Whatever you’re eating, make sure your meals are as colorful as possible—that’s how you know your food is rich in phytochemicals, which are powerful antioxidants. In general, as vegan “artivist” Sara Sechi puts it, “A positive and colorful diet makes a positive and energetic individual.”
© Nicola McLean, 100% MY Wool, acrylic, 2019.
Sticking point #5: “I feel like I’m riding in the passenger seat of my own career (and life).”
Several years back I made a friend—a fellow writer, enormously talented—who quite enjoys her bacon and sausage, and over dinner one night, we got to talking about disease and genetics. “I already know how I’m going to go,” she announced. (She was still in her twenties at the time.) “My family has a history of heart disease.”
“People say that, but it’s not your family medical history. It’s the fact that you’re all eating the same food,” I argued. “You won’t die of heart disease if you stop eating meat and dairy.”
I’ll never forget the look she gave me: the wide puppy-dog eyes, hands palm up, an exaggerated shrug. It was a gesture of utter helplessness. No, really, it’s out of my control. Then she calmly took another bite of her shepherd’s pie.
And I swallowed my frustration. My friend is every bit as intelligent as I am. I could have offered her plenty of scientific research to support my claim, had she asked for it: depending on which source you consult, only 5 to 10 percent of all cancers are genetic, and even if you do have a genetic predisposition for cardiovascular illness, physicians like Dean Ornish and Neal Barnard have proven that eliminating animal protein will flip the figurative switch, even in cases where the disease has begun to manifest. Plant foods contain no cholesterol and tend to be low in fat. It doesn’t matter if what you’re eating is “lean,” or “white meat,” or “grass-fed free-range organic”—all animal protein promotes these diseases.
Why wouldn’t my friend listen to reason?
Because as Jessa Crispin points out in Why I Am Not a Feminist, it’s “[e]asier to think we are rendered absolutely powerless than to think we choose powerlessness because it is more convenient.” For many people, cutting out what have been comfort foods from childhood is too grave an inconvenience to contemplate. As my teacher Victoria Moran writes in The Good Karma Diet, “If you have the necessary information and you’re still saying, ‘I could never give up…,’ listen to yourself. You’re affirming weakness. There you are, created, the Bible says, in the image and likeness of God, and you’re brought to your knees by a scoop of French vanilla.” The celebrated South African novelist J.M. Coetzee elaborates on this ubiquitous phenomenon of psychological enfeeblement in the foreword to Jonathan Balcombe’s Second Nature:
Ordinary people do not need to have something proved to them scientifically before they will believe it. They believe it because their parents believed it, or because it is accepted as so in the circles in which they move, or because figures of authority say it is so. Mostly, however, people believe what they want to believe, what it suits them to believe. Thus: fish feel no pain.
This voluntary disempowerment happens to a certain extent in our creative endeavors too. It’s so easy to fixate on factors beyond our control—who is inclined to recognize and promote our work, how much compensation we’re receiving compared to other artists—and in doing so, we fail to recognize the power we do have. If somebody whines because their novel or screenplay hasn’t sold or if they plummet into existential crisis because nobody is buying their art, we tell them to pick themselves up and get back to it. We don’t feel sympathetic toward those who don’t do the work they need to do in order to succeed. Why do we expect people to take responsibility for their decisions in every aspect of life except their personal health?
Of all our cultural taboos, this I see as the most tragic. A heavy meat eater has a heart attack or is diagnosed with cancer, and we are expected to react with complete sympathy, as if the disease chose them at random. The patient’s diet is “the elephant in the room,” even as an orderly arrives with a lunch tray brimming with highly processed, chemical-laden animal products—right down to the cherry Jell-O jiggling in the little plastic cup.
Truth is—unless the options available to you are the result of systemic racismVI—your diet can never be a “personal choice,” because what you choose to eat affects both the animals who die to become your dinner and every human in your life who will bear the burden of caring for you when you get sick. Blaming bad genes while continuing to eat food that research has proven time and again to be detrimental to our health would, in a saner world, be one definition of insanity. It makes me wish people would just come out and say “You know what? I love steak and hamburgers so much that I really don’t care if I end up on an operating table twenty years from now.” That, at least, would be honest.
And yes, there will always be anecdotes of spry centenarians who indulge in bacon and cigars on a daily basis, but as vegan dietitian Marty Davey quips, “Everybody has an Uncle Fred—the rest of us follow biochemistry.” It’s not intelligent strategy to live as if you’re destined to be one of the outliers.
This isn’t a hypothetical, either. A colleague I met at a literary festival over a decade ago, a bestselling thriller writer, recently posted on Facebook that he is facing open-heart surgery. Needless to say, he is scared out of his mind, and hundreds of friends left comments with heartfelt wishes for his swift recovery. I wanted to be one of those friends. But if I were to message him and say, “Hey, once you get through this, look into switching to a plant-based diet, okay?”, my concern might read too much like sanctimony. I can only hope this friend discovers the medical research on his own.
Kerry Lemon went vegan to help heal an illness, and looking back on that difficult period, she says, “I now feel oddly grateful that I became unwell and was forced to live a more ethical life.” So, you, the artist, have a critical decision to make—a choice you still make by changing nothing. You can take the risk of, twenty or thirty or forty years from now, logging weeks in a hospital bed awaiting triple-bypass surgery, enduring the indignities of Jell-O for lunch and your bottom hanging out of a skimpy blue hospital gown.
Or you could do what you need to do to ensure that at seventy, eighty, and ninety years of age, you’ll be at your desk or easel or microphone where you belong.
Better Choices = Better Health = Better Art
Stepping into your creative destiny requires accepting responsibility for your actions (and inactions). Open your notebook and spend some time considering how you might be giving your power away.
Part two: are you able to see your creative practice in a more holistic manner—to recognize that sound physical health results in greater productivity and artistic satisfaction?
If you don’t feel ready to eschew all animal products just yet, make a note of everything you eat for the next three days, including portion estimates. Then visit the USDA National Nutrient Database (https://ndb.nal.usda.gov) and make a note of the saturated fat and cholesterol content of each item. Tally it up. You may be shocked at what you find, especially if you like to think of yourself as a relatively healthy eater. Once you’ve switched to a vegan or mostly-vegan diet, you can use this site to tally up the protein content of everything you eat—and as long as you’re eating balanced and colorful meals, that number will be a pleasant surprise.
V Incidentally, America’s most famous pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, recommended a plant-based diet for children in his seventh and final edition of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, published in 1998 (two months after Spock passed away at nearly ninety-five). Spock himself had begun eating vegan in 1991 after a series of illnesses, and in those last seven years