Tofu Tollbooth Is Your Road Buddy
By Michael Vogel
From where the moss grows up the trees
to where the dirt is rusty red
I thought we'd find each story
like a snakeskin or an arrowhead,
But we only stop at fastfood places,
they hate their jobs, I understand,
I try to act familiar, but they're floating just above the land,
We are floating
You're my road buddy, but I'm lonely all the time,
I thought we'd show that friendship
could be stronger than the crossroads devil,
But I thought I heard the toll man saying,
I'll take that thing you got from praying,
this is not a romance with the road
- "Road Buddy," by Dar Williams
Burning Fields Music, 1997
from the CD "End of the Summer"
In addition to the wonderful song, "Road Buddy," which is featured in the film "Smoke Signals," singer/songwriter Dar Williams has provided vegetarians with a road buddy of another sort. Williams and Elizabeth Zipern co-authored The Tofu Tollbooth, a necessary companion for serious vegetarian travelers.
The Tofu Tollbooth is billed as "A Guide to Natural Food Stores & Eating Spots With Lots of Other Cool Stops Along the Way." The description is accurate. The second edition of the book, compiled by Zipern and Williams, is chock full of terrific out-of-the-way stops that will reward hungry vegetarian travelers. Illustrated with maps and funky little icons, The Tofu Tollbooth is also packed with "organic facts" and "hot tips" to help you navigate your way throughout the lower 48 states. And, concise directions are provided for many of the locations.
Coffeehouses, food co-ops, delis, bakeries, collectives, juice bars, and cafés — they're all here. Not a (mile)stone is left unturned. This is a book that savvy vegetarian travelers will want to have in their knapsacks and/or glove compartments.
The story of how the book came to be is a trip in itself. Williams is such a good storyteller whether she is singing or being interviewed. We'll give her the stage.
"I had decided in 1993 that I was definitely not going to make a living in music," recalls Williams, who, happily for those of us who have heard her music, miscalculated. "And [I thought] that what I should do is get together the money to self-publish a book and then sell it and the CDs when I went on the road. So that it would sort of offset the expenses of being a traveling musician, which are high.
"I started getting really excited about it. I wanted to do it for a long time. Finally, somebody said that she had spent hours trying to find a store that sold environmentally friendly insect repellent on her way down to a folk festival. And I just thought, 'I know these stores.'
"There are these wonderful stores in the middle of unexpected cities. And if you knew how to get there — you'd want to go there anyway. Because they're really groovy and they're in the middle of downtown. They have a really good vibe. And so I decided then and there to get it together and put together a list of places I had been to and just hit the Yellow Pages at the New York Public Library and start gathering names of stores and calling them. And that's what I did, on my parents' phone bill, so that once I started I had to follow through or I'd be in hock to them for the phone bill. So that committed me."
In the meantime, Williams continued to write, record and perform her songs. And, despite her skepticism, her talent found its way to the fore.
"I wrote three or four songs that really got out there, and got out far on my first CD (The Honesty Room, recorded in the fall of 1993)," she says. "One of them is called 'When I was A Boy,' another one is called 'Alleluia' and there is a song called 'The Baby-Sitter's Here.' I kind of got a sense from my growing audiences — from five to 15 — that the song 'The Baby-Sitter is Here' was making an impact and that 'When I Was A Boy' was something the audiences liked. I was starting to get a sense of that.
"I remember I sang 'The Baby-Sitter's Here' — which is about my old hippie baby-sitter — at a fund-raiser in Connecticut. And they distributed that song on the CD that they made for the fundraiser to our local radio station. The radio station played it and the phones started ringing — which was so great! And sure enough, two weeks later, my full CD came out and they started playing that. Nothing was the same after that."
Radio stations around the country soon followed suit. The airplay led to album sales as her musical career and her following gained momentum. Williams and her friend, Heather Horak, continued to compile entries for the book.
"For better or for worse, as soon as the CD came out, I was completely busy. So we finished up the book, but really I spent more time just being on the road with the CD and not doing a lot of marketing of the book.
"The Vegetarian Journal actually did a review of it, which was really nice. We got a lot more response from that than anything we did. I would talk about it and bring it around, but generally I was just so overwhelmed with just dealing with the CD. Maybe that's the secret of success; just don't expect it (laugh)! So I really didn't get to market it, but it still did really well. Somebody came up to me and said, 'You know, it's funny. I went to your concert last night, and I didn't realize that you were the same Dar Williams. You were really the star of [Grateful] Dead Tour '94.' And I was like, 'That's a huge honor.' So there's a very small subset of people who knew me for the book."
Zipern is the author of Cooking with the Dead and Made with Love. Both are about life on the road following the Grateful Dead. Zipern's books are written from a vegetarian perspective. They contain excellent recipes and are highly regarded among fans of the Dead. Zipern was working on her own book when circumstances brought her and Williams together for the second edition of Tofu Tollbooth.
"She called me to ask if she could use me as a source in her Grateful Dead cookbook," remembers Williams. "I said, 'Sure,' and she said she was also a fan of my music. She called once and I felt so bad because I was in the middle of a lot of stuff and I was really abrupt and then I found out it was her, this nice person who had asked about the Grateful Dead cookbook and she and I got to talking.
"I said, 'You know, I don't foresee being able to do it again, but if I had my druthers, I would try to bankroll somebody else putting in the hours to do it because I believe in it.' She said, 'I would just love to do that.' And I said, 'It sounds like this could work because you seem like a really trustworthy person and a charming person. And lo and behold, she really formed relationships with the people she called at the stores and really got into it. She knows a lot about the whole organic movement and the stores, and she's also a perfectionist. So a year later, the book was out and it was a lot more thorough than I expected. I thought she was just going to update things here and there and work off of the work that my friend Heather had done. But she sort of gave it her spirit. And consequently, we have become good friends. And I'm really glad that intuition paid off — I think for both of us."
The two women plan to update the book roughly every two years. "I would like to do it every two years," says Williams. "And I think Elizabeth agrees with that. I think every year becomes a real schlep and every three years would be a little far. But two years seems like a reasonable amount of time."
Both women are veterans of the road, and that comes through on every page of the book. Repeated road experience — and trial and error — are keys to hunting down good vegetarian haunts on the road.
"You kind of have to be intuitive about this as well," says Williams. "But I've come to learn that there are tempeh sandwiches and tofu sandwiches that are actually really great. And then there are some that, you know (she laughs) they can get really dry. So you have to kind of keep an ear out for that. What's nice about the stores is that a lot of times they're next to Indian restaurants or Thai restaurants that specialize in sort of groovy new age vegetarian stuff. So I usually end up relying on that."
"Apples are probably the best road fruit or vegetables. I tried kale once. Like to just grab a little kale and eat it. You cannot eat it!," she laughs. "That's a tough one. That's like eating a shirt. But arugula is a good thing. If you want to get a bag of arugula and you can wash it off someplace, that's a good thing to eat for snacks. [And], as Elizabeth says, organic chocolate. And veggie burgers, I guess, would end up being the number one thing that I eat on the road. I've never had a bad veggie burger. They're all incredibly different."
The road has always held sort of a romantic allure for many Americans, but extended trips have a way of wearing you down. Williams has maintained a very healthy attitude and outlook concerning her grueling life as a touring musician.
"I think it's very important to have a home," she relates, "and it's good to take pictures on the road and really document the experience however you can — picking up seashells and pinecones, pictures and programs and tickets. However you do it, it's important to know that you were there and to take that back into a real home and to try to keep the home somewhat organized.
"There have been times when I have been able to really make a dent in some of these huge boxes that I've been carrying around. I know everybody has those sort of nightmare boxes that they don't even open. I kept on thinking that there was something else that I was supposed to be doing; that I didn't have time to slow down and unpack boxes and cook dinner and straighten up because there was all this sort of putting out the fires of just paying the bills and doing a sort of triage of my life — doing the laundry before I got back on the road. Finally, I started to kind of settle into the rhythm of doing the laundry and enjoying it and hanging out my clothing and doing all that. Then I had to go out on the road again and I felt this incredible sadness. And I realized that all of that day-to-day stuff that I was doing — weeding and tying up the tomato plants and hanging up clothes was the stuff of my life. It was the meaning of my life. And that I was going to really miss that stuff that I sort of forced myself to slow down and do.
"So I think one can get from that the best of both worlds. When you're home, be home. And when you're away, be grateful that you have this excitement to bring back to your life and bring it back to your life. Bring back the little tokens and the memories and find a place to make them fit in your home. So as you're sweeping and tying up your tomato plants, you look over at the little postcard or rock that you picked up on the Oregon coastline. It can be such a little thing, but I have stuff like that all over my house. And that, to me, has been the secret: to be grateful for the travel and to see it as something that enriches my life."
Those intelligent and reflective insights are also liberally sprinkled throughout Williams' songs. Her music, available on the Razor and Tie label, also makes an excellent accompaniment to a road trip of any length.
Veggie travelers will be grateful for The Tofu Tollbooth, and the time and effort that Zipern, Williams, and others put into compiling the data. The book enriches our own life on the road, whatever the season, whatever the state.
Michael Vogel is Senior Editor of Vegetarian Journal.
