An air of excitement fills the crowded venue. With a mixture of nerves and thrill, Cara Livermore, the founder of Rochester-based vegan quarterly Chickpea Magazine, takes the stage with internet food celebrity Joy the Baker. They’re in Boston on the prestigious set of “America’s Test Kitchen,” and a talk is about to begin.
“That was one of the best nights of my life,” Livermore said. “Even if I don’t make a full-time salary on the magazine, I get to do these amazing things.”
But it’s the everyday work, she says, that she loves most.
“The daily act of like research, creation, all of that—that’s like my favorite thing to do,” Livermore said. “For me, it’s about the wider view and having one thing to focus on with the magazine.”
Livermore isn’t a typical food celebrity. Her work has been featured in MoMA PS1, Nordstrom, and Anthropologie, but she’s not cooking sold-out pop-up dinners around town. Instead, she opts to have friends over and play 16-millimeter movies in the backyard.
“We’re still homebodies,” she confessed.
Livermore and her partner Bob Lawton started a popular vegan food blog called
“hipsterfood” in the early 2010s, which later became the print publication Chickpea. Their claim to fame is 100% from scratch vegan cooking, an homage to their early days when specialty foods were hard to come by.
“We used to get so many hate comments just for
being vegan,” Livermore said.
Now, the magazine is in over 12 cities, reaching Boston to Tokyo, and their 37th issue focussed on Joy is on newsstands now. The irony of the topic during such bleak times isn’t lost on Livermore.
With bad news fatigue and burnout abounding, finding moments of delight has become exceedingly difficult. And that’s exactly why she dedicated 148 pages of her vegan quarterly to the subject.
“It’s been hard for me to do,” Livermore admitted. After coming off researching her previous issue, Sustainability, for nine months, a topic she cares about deeply, she felt exhausted. “Joy is exactly opposed to the Sustainability issue,” she said. “We’re still doing things in a sustainable way, but incorporating happiness into your life intentionally.”
She found herself drawn to the topic. In every issue of Chickpea, she highlights how we weave food into our daily lives and its role in fostering connections with others. Articles are bound together by a theme that excites Livermore.
With a degree in illustration and fine art, Livermore does the layout and design herself, including hand-lettering every issue, which gives it an artsy sketchbook aesthetic. She also oversees all creative aspects, from photography and recipes to curation and art direction.
“It’s like a coffee table book,” said Danielle Raymo, owner and founder of Rochester Brainery. “She puts all these cute things, like shopping lists, in the magazine that make it beautiful. Throughout the pandemic, I cooked like everything in the digital issue.”
Unlike the chef-y tips you might find in other food glossies, she and her contributors give advice on making eco-conscious choices, like meal prep to reduce food waste or how to reimagine leftovers during the week. The magazine is a sensory delight—thick, velvety pages with substance.
“I don’t want to make things that are meant to go in the trash,” Livermore said.
She’s laid back and tends to ramble, but she’s clear-cut when discussing consumerism. Livermore’s values are loud and clear with the magazine, and accessibility is another primary focus of her work. She makes a point of publishing free printables on her website, and all the recipes are designed to be approachable to beginners.
Her thoughtfulness comes across offline as well.
“She would bake a cake,” Raymo said, remembering the photography courses Livermore taught at Rochester Brainery. “She would just provide all these amazing props with different textures and great colors. Things that people wanted to post about.
No matter the kind of camera, Livermore helped community members troubleshoot and figure out how to make the most of what they had.
Raymo said this was big for beginner photographers who were shooting on iPhones. “Even if it’s the best angle to hold your camera while you’re taking a certain kind of photo, that makes such a huge difference,” Raymo said, noting that many people who took her class are now regulars in the local photography scene.
It’s those kinds of offline connections Livermore craves most now. Over the past few years, many local institutions like ROC Girl Gang disbanded, and it’s less clear now where to meet like-minded people.
“How do we find that sense of community again?” she said.
Her latest issue of Chickpea nudges at an answer: Plan a potluck with your chosen people. Bake some smiley face cookies and bring them over to a friend’s house. Seek genuine connections, potentially with food involved.
It’s rather simple, but the best things in life often are.
Ashley Mason is a freelance contributor to CITY. Feedback about this article can be directed to leah@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Nov 1-30, 2023.
