Of Omnivorous Thoughts About Being Vegan

Easily one of the grooviest vegan chefs out there is Isa Chandra Moskowitz.  She has written several amazing vegan cookbooks, keeps The Post Punk Kitchen Blog, is dedicated to destroying popular myths about the non-tastiness of vegan cuisine, promotes real cooking by marginalizing the use of fake meats, and is just generally too cool for school.  Well, Ms. Moskowitz has declared October the Vegan Month of Food (or VeganMoFo), I think for the third year running.  In honor of VeganMoFo, I wanted to do a post about my relationship with vegan food, even though I am not myself vegan. 

I grew up in Texas and Montana, respectively; states heavily addicted to raising and eating flesh.  I spent a year in Austria, a country where they love organ meat and garnish beef goulash with more meat . I did a stint at a guest ranch in the High Sonoran Desert, again meat-heavy - think ossobuco and grilled hamburgers.  And, finally, I moved to New Orleans, where lard is still not a dirty word and many people strongly suspect that a vegetarian will still eat seafood.  Locale notwithstanding, I also cultivated my own omnivorous predilections.  I was not a picky eater as a child.  I would devour chicken gizzards and brussels sprouts with equal glee. 

When I moved to New Orleans my first circle of friends worked in the restaurant industry.  In many ways, moving here really inaugurated my concerted interest in food (okay, cohabiting with a couple of chefs along the way didn’t hurt, but I’m going to give myself some credit here, too – I chose to pay attention and ask questions as they cooked, after all).  In New Orleans I ate my first raw oyster and tasted both sweet meats and head cheese for the first time.  I learned the bliss of Adolfo's ocean sauce (half crab and caper, half shrimp and crawfish) served over gulf fish.  I developed an interior battle that rages still today over whether I like catfish or fried shrimp po-boys better.  I have relished every bit of it. 

After about 5 years of living in New Orleans, I developed my own philosophy about meat.  Homo sapiens is a predator, I reasoned.  We occupy a position on the food chain, so there's nothing wrong with meat-eating.  I objected to the removal 21st-century American people tend to have from their meat (I think this was also an offshoot of growing up in -- if not precisely being part of -- the hunting culture of the northwest, where many hunt and butcher their own animals and aren't disconnected at all), so I steered myself toward meat that looked like dead animals - whole fish or crab, crawfish, entrails.  If I was going to eat meat, I wanted to really be reminded of the fact that I was eating the dead flesh of a once living animal.  I wanted it to feel visceral, like consuming a life should.

And even given this, questions and unrestful thoughts still tickled my mind.  Because we can do something, does it mean we should?  We are the most powerful predator on earth, thanks to our technology, but however our distant hominid relatives departed from their great ape relatives and began eating meat, we do not live in those circumstances any longer.  We do not have to hunt to survive and we do not have to eat meat to survive.  We simply like doing it.  What about the inherent violence in eating meat, when I consider myself a pacifist?  I once had a friend who raised an iguana.  His vet told him that a vegetarian diet would create a more docile lizard, where feeding him insects and, eventually, rodents would create a more aggressive animal.  Now, I know I'm not an iguana, but this has still stayed with me for a long time.  Can I really consider myself non-aggressive when I consume the flesh of a once living, breathing creature?  And does being an omnivore mean eating meat for every meal, like many Americans (and probably Europeans) will tell you it does?  So even while eating meat every day, I still carried these kinds of thoughts around with me.

I had also always recognized vegetarianism as a coherent philosophical choice. Especially as a devotee of felines, I could easily see the strange and irrational distinction many humans try to make between animals that are our pets and animals that are our food (not to mention between animals that are us, and all the other animals). Most of us would never think of treating our pet-animals in any way that resembles our treatment of food-animals. This has always struck me as a disingenuous and unthoughtful reality.  In retrospect, I believe I even bothered to cultivate a philosophy about meat-eating precisely because I suspected it was not morally resonant with the rest of my values concerning kindness, non-violence, and human conduct vis-a-vis nature.  It needed a defense.

And that is how I lived the first 30 years of my life.  Attempting to be thoughtful about my choices, but mostly just eating as I did because I always had and because I happen to live in a society that condones and even celebrates meat-eating.

And then I met Nicholas.  Nicholas eats vegan  He destroyed all of the worst stereotypes that had been meticulously built in my head about what a vegan is like.  He was atheletic, in good shape, quiet and personal about his choice and non-judgmental of those who did not share it.  He only discussed his dietary choice when the topic was brought to him.  He was respectful, gentle and kind...and I watched as those around us (we met in an office work environment) proceeded, despite all of these aforementioned facts, to treat him as an oddity, tease him, judge him and generally bring up his veganism as though it were his only noteworthy characteristic.  He and I talked about history and humor, about our families and what had brought us to the horrid law firm we were working at.  Veganism came up now and again, but it was simply one more facet of this very interesting, multifaceted individual.  I grew disgruntled on his behalf at the way so many chose to reduce him to one thing, a vegan, and then ridicule it, while he would go out of his way to not discuss it.

I brought cookies to the office for Christmas and I made sure to include a couple of vegan experiments so that Nicholas would not be excluded.  As we started dating and spending more and more meal times together, I bought a vegan cookbook (Moskowitz's Vegan with a Vengeance - I highly recommend it).  I made these efforts in the spirit of inclusion - not because I was sublimating my own habits and not because Nicholas ever denigrated my own dietary choices.  By the time we were cooking together regularly, we generally cooked vegan and then I might add cheese to my own, depending on the dish.  It was easier and didn't prove onerous to me at all.  While I did not miss a meat heavy diet, I let meat be a treat to me - something I would eat on occasion, especially in a restaurant.

Eventually, I stopped enjoying even these treats.  Meat began to smell unappetizing to me.  It began to hit my stomach like a ton of bricks.  It made me feel heavy and overloaded.  I switched from whole milk to soy milk - something I never thought I'd do - for the same reason.  Once I began excluding meat and dairy more and more from my diet, my body's ability to handle these animal products, as well as my palate's taste for them, diminished.  Finally, I began to ask Nick more concertedly about being vegan.  I read a book he recommended (when asked), Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, which has a lot of throught-provoking things to say about human use of animals, not just for food, but for research and testing.  I didn't find it preachy at all, just well-documented and well-written, and, I would recommend it to anyone.

And the short of all this long is that after almost 3 years of dating Nicholas, I still eat cheese and ice cream, I still eat seafood, and on a rare once-in-a-while I'll nibble on some pancetta, prosciutto or salami of some sort.  I am not vegan and not even a vegetarian, and yet I cohabit easily with a vegan.   I continue to notice how he treats his choice as personal, while many others treat it as an affront to them.  I admire and respect Nick's choice, his emotions and thoughts that motivate his choice, his will power and strength of character to stand by his choice.  I feel like he challenges me, just through existing, to be better and more consistent in marrying my actions to my values, something with which I still struggle.  As he has observed many times, everyone comes to things in their own time, and labels of "vegan" and "vegetarian" can as easily be used to pigeonhole and denigrate someone as they can be used as a form of proud self-identity. 

Ultimately, whatever personal changes in my diet I have made or not made, won't make or will make in the future, I have found it enlightening and very fruitful, if sometimes disturbing, to question basic assumptions with which I grew up concerning human beings' place with regard to other animals, how we use them, and whether we should use them, let alone whether we should eat them.  It is often those behaviors, habits and attitudes closest to us that we never even bother to evaluate.  We never really choose them, because we simply continue to do or believe what we were raised to do or believe.  No evaluation or decision is really involved - other than the decision to never ask questions and to ignore even entertaining such thoughts, I suppose.

Of Making the Middle Ages Look Stupid So We Look Smart

The first book with no pictures that I ever read all the way through was Meet George Washington by Joan Heilbroner. This would have been 1983 or so. I remember being proud of myself and I read it twice. I have been interested in history of all sorts ever since. “Interested” could be too mild a word. “Obsessed” might serve better. In any case, over the last 25 years or so, I have invested myself in all things historical; works of fiction and non-fiction, period films and documentaries, and a couple of history degrees.

Despite being a partially trained academic historian, I also do not look down my nose at "popular" history* but revel in it. I feel very passionately that history belongs to everyone. I understand the worries of scholars who spend their professional lives teasing out the nuance and complexity of history, who use larger philosophical questions about meaning and the nature of language to go about the work of writing history. It's painful to see something you care about and examine carefully so oversimplified and accidentally or willfully misunderstood. Add to this concern the very nature of history and its role in human society, which is as a commodity - the powerful control history and use it to their advantage. Nearly everyone seeks in it justification for present action, inaction or thought. History is a tiny manipulation away from propaganda and this is something to be aware of. Nevertheless, history simply does not belong in an ivory tower. It doesn't need protecting. It needs to get out and breathe. And that means that sometimes inaccuracies will arise...and they will proliferate as people decide that they like the sound of the inaccuracy better than the truth. I don't relish when this happens, but I figure humans are imprecise creatures and we kind of do this with everything else anyway. And meanwhile there will always be scholars more concerned with truth and subtlety than what sounds good and seems obvious.

Okay, so now that I've said that, I will begin my rant about an exceedingly common historical error that really chaps my hide: that people in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat. The Middle Ages is such a popular whipping boy for our technologically-minded age and we are so very convinced of our own ascendancy.  It probably just sounds right to us that medieval people would have thought the earth was flat. This is, in fact, a really good example of how we use history to tell us something about our present rather than to truly understand the past. We like thinking about how "backward" the Middle Ages were because we get to feel smug and comfortable about how much we think we know (to chuckle about this, picture asking someone in a thousand years how much we know in the 21st century). I believe a lot of people imagine the Middle Ages as some crazy anomaly sandwiched in between the classical age and the Renaissance.  Some people still call it the "Dark Ages" for crying out loud (different rant, but equally as annoying as this flat earth idea). Inherent in our treatment of the Middle Ages is our belief that we are much smarter than those silly people.

Well, we're not.  Medieval scholars thought just as complexly about the subjects that engaged their minds as we do. I believe simply that different questions captivated them than captivate us. In fact, anybody in a position to be informed on the matter in the Middle Ages would have told you that the earth was spherical. It's just that fewer people were in a position to be informed - for that is true of the Middle Ages, literacy was rare and education was prized for only a few in society. I suppose there were peasants somewhere who, if they even bothered to think of it, would have imagined the world as flat. And yet that doesn't make the entire culture a society of dimwits.

And just incidentally, this flat earth fallacy extends right up to the Early Modern period and Columbus' "discovery" of the Americas. Nobody ever told Columbus he might sail off the end of the earth. For crying out loud, Columbus called the indigenous Americans "Indians" because he thought he was in India. He sailed west hoping to end up east. He sure as hell knew the world was a sphere...he just seriously misjudged how large that sphere was.

And you know, while I'm at it I'll dismiss two more annoying common misunderstandings about the Middle Ages: (1) rampant and persecutory witch hunting belonged to post-Reformation, post-Renaissance Europe and not to the Middle Ages (think of our own famous witch hunt - what happened at Salem occured in the 1600s, gang), and (2) the nastiest of all the inquisitions was the Spanish Inquisition and guess what? It was led by two secular leaders, not the Catholic Church, and these same leaders, Columbus' pals Isabelle and Ferdinand, also lived in post-medieval Europe. If the Spanish Inquisition had been led by the medieval Catholic Church, its inquisitors would have shown more restraint and sought reconciliation with the church, only recommending torture or execution in extreme cases, which is how the inquisitions were run in the Middle Ages. To be sure, I do not advocate for a kinder gentler image of what any of the inquisitions were. They still entailed torture and coerced conformity, certainly, but when you think of widespread inquisitorial persecution and aggressive zealotry, trust me, you're probably thinking of the Early Modern period and not the Middle Ages.

Okay, okay, unless you're thinking of the Crusades.  That was certainly a medieval debacle of persecution and zealotry, but again, it was started by the church and only really turned horrific in the hands of secular leaders. My point stands, that what we think we know about the Middle Ages has more to do with how we like to view ourselves in contrast to it, than it has to do with what that time period was really like. Sure, the medieval church sought and sometimes coerced conformity.  It also mediated between bellicose secular rulers and advocated for peaceful resolutions. Then again it also sent an army of marauders into the cradle of civilization to "reconquer" Jerusalem, which had never belonged to Europe or Catholicism in the first place.  And the church was only one medieval institution at work, if a very important one. There was a whole society of folks out there doing the muckity muck of living and dying who didn't get to write about it. What about their experiences? Can we judge an entire time period based on events we don't like and ideas we misunderstand? Well, yes, as it turns out, we do it all the time. I hope someday our own time period is some other culture's whipping boy. Cosmic (karmic?) justice is rather more beautiful than our measley human justice. Meantime, I can blog about it.

*Most scholars would consider "popular" history anything that concerns itself with being entertaining as well as, or even at the expense of being, accurate. New Orleans, for instance, abounds in popular history - plantation tours, cemetery tours, horse-drawn carriage tours (these guys are notorious for making up the "history" they purvey to tourists), and the like.

A Dream I Had

I was audience to my dream rather than a participant in it and watched my protagonist, a young blonde woman, trying to open a locker.  It looked as though she were in a locker room where employees (of what type?) might change into and out of their work clothes.  But this young woman was not trying to change.  She was not herself.  That is, I somehow knew that there was someone else peering out of her eyes, someone who knew themselves to be other than a young blonde woman.  They knew they had to draw no attention to the young blonde woman lest someone notice that she was not acting as she normally would.  This person, my protagonist, hurriedly attempted to collect a bag of clothes, a wallet and keys from the locker with the intention of somehow locating the right car and getting the heck out of Dodge, but at the crucial moment, my protagonist shut the locker and realized that the keys were still inside.  This was a problem since the protagonist, not actually being but just looking like the young blonde woman who's locker it was, had no idea what the locker combination might be.

Just then, another employee entered the locker room and, initiating conversation, implied that the protagonist was expected at work.  They walked together into the next room.  Several others were in this room.  Everyone was relaxed, but the protagonist was on guard.  There was something about her these others mustn't find out.  A coworker began speaking to her and she placed her bag of clothes on the counter.  Another coworker began going through the bag and a feeling of dread and panic struck our protagonist.  The coworker asked, "What are these?" as he pulled bloody articles of clothing out of the bag.  "Why is there blood all over them?"

At this point the nature of the dream altered - I was still audience rather than participant and the young blonde woman was still my protagonist, but I could no longer sense whether she was herself or someone else and I had no way of knowing whether what followed was the truth or an absurd lie she constructed on the spur of the moment, though I suspected it was a lie.  It doesn't matter either way, because her telling of the thing, true or false, brought it into being.  She said:  "I am a werewolf hunter.  That's werewolf blood.  I am protected by the guards and you can't do anything to me."

Suddenly, the coworkers were not coworkers.  There were three very tall, wicked looking creatures (I've been thinking of them as demons, but not with a religious connotation, rather very earthy and actual).  Two of these creatures wore long black cloaks and had brownish skin.  No hair, pointy teeth and chin, very Nosferatu-looking.  The third looked similar, but wore no cloak and had pasty pale skin.  It was clear that the two cloaked creatures were the young blonde woman's guards and the third creature wanted to devour her alive.

An indeterminate period of time ensued where the young woman would taunt the pale creature, teasing him and then retreating beneath the cloaks of the guards, pressing close against them, knowing they would protect her.  A moment came later, as she stood in the middle of the room daring to step away from the guards, where the pale creature approached her.  She backed up until she was sitting next to a guard and cuddled against him in fear.  The pale creature still approached.  He slowly reached out and took one of the young woman's wrists in his hand.  He leaned his head down and played a moist tongue over the pulse in her wrist.  As if to reassure herself and explain why the guards would let him get so close to her without acting, the young woman told him, "You haven't tried to hurt me.  My guards will protect me if you do."

The pale creature, keeping one wrist encircled, slowly took her other arm and lifted its wrist toward the head of the guard she leaned against.  The guard encircled the wrist with one hand and bent over it, much like the pale creature was doing.  The pale creature said, "Yes, they're here to protect you."  And then both the pale creature and the guard chuckled, as though they enjoyed a joke between themselves, and they each leaned over either wrist of the young woman, slowly playing their tongues across her pulse, sniffing at her blood just below the thin skin.  At this moment, I suddenly ceased being an audience to my own dream and became its protagonist.  I sat there, my arms helplessly outstretched with a creature attached on either side, and I realized they'd been playing a game with me the entire time and that my protectors were waiting to devour me as well as my foe.

I woke up. 

Book: Art and Physics by Leonard Shlain

The full title of this book is Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light and it was written by a surgeon.  I point out this last detail because I think non-professional works of high intellectual ambition are pretty rare.  And well-executed ones are even rarer.  I believe outsiders to an established discipline can often see patterns, make connections or hazard hypotheses that a trained professional either could not or would not do.  Professional academics, scientists, artists and so forth who have spent years and years studying, practicing and executing their crafts can, and maybe should, possess a snob factor about this kind of book.  I suppose I understand this stance, although I have a lot of musings about institutionalized disciplines and power structures of learning that I do not really want to get into right here.  I offer, however, that I found Leonard Shlain's book about art and physics fascinating, well written and, insofar as I am equipped to say, well researched. 

Shlain examines correspondences in the visual arts and physics, from the classical period through the present.  I found this a wonderful project, especially as Shlain's ultimate hypothesis is not that the arts were influenced by developments in the sciences, but that the arts in strange and obscure ways seem to, over time, prefigure scientific discoveries.  That is, Shlain does not propose causality, but correspondence.  I find this especially interesting because it seems so unexplainable.  It is precisely the kind of hypothesis I would never expect to find in an institutionally-derived work.  Additionally, an institutionally-derived work would likely never purport to marry art and physics in the first place - the arts and sciences are so often viewed in opposition to each other and not as complementary visions of the same reality. 

Shlain's final argument concerns an ultimate connectivity of cognitive states (and all time and matter) that occurs in a dimension we cannot perceive with our measly three-dimensional senses.  Metaphorically, our individual-seeming, three-dimensional selves function like our cells, independently but nonetheless creating a unity of form and function, even of consciousness.  In the case of cells the unity is us (or a cat, or a plant, etc.).  In the case of us as cells...what is the unity we create?  We simply cannot perceive this unity because we are locked in our three dimensionality.  Some artists, as sensitive nodes, Shlain's argument runs, get a glimmer of this unity, translate it into their art and, thereby, provide effective visual metaphors for scientific discoveries that have not  yet occured and that are exceedingly difficult to imagine as they precisely pertain to reality exterior to our three dimensions (he uses primarily Einstein's theories concerning gravity and how bizarrely matter behaves at the speed of light).

This may sound far out, but I would suggest you give this book a fighting chance.  Shlain's basic argument, his evaluation of various artworks as demonstrating specific scientific findings - it all hinges on metaphor.  And metaphor is an exceedingly powerful, non-causal means of connectivity.  The roots of metaphor grow out of language, which in turn is likely the root out of which grows our very cognition.  Julian Jaynes has argued that consciousness itself is a metaphorical space we have created linguistically.  Additionally, many of the scientific findings of the 20th century that pertain to light, physics and the nature of reality are only comprehensible to our three-dimensional minds via metaphor.  There seems to be something more accurate about the correspondences in metaphorical relationships than about the causal relationships between events that we purport to live by.  As Hayden White has observed, causality is a construction imposed on events through our human need to narrativize - causality and narrative do not inhere in events themselves, and only seem to do so when we are bounded by the third dimension and cannot perceive time as a unity.

The short of the long is that Shlain probably made a few mistakes here and there that an artist writing about art, a physicist writing about physics, and a historian writing about the history of either, would not have made.  But neither would the artist, the physicist or the historian likely have blended these seemingly disjointed disciplines into one comprehensive vision of the reality in which we find ourselves.

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