By Dalia Colón, author of The Florida Vegetarian Cookbook
Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are.
Nearly two centuries after French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin penned these words, they still ring true.
Food is so much more than fuel. It’s a way of preserving our culture, history, and values. In Florida, this means food festivals. Nearly every weekend, you’ll find a gastronomic gathering that tells us Floridians who we are.
We’re global, like the EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival; sultry, like the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival; and yeah, we can be kinda fishy, with events like Key West Lobsterfest and the Florida Seafood Festival in Apalachicola.
We’re also unapologetically Floridian, as evidenced by LaBelle’s Swamp Cabbage Festival and the Wausau Possum Festival.
At their best, Florida’s food festivals inspire us to honor our past, embrace our diversity, and appreciate our state’s culinary bounty.
For example, during the Tampa Bay Collard Green Festival on the grounds of the Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American Museum, Black American foodways take center stage. The celebration includes thousands of guests of all backgrounds, a collard green cook-off, and James Beard Award-winning chefs and food writers who shine their star power on this little slice of Eden.
In Plant City, the Florida Strawberry Festival carries on a tradition started by farmers nearly a century ago. After a big freeze destroyed their citrus and cotton crops, a small group of farmers tried their hand at something new: strawberry plants. The berries thrived in cold weather and, thanks to a new railroad system, farmers began shipping their little red jewels far and wide. Grateful for the berries’ economic impact, farmers and volunteers organized the first Florida Strawberry Festival in March 1930. Today, the Florida Strawberry Festival is a can’t-miss event, with rides and concerts, shortcake, and more shortcake.
Down in Delray Beach, the South Florida Garlic Festival pays homage to this spice that early Spanish settlers popularized throughout Florida. The festival was even name-checked on Jeopardy!.
I don’t have a gameshow or my own annual food festival, but I do have an affinity for garlic and strawberries and collard greens and all the other crops that thrive in Florida and find their way to our dinner table.
So in 2021, when an editor from University Press of Florida emailed me to ask if I had any ideas for a cookbook, I knew just the topic: an ode to Florida produce.
The Florida Vegetarian Cookbook contains more than 100 recipes that celebrate our state’s fruits, veggies, and herbs, from Make-Ahead Farro Salad with Cilantro-Lime Dressing and Game Day Buffalo Cauliflower to Black Bean Plantain Burgers and Mixed Berry Empanadas. Many of the recipes are vegan or offer vegan adaptations, meaning they can be made without animal products such as butter, cheese, and eggs.
The book also includes a dozen essays that reflect on Florida produce, from controversial cilantro to our state’s waning citrus industry. There are also tips for going meat-free, including answers to the persistent question, “Where do you get your protein?”. Stunning images by Tampa food photographer Chip Weiner are the icing on the cake. Kelly Green Collard Cake, anyone?
But this cookbook isn’t just for herbivores like myself and other 5 percent of Americans who identify as vegetarian or vegan, according to a 2023 Gallup poll. It’s for anyone who wants to lean into a plant-based lifestyle. Why not start with Meatless Monday, and see where things go?
James Beard Award-winning chef Michelle Bernstein of Miami called the recipes in The Florida Vegetarian Cookbook “seamlessly easy to follow, fun, and delightfully sunny.” Chef Art Smith, two-time James Beard Award-winner, seventh generation Floridian, and former personal chef to Oprah Winfrey called the cookbook “a great addition to the Sunshine State bookshelf.”
May your bookshelf overflow with books that remind you who you are.
Learn more about The Florida Vegetarian Cookbook
Dalia Colón is an Emmy Award–winning multimedia journalist who has worked and eaten her way across Florida. She is executive producer and host of The Zest podcast from WUSF Public Media and the NPR Network, associate producer and cohost of WEDU Arts Plus on Tampa Bay’s PBS station, and a former James Beard Awards judge. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, and Gravy, the journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Dalia lives in Riverview, Florida, and never leaves home without a snack.
The Florida Bookshelf 