Scuba Diving as a Spiritual Practice
A Conversation with Debra Diane
A Conversation with Maya Gottfried
A Conversation with Donald Vincent
This Is Not an “Impossible Dream”
If You Can Move, You Can Dance
Further Reading, Resources, and Inspiration
I grew up on a steady diet of Jim Henson, Judy Blume, and chicken cutlets, and I knew from the time I could grasp a crayon that I was going to be an artist. The more I used my imagination, though, the more uneasy I felt about eating and wearing animals who surely wanted to go on living as much as I did. When I was twenty, I went completely vegetarian, and creatively speaking the following decade felt like an alternating series of false starts and measured joys. I published three books, but I never felt as though these accomplishments served anyone but me.
When I became vegan seven years ago, I experienced an exhilarating surge of creativity that has continued to this day. As the knock against vegans goes, I wanted to tell everyone I knew that our bodies produce casomorphin in response to the casein in dairy cheese, meaning that we are literally addicted to our favorite chèvre; that we’re the only species that drinks the breast milk of another; and did you ever wonder why, if cow’s milk has so much calcium, everyone we know over the age of seventy is suffering from osteoporosis? I told anyone who would listen that I could feel new pathways lighting up in my brain, that something inside me had been liberated. I was excited to try new recipes and veganize the old ones, to share everything I was learning, and over the years that excitement has compounded itself.
But when I talk about going vegan with people who aren’t, I usually sense an invisible wall going up between us. It’s all very well and good for me, I can almost hear them thinking, but my way of life is not feasible for them.
Apart from the fact that I’ve written some pretty good novels, there’s nothing remarkable about me. I wasn’t raised in anything remotely resembling an alternative lifestyle. I have wistful memories of stopping for Egg McMuffins at dawn en route to my grandparents’ vacation house in the Poconos. But I also remember calling the toll-free number on the back of a Noxzema jar to ask if Proctor & Gamble tested on animals. I can’t recall what initial click of insight possessed me to do this; my parents weren’t pet people, and as Carol Adams points out in The Sexual Politics of Meat, “meat eating is the most frequent way in which we interact with animals.” All I know is that I wasn’t ready to follow the thread of logic that connects testing on animals with eating animals. In my teens, I ate tuna sandwiches and a couple of steaks a year and called myself a part-time vegetarian.
Dyeing Easter eggs with my sister Kate, 1992.
This was still my dietary MO my freshman year at NYU, which is when I first began to think about writing a novel. I met this lovely, gentle girl named Chloe in one of my core classes, and I wanted to be friends with her even more when she confessed she was already working on one.
“This is what I have so far,” she said shyly, handing me an old-school black-and-white composition notebook. It was two-thirds full, maybe more, and I could tell by the hurried quality of her handwriting that she’d spent many evenings flush with inspiration.
I knew enough to want to spend as much time as I could with people who weren’t only talking about making art. So one night, Chloe and I went to this French restaurant in the West Village that is long since out of business. We ordered two deluxe steak dinners, and the waiter asked if we wanted wine. (Three months living in Manhattan, and I still hadn’t been carded.) Chloe and I traded devious looks.
Here we were, two eighteen-year-old aspiring novelists in a candlelit restaurant in New York City talking about books and ambition, drinking illegally, eyes alight with our newfound kinship. I felt terribly grown up, and excited, because in a sense we had settled in at this table for two to plot out at least the next ten years of our lives.
We were clichés, of course we were. But of all the elements in this scene, the one that makes me cringe is the meat on my plate.
The following summer, I found a copy of Conversations with God on the bargain cart at the Strand, an East Village institution advertising “eighteen miles of books.” I’d dismissed the book as new-age baloney whenever I had to reshelve it at my bookstore job back in high school, but this time it practically leapt off the cart into my hands. I vividly remember reading the following lines on the A train one afternoon:
A [highly evolved being], in fact, would never consume an animal, much less fill the ground, and the plants which the animal eats, with chemicals, then fill the animal itself with chemicals, and then consume it. A HEB would correctly assess such a practice to be suicidal.
Whether or not I believed these words actually came from “God,” they provoked a physical reaction in me. I did not want to be a flesh eater, not “part-time,” not at all. But it took me another decade to un-believe the cultural narrative that cows willingly “give” us their milk, that chickens have no use for their eggs, that these animals aren’t made to suffer for what we take from them.
None of that is true.
What I’m about to write is a difficult thing for artists to face, because we’re the ones who are supposed to be seeing into the heart of the culture, testing out radical new ways of thinking and being and doing, and calling “bullshit!” whenever we see it. The truth is, though, that we are not nearly as open-minded as we like to think we are. How often do we say that something is “not for us” when we haven’t given it a chance? How often do we actually challenge the prevailing cultural norms? And what about all the times we look back over our thoughts and actions and feel a creeping shame at how little consideration we gave the needs and feelings of those around us?
If we truly want to grow as artists and as humans, we have to be willing time and again to look for the kinder, more responsible, more loving way, especially when that way is not the convenient one. As artists and innovators, it is our responsibility to offer a reasoned critical response to the dominant culture, and the most fundamental expression of culture is food.
Creativity is so much more than putting marks to paper, and to fulfill our artistic potential requires more than a good eye, a sharp intellect, and a belief in one’s own capability. So, when I hear fellow artists talk of chronic anxiety, depression, and fear, that they need “comfort foods” like bacon and cheese to cope with these dark feelings, I want to tell them they’re confusing comfort with anesthesia. I want to tell them they’ll live longer, happier lives if they