death, Diamond’s veganism crumbled. She began trying foods she’d never in her life tasted: clams, sausage, duck, braised lamb, steak, hamburgers, hot dogs, and even bacon. Diamond eventually settled into a happy medium: mostly vegetarian, some fish, and meat when she felt like it. The decision, she said, was based on "what feels good to me intuitively and foods that I know feel really good to my body.”
In 2012, Diamond decided to showcase her food know-how and newfound culinary philosophy via the blogosphere. On Kale & Caramel, one finds virtuous dishes like creamy zucchini soup dressed with hemp seeds, but also decadent gingersnap roasted pineapple ice cream sandwiches. And though vegans will revel in dishes like almond milk-based chocolate raspberry ganache cake, there are plenty dairy-filled delights, like green ice cream and double berry cream pie.
Black pepper and honey ricotta-stuffed figs.
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Her balanced attitude has struck a chord with readers, though her gorgeous photography is certainly a draw unto itself. Kale & Caramel boasts more than 20,000 followers on Instagram, who tune in for dishes like fried poblano tacos and rustic wheat berry salad.
There’s still plenty on the horizon for Diamond. She recently launched a body and beauty vertical on the site, featuring products all made from ingredients found in the average pantry. She’s also trying out video, which she hopes to debut on the site soon. Now based in Los Angeles, Diamond hopes to inspire in others the diet metamorphosis she herself underwent.
“I don’t want to have an adversarial relationship with food,” she said. “I want it to be about creating beauty, both inside and out. I think that is trusted on Kale & Caramel.”
