The Vegan Body Project

Deceit and Loalty. More later, but for now, just a thought.

2011-12-14T17:27:00.000-08:00

‎"Loyalty comes in many types. Sometimes it is unabashed. Sometimes it is naïve. Always, though, it is risky. But then, if loyalty is to mean anything, there must be a risk attached. And surely the greatest risk to loyalty is deceit." -- Frank Deford

Hitler and Vegetarianism

2011-11-25T07:08:00.000-08:00

Hal Herzog, who has already discussed this issue in his blog, and I got into a fight in front of an entire class of undergraduate students. Hal has graciously claimed responsibility, saying of the altercation (which, I should add, was all in the spirit of academic debate), "It was my fault. I used the Nazi animal protection movement to illustrate how a culture can twist human moral values in weird and tragic ways." And this proclamation is true; Hal's position, astutely supported via a very comprehensive body of scholarship, is that people have some really conflicted and, as would seem to be the case in terms of the Nazis, some very contradictory views about the value of life, human and non-human alike. Indeed, Hal's written a brilliantly accessible, illuminating, and thoughtful book about this subject, which, when last I checked, was ranked as the #14 best selling book on Animal Rights on Amazon.

Back to our fight: what Hal's blog doesn't cover about that altercation is what I was saying prior to his interjection that "Hitler was a vegetarian." I was following Hal's lead, after he'd read from his book a particularly graphic passage about the lives of factory farmed hens. I stood up and started talking about my veganism and then realized that no one was listening to me at all. Everyone looked vaguely traumatized by what they'd just heard; indeed, they should have been traumatized. I backed up, and we talked about how the information that Hal had conveyed had made the students feel. One said, "kind of guilty about having just eaten Chick Fil A for lunch." Yeah. So we processed. Then I showed the vegan police scene from Scott Pilgrim to lighten things up a bit.

Yeah, I've posted this clip before. But I can't get enough of the "Gelato's not vegan?" "It's milk and eggs, bitch" sequence.

And then I went back to me, to why I am vegan and how my animal rights position is also the source of many of my scholarly endeavors (and, by the way, this is a topic that I NEVER discuss in class, so doing so was weird for me. Doing so made me feel vulnerable, because I have a pretty good sense of the kinds of questions -- and the kinds of attacks -- that generally follow such disclosure. And that's part of why I keep my personal politics -- at least in any overt sense -- out of my pedagogical practice). My work as a postcolonial scholar is, in many ways, premised on my belief that human beings learn to "other" human beings because they are able to dehumanize them -- to treat them like animals. And they are able to do this because of what I've termed the "primary binary opposition" of human/animal.

My belief is that this distinction, the primacy that we ascribe to human beings and the subjection we dictate to non-human animals -- who clearly think, feel pain, and learn, activities in which humans participate as well -- is the foundation upon which we constitute all other binary thinking. And in the context of such dualisms, one side of the binary is necessarily coded as inferior (think man/woman, white/black, culture/nature). In order to illustrate this point, I shared a copy of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus in which Spiegelman depicts the Jews killed during the Holocaust as mice.

The Nazis gassed the Jews using Zyklon B, a pesticide used to kill rodents -- mice and rats. In depicting the Jews as mice, Spielgelman's novel illustrates the way that the Nazis dehumanized the Jews. They treated them like rodents, and rodents fall into that category of animals that we, as a species, hate. And this is the point at which Hal interjected that Hitler was a vegetarian.

OK, you can read Hal's blog about the Nazis and their animal rights agenda. And you can read my argument below about how Hitler wasn't a vegetarian. But before you go any further, what you should know is that whether or not Hitler was a vegetarian is a red herring to any thoughtful discussion about animal rights, about ethical vegetarianism, and about a life committed to recognizing the interconnectedness between human and animal life. Hitler's supposed vegetarianism has been thrown up at me so many times that it makes me tired to think about it. And generally, I don't even bother to take it on: people who bring up Hitler's vegetarianism, generally speaking, do so to undermine an ethical vegetarian position. They do it to indicate that vegetarianism is highly flawed: how could vegetarianism be a good thing if someone as bad as Hitler practiced it?

My sense is that Hitler has a lot in common with most of us, if we dare to examine Hitler as a human being. And that might be more than we're willing to do. But I responded badly to Hal's assertion. I said, "no he wasn't." And then we went from there, back and forth, each offering the evidence we have at our disposal, until I finally acquiesced. And I only acquiesced because I could tell that we were causing the poor students to freak out a bit.

To digress for a moment: there's a scene in Nikos Kazantzakis's 1953 novel The Last Temptation of Christ and Martin Scorsese's 1988 adaptation of it during which Jesus, who has stepped down from the cross, raised a family, and grown old, confronts Paul, who is preaching the story of Christ's resurrection. Jesus approaches Paul and says that Paul is telling lies about him, that none of the things that Paul claims are true. Paul responds that he has built the truth out of what people need to hear. He says, "you know, I'm glad I met you, because now I can forget all about you. My Jesus is much more powerful."

Scorcese's film with Willem Dafoe as Jesus and Harry Dean Stanton as Paul. Oh, and Juliette Caton as that annoying angel thing. By the way, all the evil people in this film have British accents (David Bowie plays Pontius Pilate); all the good guys sound like they're from the Bronx.

When I saw this film in the late 1980s, it made me understand Christianity in a way that, at least momentarily, made me want to believe -- and it made me want to be an English major, because I realized for the first time in my "I-was-raised-Methodist" life the power of fictional narrative to create truth. And I bring this up because it's a point that I keep returning to with regard to this Hitler business. I strike this comparison not to offer any kind of moral connection between the historical figures of Hitler and Jesus but to posit that mythologies arise -- for better or worse -- out of the human desire to explain and justify human behavior (again, for better or worse). The mythology surrounding Hitler's vegetarianism is a case in point; positing that Hitler was a vegetarian serves to undermine an ethical vegetarian position. It assumes, naturally, that vegetarianism is corrupt because Hitler was a vegetarian and Hitler was corrupt.

I can tell my "truth" about Hitler's vegetarianism, and I can corroborate that truth. Here are a few points that I'm taking from Charles Patterson's 2002 study Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, the title of which comes from "The Letter Writer" by Isaac Beshevis Singer: "in relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka:"

1. Hitler had irritable bowl syndrome. His doctor advised him to eat more vegetables, which he did in order to reduce the embarrassing symptoms associated with IBS.

2. Hitler never gave up his favorite meat dishes, which included Bavarian sausage, liver dumplings, and stuffed game (by the way, pork's not a vegetable). Here's a quote from one of Hitler's chefs, Dione Lucas: "I do not want to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab . . . but you might be interested to know that it was a great favorite with Mr. Hitler." Liver and squab: not vegetables.

3. According to historian Robert Payne, the image of Hitler as an ascetic was the product of his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels: "Hitler's asceticism played an important part in the image he projected over Germany. According to the widely believed legend, he neither smoke nor drank, nor did he eat meat or have anything to do with women. Only the first was true."

Here's a link to all of the above, plus much more. Other scholars, including Carol J. Adams and Rynn Berry, have also written to dispel the Hitler as vegetarian myth. Here's a link to a piece about the New York Times' retraction of a previous assertion that Hitler was vegetarian, which lists a variety of sources as evidence.

So I have my sources and Hal has his, and neither one of us will ever prove anything to the other, I suspect. Did Hitler ever call himself a vegetarian? I very much doubt it. But as Paul says in that scene from The Last Temptation of Christ, my truth, in the overall scheme of what people need to believe, won't matter. Theoretically, they'll tear me limb from limb to preserve an essential myth, and that myth is that in order to be unlike Hitler, one must eat meat. It's a tidy justification, isn't it?

"Two Little Hitlers" by Elvis Costello

* And as an aside, there's plenty of debate out there as well as to the vegetarian status of Jesus. Maybe I'll take that on in my next blog. Or maybe not.

Anthony Bourdain and Moby in Asheville

2011-10-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

The other day, Jason got a text from Mackensy Lunsford, the most excellent food writer for the Mountain Xpress, asking if, as a local chef, he had any questions for Anthony Bourdain, who's coming to Asheville next weekend and who she was interviewing. We talked about it, and he wrote back to ask a question. Bourdain's response is in today's Xpress. You can read the complete interview here.

Here are some excerpts, including Jason's question:

Anthony Bourdain has not been to Asheville recently, despite rumors to the contrary. But he has a vague understanding of what we're about from a previous trip years ago for a book-signing. "I remember this hip island of enlightenment," says Bourdain, who doesn't recall much else about the visit, including the date.  And while some may choose to attribute that lapse in memory to Bourdain's purportedly high-partying lifestyle in years past, it's more likely that it can be pinned on the fact that the chef-turned-writer has been, quite simply, just about everywhere you want to be — and plenty of places where you might not.  

Bourdain is coming to Asheville again on Saturday, Nov 5, this time to talk about food and travel, and how life in general relates to both. He took more than a few minutes out of his day to chat with Xpress from the back of a car taking him from New York City to Waterbury, Conn. He lost reception several times (lucky for us, he was game about being called repeatedly). Bourdain had plenty to say about vegetarianism, food trucks, hunger and mediocrity.

***

Plant's Jason Sellers wants to know if you would be willing to visit his vegan restaurant to "quell some of that open animosity with some open-mindedness."

Listen, I'm perfectly OK with vegetarians practicing whatever they want to do. I just think they make for bad travelers. That's what pisses me off. If you're eating vegan for religious reasons, fine. What you do in your home — or hometown even — in the industrialized world, I'm OK with that. That's your personal choice. I think the notion that you can travel — and I'm not talking about Rome or Paris, of course you can call ahead and say, "do you have any vegetarian options?" You can't do that in the developing world without offending people ... It's awkward and hurtful to go to grandma's house and turn down the turkey. I just see it as rude and incurious.

OK, so thing the first: kudos to Mackensy. There's this nice and not-too-subtle Bourdain's-a-bit-of-a-drunk-and-can't-be-bothered-to-remember-when-he-was-here bit. Then there's the inclusion of the backhanded compliment that we're a "hip island of enlightenment" in what I can only assume is a state of redneck provincialism, which counts as nothing more than an insult to the entire state of North Carolina. But I love Mackensy mostly because she's always been supportive of Jason, has always helped him promote his work, going so far as to mention both Jason and Plant prior to introducing Sandy Krebs, the new chef at the Laughing Seed, in an interview that she conducted last week with Krebs.

So back to that Bourdain interview.

First of all, Bourdain's response doesn't really seem to answer the question, to respond to the invitation to break bread and to "quell some of that open animosity with open mindedness." My friend Lori started a Facebook page devoted to getting Bourdain to Plant. And I know that there are people out there who will be openly protesting, because of his harsh anti-vegetarian rhetoric, Bourdain's presence in Asheville. In Jason's question is a genuine effort to engage in dialogue, and it's an effort that is met with complete dismissal. And not even dismissal: Bourdain's response is a rehash of his tired diatribe against non-carnivous diets.

At least this time, he doesn't invoke the term "hezbollah."

Second -- and apropos of absolutely nothing -- Bourdain goes off on how offensive vegetarianism is to people who live in the "developing world." We're in Asheville, but whatever.

Of course, Bourdain's "developing world" argument completely ignores the fact that the Western world, the so-called "developed" world, has historically been the part of the world where meat has been central to diet; in terms of diet, many of the cultures of the so-called "developing world" have been based on a starch with animal protein added only occasionally. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams links increased meat eating with capitalism and patriarchy in the West and with racism towards plant-based cultures: “into the twentieth century the notion was that meat eating contributed to the Western world’s prominence” (31). As support, she quotes nineteenth-century English physician George Beard’s analysis of the superiority of “civilized” meat-eating peoples over the “rice-eating Hindoo and Chinese and the potato-eating Irish peasant” who were all kept in subjugation to the English, which he refers to as a “nation of beef-eaters” (qtd. in Adams 31).

Third: "vegetarians make for bad travelers," says Bourdain. My sense is that stupid arrogant carnivores make for bad travelers when they turn down the hospitality of their vegan hosts, eh? Oh, and both Jason and I have been to this so-called third world and eaten vegan and had really significant discussions with people we've supposedly offended. Anywhere on the planet, I imagine, people are, and should be, willing to talk about what they eat and why they eat it just as much as they should be willing to engage in any other political discourse -- and in our experience, they have been.

People elsewhere -- people in the "developing world" -- aren't such children that they need protection from differences of opinion, or differences in diet; they don't need to be championed by the patronizing impulse of someone like Bourdain. What he does when he makes his pro-developing world argument is to speak for the developing world. And don't let Bourdain's rhetoric convince you that food isn't political -- or that it's only political in the sense that veganism functions as a silencing of other perspectives; the opposite seems to be more accurate. Vegetarianism and veganism function as affronts to Bourdain's white male carnivorous Western privilege: his speaking for other cultures is more of a silencing than an act of communal eating.

Anthony: pretend to give a shit about "other" cultures. Use this argument to sound like a humanitarian. Gorge yourself on the foods of "other" cultures. Come home. Get drunk. Talk shit.

Then: "What you do in your home — or hometown even — in the industrialized world, I'm OK with that." And then: "it's awkward and hurtful to go to grandma's house and turn down the turkey. I just see it as rude and incurious." Grandma doesn't live "in the industrialized world?" Fallacy from tradition much? Just cause something's been the case, it should always be the case? People have always eaten turkey, at grandma's house (in the industrialized world); therefore, people should always turkey at Grandma's house.

Perhaps a bad analogy: I had a great uncle who died when I was about 15. When I was very young, he sat me down and made me repeat after him: "eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Catch a nigger by the toe." As I said, I was very young. I did what he asked. What's the harm, right? He'd always used that word, I suspect. Refusing to repeat after him would have been "awkward and hurtful."

I can't help but think of a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving when reading Bourdain's quote above. Thanksgiving, the holiday with which I (and I would imagine most U.S. citizens) associate turkey and grandma, is based on a colonial model of genocide. Turkey, likewise. At least in its current, often factory farmed incarnation. The Meleagris gallopa, wild North American turkey, was a symbol of sacrifice for many native peoples: "the spirit of turkey is free, and opens up the channels between us and others on a meaningful level." Open channels allow for communication, even about such subjects as why one might not want to eat turkey.

Oh, and "rude and incurious"? That's what you are, at least in the developing world, if you don't eat meat. Sounds more like Bourdain than anyone: rude not to respond to Mackensy's question. Incurious not to take Jason up on the invitation.

Anyway: I did an internet search for "Moby contact information." Moby will be in town for Moogfest tomorrow. We called the number that came up. The person who answered is no longer his agent, but he forwarded our invitation to break bread on to Moby's current representation. That was yesterday.

Today, we got a call letting us know that Moby will be at Plant for lunch tomorrow. All it took was an invitation, an offer to break bread, here in the "first" world. And this is not a plug for Moby...except that it is. Thanks, man.

Why Margaret Atwood Should win the Nobel Prize in Literature

2011-10-06T13:43:00.000-07:00

I came home last night after dinner with friends (at Plant, of course) and collapsed on my sofa, wanting nothing more than to watch something mindless on television. So I flipped channels, landing first on 127 Hours, Danny Boyle’s self-proclaimed "action movie with a guy who can't move," the story of Aron Rolston's ordeal trapped by a boulder that falls and pins his arm to the wall of a canyon in Robber's Roost, Utah. I've seen it, several times, so I flipped more, and caught the end of Sean Penn's Into the Wild, an adaptation of Jonathan Krakauer's biography of Christopher McCandless, the Emory University graduate who abandoned his family in 1990 and headed into Alaska, where he eventually died.

McCandless's last self-portrait

I sat there watching for a minute, thinking the rather ungenerous thought that men get immortalized, their narratives becoming part of the mythology of masculine individualism, for doing some stupid, selfish shit. Rolston went out on his own and told no one where he was heading; early in the film as he prepares to leave his house, his mother calls. He listens as she leaves a message, asking him to call her. He ignores it. McCandless is even worse, as he cuts all contact with his family, leaving them worried and desperate to find him.

And then there's a pang of envy on my part as well: as a woman, I know that I'll never feel free enough to embrace such adventure, however misguided and stupid it may prove to be. And I feel relatively certain that if I did, and if the results were the same, the narrative that would be told -- if any narrative was told at all -- would be much more lurid, more gruesome (if anything can be more gruesome than James Franco's portrayal of Rolston severing his arm to escape), more about the idiocy of placing oneself in harm's way and less about the spirit of individualism that makes heros of men who do just that.

The tourniquet and dull knife Rolston used to sever his arm

By the time I got to HBO and Martin Scorsese’s portrait of George Harrison, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, I was just annoyed. And this is not to say that I don't think Harrison deserves a biopic; my sense is that he does. But by then I was just tired of the mythology of men, so I kept flipping. What I landed on finally was a Dateline ID show, something about Canada; I caught the image of a rope on a bed and flashed immediately to the opening pages of Margaret Atwood's 1981 novel Bodily Harm, in which the narrator comes home to find police in her house, men who let her know that someone broke into her home: "we don't think he was a robber. . . . He made himself a cup of Ovaltine" (5). They then escort her into her bedroom and show her "a length of rope coiled neatly on the quilt. It wasn't any special kind of rope, there was nothing lurid about it" (5).

As it turns out, the Dateline show was about Russell Williams, the Canadian Air Force commander who was jailed in 2010 for rape and murder and some 80 other counts of breaking and entering and stealing women's underwear. Williams confesses, on videotape, to police, in part, he says, because he is worried about his wife.

Here's part of the confession.

I thought of Margaret Atwood's poem "Marrying the Hangman," that begins thus:

She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man
may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a
woman by marrying the hangman.

The women Williams killed: Marie-France Corneau and Jessica Lloyd

Atwood's assertion that women find themselves in the precarious position of depending on men to protect them from men is as much a part of my daily thought processes as is her claim that "men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." Atwood's words, her narratives, fictional characters, and politics are so much a part of my everyday existence that they form much of the fabric of my consciousness, indistinguishable, in many ways from my very sense of self. And this has been the case since I first encountered her work in the form of her 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, which I read in 1989. I was in college; I wanted to be a novelist myself. I read Atwood's work and realized that everything I wanted to say at that point in my life had been said by her already. And had been said better than I ever could have said it. Reading that novel destroyed me.

Reading Atwood's work -- her novels, short stories, and poetry -- has always made me feel this way, that she's somehow already charted the territory that percolates in bits and pieces in the semi-conscious parts of my brain; her writing is by turns terrifying and prophetic, satirical and funny. Atwood plays with language, ever conscious of the power of words, both to create and destroy personhood, nature, and society. In the poem "You Fit into Me," for example, she takes apart a seemingly innocent image, a clothing fastener, to reveal a disturbing duality:

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

And Atwood's work is filled with this duality, with the problematic and imbalanced nature of relationships -- heterosexual, national, interspecies. Her female characters are often initially complicit in their victimization, even as they ultimately cast off such a subject position. As Atwood's unnamed narrator states at the end of Surfacing, “this above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that, I can do nothing” (222).

I have long wanted Atwood to win the Nobel Prize. The sheer volume and scope of her writing, its variety, its quality, its prescience, its astute examination of gendered, national, and species based power politics, and its deconstruction, via both satire and scathing critique, of our contemporary world warrant her winning it.

Perhaps more significantly, though, than even her subject matter, in writing Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Atwood in many ways articulates and, more importantly, authorizes, via a thematic analysis of Canadian literature (based on the inclusion of certain works and the exclusion of others), Canada’s national narrative. In this work, Atwood states that the central theme in Canadian literature is survival and she locates in Canadian literature four “victim positions”—ranging from denying that one is a victim, to acknowledging that one is a victim, to becoming a creative non-victim. These victim positions, according to Atwood, are universal, “whether you are a victimized country, a victimized minority group, or a victimized individual” (46). It is, therefore, not only through the trope of survival that Atwood reads Canadian literature and interprets Canadian national identity, but also through the trope of victimization. Indeed, in order to survive, one must first be a victim of something else.

Atwood’s work not only established Canadian literature as the articulation of a survivalist mentality, but it also established Canadian literature as a legitimate entity; Atwood, I contend, "invented" Canadian literature. As she remarks:

The few dedicated academic souls who had cultivated this neglected pumpkin patch over the meager years were affronted because a mere chit of a girl had appropriated a pumpkin they regarded as theirs, and those who had taken a firm stand on the non-existence of Canadian literature were affronted because I had pointed out that there was in fact a pumpkin to appropriate. (4)

As Atwood notes, teaching Canadian literature “is a political act” (21), and Survival conceives of such literature not only as a mirror for Canadian identity but also as a map, “a geography of the mind” (26).

I'm currently teaching Atwood's Year of the Flood, her most recent work, and the second in a series of what will be three novels (the first being Oryx and Crake), that explores a potential apocalypse delivered in the form of the BlyssPlus pill, a pharmaceutical that delivers excellent sex and protects takers from STDs...that is, until it kills them. The work, set sometime in the near future, includes much of what is already familiar -- genetically engineered animals and food, rampant global warming, viral internet pornography -- as it leads us to some logical and horrific conclusions about what might be probable. As Toby, one of the God's Gardeners, a sect of vegan preapocalyptic hippies, notes, "how easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it" (217). After the world ends, so to speak, Adam One, the leader of the Gardeners, realizing that veganism may be impossible in the current moment, preaches to his flock, "which is more blest, to eat or be eaten?" (346), even as he entertains the idea that survival may, at some point, depend on cannibalism.

We're told by Ren, another of the survivors, that "Adam One used to say that people can believe two opposite things at the same time" (229), and I asked my students to speak about this idea. There was silence, and then one offered, "it's like watching 'Toddlers and Tiaras.' You know it's wrong, but you can't look away." Good point. And that's why I ended up watching a TV show about Russell Williams's victimization of women instead of any number of shows about the accomplishments of men. Men are immortalized, and women are murdered; at least that's what last night's channel surfing showed me. Men act stupid and become mythological heros; women get killed for leaving a window open... A man comes in, with a coil of rope, and it's curtains. And we all revel in the grotesque aftermath.

Atwood's writing acknowledges and then resists this reality; it always has. Today, I'm happy, I guess, for Tomas Transtromer, whose work I don't know at all, but who, I have no doubt, deserves the Nobel as much as the next guy. And I'm sorry for Atwood who, I feel certain, deserves it more. As she says, "a word after a word after a word is power." Maybe next year.

* And I realize that this post has next to nothing to do with veganism.

September 11, veganism, and memory

2011-09-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

I spoke with my mom earlier today about the proliferation of September 11, 2001 news that’s out there at present. Tenth anniversary and all. She said, “it’s not like we’ll forget it. Do we really need to relive it?” She’s got a point, I think. But for me, and for reasons that are somewhat vague, I haven’t ever let myself fully experience what I’ve been going through today, ten years later, with regard to 9/11. I watched this. It killed me. The second part in particular.

There are anniversaries...and there are anniversaries. Summer in the year of 2001 is inextricably enmeshed, in my mind, with two major events: my decision to become vegan and the day that the planes flew into the towers in Manhattan. I had decided, but now, in the retrospect clouded by the plumes of billowing smoke, the screams and melting metal, the people, desperate for escape and air, hurling themselves from hundreds of stories, I don’t remember the exact date that I became vegan.

I remember that I sold my leather Fluevogs and my Doc Martins on ebay. I cried to Jason; this felt like a kind of baptism, a kind of secular salvation for me, a woman who had been vegetarian since 1989 and had been volunteering at the Dakin Animal Shelter since moving to Massachusetts.

I got rid of wool. I went into a major sulk over the loss of fresh mozzarella pizza at Pizza Paradiso in Northampton. It must have been summer. It was still warm; my windows were down and I was driving, speaking through tears to Jason about this decision to, as I said at the time, “make my life consistent.” And it was an important decision, made on a day that I should certainly remember, but the particulars of it are lost to me now, enveloped in what must have come immediately afterwards, the attack, the video images played on a constant unending loop, the deaths.

Everyone keeps saying that there’s no way to forget that day. And, while I can't forget it, I don’t necessarily remember it either. That day, that beautiful, blue, warm and peaceful day, I woke up and, I suppose – because this is what I always do – I had coffee. Maybe I went running, but it must have been early, because I remember moving my car from one side of South Street to the other so that repairs could be made on the asphalt near my apartment. And I remember that the radio was on in my car as I moved it, as always, tuned to NPR, and I knew, at that moment, that a plane had flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

I didn’t have a TV. Seriously. This was one of the last pretensions that I shed – and I shed it fast after that morning. I had been taken with the belief that owning a television, that watching television, was something associated with lower life forms. So what happened next? Here’s where memory fades, at least with regard to time. I know that I watched the news with my downstairs neighbor Jamie. I know that I talked to Jason, but I don’t remember the content of that conversation. And I don’t remember how time unfolded for the rest of the day.

I know that I tried to call Stacy, my friend from Staten Island who lived in New Jersey, who was turning 32 on September 11, 2001. I suppose that if one lives long enough in a world of mass murder, one’s birthday will, inevitably coincide with something like this. For me, all there was, at least for a long time, was the coincidence of my birthday with the death date of Aphra Behn in 1689. But then there was the shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007. And my birthday, like Stacy’s, became forever associated with evil and the mortality of my species.

I tried to call Stacy that day. The lines were blocked. The world just stopped.

What I remember next is all out of sequence: driving to school. Driving away from school; UMASS closed at 1 p.m. Sitting down in the office of Stephen Clingman, my dissertation director, and trying not to cry. He told me that it was ok. I said that it most certainly wasn’t.

It was the only day during the five years that I was in Massachusetts, five years marked by impossible blizzards, feet deep snows, ice, extreme cold, that the university shut its doors and let its charges wander without cause. The planes had flown from Logan. We were free, and we were implicated. I left the campus. The gates at the parking garage were open; no one had to pay. I went home and ran a 5K at the hospital grounds at Smith College. It was Tuesday. We raced weekly, but this day my heart nearly exploded because I felt that I had to run for everyone who had died, everyone who had never run before, everyone who had called out that morning only to die just a bit later.

And that’s all I remember.

In the years that have passed since September 11, since that singular September 11, I have closed my heart and my mind. I have been annoyed at the perpetual remembrances, the constant calling to the fore the faces of the lost. I know that there is worse evil in the world. This holds no candle to the holocaust. I know about what’s happening in Congo. And then there is the moment, which is barely a moment. Even as it is, even as it leaves an impression that I can’t shake ten years out.

Since my country invaded Afghanistan in some misguided and ill-conceived attempt to right the wrongs of 9/11/2001, the statistics for just how many people have died are hard to find. But my sense is that we’ve killed – many, many times over – the number of U.S. citizens that died that day. In fact – and I hate to cite Wikipedia, but when it’s the best source that I find on the subject, I will – it seems that in terms of civilian deaths (think of civilians as those people who were working in the Towers that day), from 2001-2003 we leveled 23,600 people. My mind wants to continue to forget.

Back to veganism: I think about my country, about what we do, about the narrative that we spin. I watched a documentary today about the phone calls that were made from people in the towers as the towers were about to go down. One mother said that she stopped listening to her son’s message, that she had created a message that he didn’t really say, because that message, the one that she’d invented, was more comforting to her. And that’s the way with history: Ernest Renan said, in a lecture he delivered in 1882, "forgetting . . . is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation." The narrative that we tell -- even in spite of concrete images and saved final voice messages -- is a narrative shaped by what we remember, certainly, but it's also a narrative of invention, of justification, built just as much on what we choose, consciously or not, to forget.

There are no voices to hear or meld or misremember when it comes to animals. Every day in the United States, the narrative that we imagine or excuse with regard to their lives and deaths is our own. I became a vegan in 2001 on a day that I should remember but don't, because the reality of not being vegan was staring me squarely in the face. And then September 11 encroached, called me forth to see the evil that spurs us onwards in a blind frenzy to win some impossible game.

I know many truths from that impossible year: we are still at war, an invisible enemy is supposedly vanquished, and many, many more humans have had to die. And I am still a vegan, and this choice will continue to sustain me, will continue to bring me up against impossible murderous adversaries, real and imagined, remembered and forgotten, again, and again, and again. Happy anniversary.

Vegetarian Vampires (again)

2011-08-25T13:25:00.000-07:00

OK, so I'm working on this chapter. And doing so is making me have to watch Twilight, which makes me want to put my head in the oven.

But seriously. Here's the first bit. There's much more, but if I put it all up, you'd probably not read it. You may not read it anyway. Which is fine.

Vegan Vampires: The Politics of Drinking Humans and Animals in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and True Blood

I used to fancy that life was a positive and perpetual entity, and that by consuming a multitude of living things . . . one might indefinitely prolong life. – Renfield, Dracula

It is, of course, impossible to discuss representations of vampires in Western culture without discussing Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. In fact, it is largely – if not wholly – because of Stoker’s novel that “vampires belong to a modern popular folklore that few will admit to believing but that has become part of a way of thinking about and ordering our vision of the world around us” (Hallab 9). The veritable cottage industry that is the production of literary criticism about Dracula[i] has provided a vast array of theoretical readings of Stoker’s vampire’s symbolic significance within the context of Victorian era England. As Mary Y. Hallab notes, Dracula has been read as “the tyranny of patriarchy, the power of the corrupt aristocracy or the nouveau bourgeois capitalists; he represents decadent foreigners, Slavs or Jews; he is a homosexual, a social outcast, even a mother, and he is dangerously erotic” (2). Critics have read Dracula through every theoretical lens imaginable, from psychoanalytic, to Marxist, to feminist, to queer, to postcolonial, and the continued persistence of scholarship about the novel points to its literary, cultural, and psychological significance.

In this multiplicity of perspectives, there is but one work that examines the novel’s politics of consumption via a vegetarian critical lens. “Love at First Beet: Vegetarian Critical Theory Meats Dracula,” a 1996 piece by J. E. D. Stavick, explores the novel in terms of the ways that it disrupts the food hierarchy present in Western culture, one that “privileges bloody meat, especially beef, over all other food” (24). Slavick’s essay draws on the vegetarian critical theories of such authors as Julia Twigg and Carol J. Adams in order to trace a Victorian politics of meat – of which Jonathan Harker is very much a part, as he chronicles from the very beginning of the novel the kinds of meat he eats as he travels towards and inhabits Dracula’s castle.[ii] Through an analysis of the ways that Dracula consumes those who consume meat, Stavick posits a vegetarian theoretical argument influenced by both Marxist and postcolonial theories:

The threat to English consumption is the threat of reverse colonization, which in this text is manifested in the vampire invasion of England by the powerful consumer “Other,” Count Dracula, who threatens England with his violation of the meat hierarchy. (26)

Taking Stoker’s Dracula – and Slavick’s vegetarian critical theorizing of it – as my starting point, I want to examine the vegetarian and vegan politics that are both implicitly and explicitly present in three contemporary popular cultural representations of vampires, Joss Whedon’s 1997-2003 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stephanie Myer’s Twilight saga (2005-2008), and Alan Ball’s HBO series True Blood (based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlene Harris), which first aired in 2008.

While Stoker’s vampire kills and feeds without remorse on human beings, his late twentieth and twenty-first century counterparts – Angel, Edward Cullen, and Bill Compton – refuse this seemingly essential component of vampiric existence. Furthermore, while diets devoid of animal products were gaining prominence in Stoker’s nineteenth-century England “under the leadership of such enthusiasts as Sylvester Graham . . . and Ellen G. White” (Stavick 24), vegetarianism and veganism have flourished since that time, and have, as I have indicated earlier in this study, entered the mainstream popular cultural discourse in profound and often contradictory ways that disrupt hegemonic assimilation. If the figure of the vampire changes over time to accommodate whatever “our society shuns, but secretly demands” (Thorne 4), then vampires that eschew both murder and the consumption of human blood – and in the case of True Blood’s Bill Compton, animal blood as well – point, perhaps, to “our age’s fantasies of non-exploitative tolerance” (Tyree 32). A chronological examination of these three texts demonstrates how the vegan/vegetarian vampire trope shifts over time as well as how the terms “vegan” and “vegetarian” initially signify weakness, asexuality, or asceticism. But even as they become further and further removed from their original meanings, by the time we get to True Blood, vegan vampirism constitutes a fraught and powerful political stance, one that challenges and disrupts the hegemonic matrix of carnivorous, homophobic sexism prevalent in both True Blood’s fictional Bon Temps – where human beings reverse the discourse and consume vampires – and the very real United States.

[i] An MLA search for Dracula on June 8, 2011 pulls 677 articles.

[ii] Stavick notes Harker’s notations about what he eats. For example, on the first page of the novel, Harker comments that he eats “a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good” (11), and later he consumes “egg-plant stuffed with forcemeat, a very excellent dish” (12).

Plant. Is. Food.

2011-08-16T14:53:00.000-07:00

Jason Sellers, that guy that I've been living with for well over a decade, opened Plant today, so most of this entry will be me bragging about him. Jason is one of those people who just seems good at everything that he does. He's one of those people I often envy for what appears to be an uncanny ability to do anything well. Here's a case in point: we were hanging out at the Bywater with friends a few weeks ago. The Bywater is this really cool concept bar/recreation area on the French Broad River. I call it a kind of summer camp with booze: in addition to the bar, there's about an acre of land with picnic tables, horseshoe and cornhole games, grills, and fire pits. You can bring your own food and grill out, sit by the river, play the games. You can bring your dog. You can tube down from the Wedge, climb out of the water, and head into the Bywater -- at least that's what a whole cadre of folks had done the day we were there. I haven't tried it yet, but I will.

As an aside, I worry a bit about the fact that the grounds are laid out as follows: bar, railroad track, river. Sound like a recipe for disaster to anyone other than me?

No river, here, but you get my point, right?

There's a bimini ring toss game as well, the goal of which is to swing a ring tied to the end of a string in such a way that it lands on a hook attached to a wall. This is not an easy task. I stood there and threw the freaking ring over and over and never got it on the hook. Jason took one practice swing, then a second, then got the ring on the hook. And then did it over and over. In exasperated and highly competitive frustration, I gave up and got another beer.

So it's this sort of thing that seems unnerving to me, Jason's ability to do things with such seemingly little effort. But the truth is something altogether different -- and the ring toss example works to explain it. I just kept throwing the ring, thinking that if I just threw it enough times, it would land on the hook. Which it didn't. If it had, I would have then gone back and then tried to replicate the process by which I succeeded. And that's my method with most things: produce a lot of scholarship, for example, hope that some of it is good, then go back and replicate the model on which the "good" is based, then get bored and move on to something else. I hang pictures on the walls by trial and error, thereby leaving lots of holes, rather than measuring anything out. I have a tendency to believe that many things that I do are good enough to suffice and don't necessarily need to be better, to be perfect.

I actually find it odd to write these things; I've always considered myself a perfectionist -- and perhaps in some ways I am...in the ways that have to do with appearances, with wanting to appear competent and capable of everything that I do. But in many essential ways, I'm not. I'm happy to let things slip; I'm happy, for example, to paint the bathroom walls without taping the trim, even if it means that I get some paint in the wrong places. It saves time, even if it's not perfect. And perhaps this is about being a bit of a risk taker, or being impulsive, or being just this side of dangerous. Or perhaps it's just about being sloppy.

Not Jason. Jason's the antithesis of sloppy. Jason measures everything that he does, and he weighs all the options before acting. He got that ring on the hook on the third try not only because he considered the problem of the ring and the hook -- the weight of the metal in his hand, the length of the thread, and his position relative to the wall -- before he let it go, but also because he paid careful attention to what he did wrong the first and second times; he doesn't come at things backwards, doesn't allow himself to continue to make errors. He gets it right because he takes getting it right very seriously -- perhaps moreso than anyone else I know. And once he gets it right, he keeps working to get it more right. He got the ring on the hook, but maybe he could get the ring on the hook with his eyes closed. Maybe he could get the ring on the hook using his non-dominant hand.

So back to Plant: Plant is vegan. Plant is a restaurant based on an ethical principle to which Jason adheres absolutely and to which his business partners, Leslie Armstrong and Alan Berger, adhere as well. And that ethic is, in fact, the driving impulse behind the place. Jason had been a long time vegetarian when I met him in 1997; we became vegan after we moved to Massachusetts in 1999. And Jason has always been a chef at heart, has always been interested in food and in the politics behind how and what we eat. He went to culinary school at the Natural Gourmet in Manhattan in 2004, and he worked in the city at Candle 79 before moving with me -- very much against his heart's desire to stay in New York -- to Asheville, where he became head chef and kitchen manager at the Laughing Seed.

Leslie, Jason, and Alan.

Jason has been working to get it right for a long time, and he's succeeded in ways that seem inconceivable to me. And I should know: I've been present for the entirety of his culinary journey. The food that he's making now is the food he's always wanted to make. It's delicious, savory, entirely plant based, and incredibly refined in both presentation and flavor combinations. One of my friends declared, after eating lunch there today, that the space in which Jason works should be declared a holy pilgrimage site.

For Jason, getting it right is still something that can be improved upon; getting it right is just another place from which to start. And I can't wait to see what happens now.

Oh, and Anthony Bourdain is coming to town, or so the rumor goes. If he shows up, I'm sending him an invitation to Plant. Bring it.

Coetzee, the Nature of Likeness, and Animals

2011-07-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

I have not been blogging, and here’s why: I’m teaching a graduate seminar this summer on the works of South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, the writer about whom I wrote the dissertation that later became my first book. It is keeping me busy. My initial interest in Coetzee occurred in a PhD graduate seminar – my first PhD seminar, actually – on the works of Nadine Gordimer and Coetzee. The course was taught by Stephen Clingman, who later directed my dissertation. Mad props to Stephen.

I took the class because, as an MA candidate, I had read Gordimer and liked her. I had never heard of Coetzee.

Nadine Gordimer...

...and J.M. Coetzee

While my work has always focused on the African literature of one type or other and on the ways that postcolonial authors and literatures speak back to colonial power (disseminated via not only violence but also through language – often English – religion – always Christian – and education), Coetzee’s work, at least in terms of my reading of it, is more about the politics of refusing to engage with, well, politics. Initially he was a perplexing source of interest for me, as I had always been inclined to think of myself as a champion of the marginalized (yes, arrogant...I was younger then) and as someone who was in possession of a feminist agenda that required me to be sincerely dedicated to writing about literature by women. My MA thesis was on Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, and Tsitsi Dangarembga; I had every intention of furthering my work on Nwapa when I went to UMASS.

But my interest in Coetzee and my decision to write about him was based in large part on reading Disgrace, the 1999 novel for which he won his second Booker Prize (he was the first author to win this prize a second time), and The Lives of Animals, his 1997 Princeton Tanner Lectures, which were published the same year as Disgrace. In essence, his fictional explorations of animal and human interactions, and his philosophical and dialogic musings via the character of Elizabeth Costello about animal rights, vegetarianism, and the limits of the empathetic imagination led me to formulate one of the key tenets of my study on Coetzee, that while we may never be able to “imagine” the interiority of the other – whether that other is animal or human – we should never cease to try to do so. And, in trying and failing, we should nonetheless respect the alterity of that which cannot be imagined.

I love this poster for the film. Dog collars across the South African flag. Perfect.

In other words, while I can’t really think my “way into the life of a bat” (77), as Costello claims that, as a writer, she can, I still think that I should respect the bat – * and even go as far as to consider that the bat and I are of the same order of being, deserving of the same ethical considerations.

* That’s my position; I have no idea if it’s Coetzee’s.

Coetzee’s texts engage with – and never firmly state a position – this idea in both Disgrace and The Lives of Animals. His characters engage dialogically, raising issues but not handing down dictates and truths of any kind. When Elizabeth Costello claims in The Lives of Animals that “we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them” (65), we get all kinds of outcry from the other characters in the story. Her daughter-in-law Norma accuses her of rambling, of being confused. Abraham Stern, a Jewish poet, refuses to have dinner with Costello after her statements, claiming “you misunderstand the nature of likenesses; I even say you misunderstand willfully, to the point of blasphemy. Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not have the likeness of man. If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead. It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way” (94).

And this sort of dialogue – the unanswerable (to my mind) question about the nature of “likenesses” – spills out into a classroom when one is teaching these texts, as was the case with me last night.

I’ve taught Disgrace many, many times since first reading it; my copy is falling apart, full of notes, a complete mess. You’d think that I would have said, at this point, all there is to say about the work. And if I haven’t, surely someone else has, as there is so much literary criticism out there on Disgrace that it’s hard to believe there’s anything new to discover. That being said, I found myself focusing on this question of “likenesses,” and that’s something I’ve never really done before in all the times I’ve read or taught the novel. There are several reasons, I think, why I went with that lens and not some other. One is the notion of context again, something that’s been with me since ASLE and the disappearance of Lauren Spierer.

On an intellectual level, ASLE was about presenting on contextual moral vegetarianism. On an emotional level, it was about processing the narrative of a 20 year-old female University of Indiana student who had vanished, seemingly into thin air, right before I landed in town. I’ve already written about my academic presentation, and I’ve already talked a bit about Spierer, whose ubiquitous image, appearing all over campus and town, on fliers, on billboards, in the windows of all the local businesses, is burned forever in my mind. I still search the internet everyday for news about her. But context is important in her case as well: she’s from a wealthy family, she’s white, blonde, pretty, which is not to say anything other than the media attention that her case gets and that the family can afford to give it is constant. And I’m all too aware of “missing white woman syndrome,” which is my point exactly.

On July 5, a little over a month after she disappeared, there were numerous stories about a woman’s body found in a creek in Indianapolis, a body that was not Spierer. Several days later – and to find any follow up, one has to scroll through pages of headlines about the body that isn’t Spierer – the woman that was not was identified as Shaneice Nicholson. And that was that. Nothing else. Mostly Nicholson is not Spierer. Context matters. But what do we make of such circumstances in terms of an examination of likenesses?

But back to class: we were discussing Disgrace and I brought up Lucy Lurie’s assertion to her father that “there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals. . . . That’s the example that I try to follow. . . . I don’t want to come back in another existence as a dog or a pig and have to live as dogs or pigs live under us” (74). I confess that I sort of share this sentiment; I pointed to this passage because it’s how I think as well: since I can’t know that there’s a higher life, I’d like to live assuming that this one is the one that matters and that I have an obligation to live it, at least insofar as I’m capable, in a way that, as Lucy says, “shares some of [my] human privilege with the beasts” (74).

One of my students countered, “I like David’s comment better.” David responds to his daughter by saying, “yes, I agree, this is the only life there is. As for animals, by all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher, necessarily, just different” (74). So this student’s ideological positioning countered mine (as both were expressed in Coetzee’s novel) and led me back to the question of likenesses yet again.

Disgrace plays with the concept of likeness; the narrative is filled with pairs of words that are similar, yet different – compliant/pliant, moderate/moderated, demand/command – as both the narrator and David Lurie weigh which is appropriate in any given context. But the novel most clearly presents the philosophical difficulty of establishing likeness via the violence done to the bodies of two racially different women – not unlike Lauren Spierer and Shaneice Nicholson – and in white professor David Lurie’s (possible) realization that the “undesired” sexual intercourse that he forces upon his racially mixed student Melanie is something for which he must seek forgiveness. This realization comes, if it comes at all, after his white daughter is raped by three black men. And it comes, I would argue, after he feels empathy for two sheep destined for slaughter by Lucy’s black tenant Petrus.

If we see Lucy’s rape as more violent – of a different order – than David’s “not rape, not quite that, but undesired” (25) “seduction” of Melanie (which the narrator describes as an event during which she “decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of a fox close on its neck” (25)), then that may be because the narrative’s free indirect discourse is focalized through David. His white male ego is that which orders the fictional world, but his is a position with which Coetzee is not necessarily comfortable.

And if we’re able (as David may be) to see, ultimately, the likenesses between the slaughter sheep, Melanie (the rabbit being slaughtered in the above metaphor), and Lucy (who describes her experience as a kind of slaughter: “you’re a man you ought to know. When you have sex with someone strange – when you trap her, hold her down . . . isn’t it a bit like killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards . . . doesn’t it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?” (158), it is through our ability to empathize. And it’s through our willingness to accept that beings that look very different – in terms of their races and species – are actually very much alike indeed.

**********************

In other news: Russell Brand and Kristin Wiig have been named PETA's sexiest vegetarian celebrities of 2011. I love both of them, so I guess that's ok. Right? This past weekend, I downloaded -- and have been listening incessantly to -- the soundtrack from Get Him to the Greek, which is a fake album by Aldous Snow's (Russell Brand's) fake band Infant Sorrow.

I am totally serious.

ASLE, Animals, Contextual Moral Vegetarianism, and Me

2011-06-30T12:46:00.000-07:00

Part 2: Things go Dark and Creepy

Now that I’ve ruminated about all the productive and positive things that happened at ASLE, here’s a bit about what I presented: an essay on the role of contextual moral vegetarianism in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. To be clear (again), ASLE is about literature and representations of the environment in literature, but, perhaps, because I have had limited experience in the real world, literature functions for me as a way of accessing the real world, and this is one of the main themes that I incorporate in my teaching: that nothing one reads in a fictional work of literature is any less true than what one reads about and learns in a history class. As Nobel Prize winning South African author Nadine Gordimer states in “Living in the Interregnum,” her 1981 James Lecture presented at the Institute for the Humanities, “nothing I say here will be as true as my fiction.”

In Life of Pi, the title character is an ethical vegetarian…until he’s stranded for 227 days on a lifeboat, adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, his sole companion a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. In terms of my essay, it’s largely based on a bit of theoretical shifting that is a part of the realization that being vegan/vegetarian makes no sense in certain contextual situations (duh, right?). What is one to do, for example, on a lifeboat in the middle of an ocean? Such a scenario is the extreme case, but Pi’s ability to contextualize his diet, to partake of sea creatures (and possibly even to partake of the flesh of another human) situates vegetarianism and veganism as dietary choices that can only be made in certain (privileged) circumstances.

Here’s the start of the essay:

Perhaps nowhere is the conflicting nature of the Western rhetoric of species preservation more apparent than in much of the current debate surrounding vegetarianism. In conjunction with the twentieth and twenty-first century Holocene extinction spasm has occurred the rise and commercialization of a vegetarian diet as an ethical imperative and as a presumed reaction to and proposed remedy for environmental destruction – including species decimation. Arguments in favor of such an ideology often cite, among other factors, the environmental damage done by factory farms and the depletion of arable land as a result of overgrazing. Despite Anthony Bourdain’s limited claim that "vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit,” arguments in favor of a vegetarian diet focus on a politics of compassionate consumption, the health benefits of eschewing meat, and the positive environmental impact to which such a diet contributes. Bruce Friedrich offers one such argument: the amount of land used to satisfy the food requirements of a vegan for one year is 1/16 acre; for a meat eater, the figure is 20 times as high. Similarly, “it requires 300 gallons of water to feed a vegan for a day. It requires about four times as much to feed a vegetarian, and 14 times as much to feed a meat eater.”

OK, all well and good. But despite such statistics, vegetarians are the “enemy” and vegans are “Hezbollah.” (by the way, that’s the worst analogy ever in the history of faulty analogies. Seriously: hez·bol·lah [Arab. khes-bah-lah]–noun a radical Shiʿite Muslim organization in Lebanon engaged in guerrilla warfare against Israel. veg·an [vej-uhn; especially Brit. vee-guhn]–noun a vegetarian who omits all animal products from the diet). So, if this is the general perception (and I kinda think that it is), how do we crazy animal rights people convince the rest of the world that being veg matters or is helpful (or is healthful or that being compassionate to animals – the ones that aren’t pets – is necessary)?

Intermission. Consider Scott Adam’s assessment in Dilbert for more on the crazy:

Oh, and by the way, a big fat fuck off to Anthony Bourdain, who capitalizes on being a vegan hater. Anyone can cook with meat; it takes talent to cook without it.

The Ramones tee-shirt notwithstanding, he’s still a dillweed.

Here’s Deane Curtin on the subject of contextual moral vegetarianism – and Deane Curtin is a major source for my thinking in this essay: In Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World, Curtin has claimed that he can imagine saying “to a dominant white culture, which has perfected the global food market and excelled at industrial farming, that we have an obligation to be vegetarian,” but he notes that

as a ‘contextual moral vegetarian,’ I cannot refer to an absolute moral rule that prohibits meat eating under all circumstances. There may be some contexts in which another response is appropriate. Though I am committed to moral vegetarianism, I cannot say that I would never kill an animal for food.

Mostly, I tend to agree with Curtin’s statement that in the West, we white folks have a moral obligation to be veg – and I also recognize the racial implications of such an assertion. I’d argue a bit differently, that perhaps race may be a part of the contextual picture, but socio-economic status is probably a bigger factor. Carol Adams deals that the contention that veganism/vegetarianism is a particular form of racism – an argument often posited in order to support the cultural significance of a subordinate (read as “nonwhite”) population’s ancestral and familial connections to a meat eating – by linking the oppression of nonwhite groups to the oppression of animals. And that’s an argument I get as well – and I’ve written about that idea all over the non-blog world, so I won’t rehash my sentiments here.

In terms of who should be and who has a contextual right not to be veg, I prefer not to make pronouncements beyond the fact that I’ve never understood the reasons offered by people who have given me (almost always uninvited) their opinions as to why not.

But I also understand the contextual argument, particularly given all kinds of racial, socio-economic, and global circumstances that do not support vegetarianism or, on the more extreme end, veganism. For example, Curtin goes further to discuss the Makah nation of Washington State; the Nation asserts that it has a right to hunt gray whales, a species that was removed from the Endangered Species List in 1994 (Curtin 137). For the Makah people, whaling’s cultural significance has become a key aspect of their cultural renaissance. Despite the United States government’s allocation of 20 gray whales to the Makah over a four-year period, however, animal rights and environmental activists have protested Makah whaling and denounced the practice.

OK: so back to ASLE. Here’s me trying to discuss this contextual vegetarian ethos, and then there’s this bumper sticker displaying a precise example of such an ethos:

I can’t find any information that links this organization, the Fur Harvesters of North Bay, Ontario, to native peoples, even though the image on the sticker is of a stylized image of a native person, a trapper, disenfranchised by the whites who invaded North America (there are links on Fur Harvesters’ web page for such things as “furisgreen.com” and “Origin Assured," which, while arguing for the green and sustainable nature of fur, convince me of absolutely nothing).

The image, for whatever it’s worth, capitalizes not only on the concept of context, of native people’s cultural history of hunting and trapping but also on the (false) belief that hunting and trapping is a way of protecting women from harm. By such logic, if one hunts and kills animals, one is less likely to hunt and prey upon and kill women (little old ladies in this case). The sexual politics of fur. What a problematic phrase, in oh so many ways.

But there is much evidence to support a counter-argument, that there are connections between the killing/abuse/hunting of animals and the killing/abuse/hunting of humans – predominantly women and children. So let’s start with Ed Gein a hunter, who gutted his female victims like deer.

I get that Gein was batshit cuh-raaz-ee, so perhaps his example is not exactly representative.

But here’s an article in Newsweek on the subject of the links between animal cruelty and the murder of humans and another from PETA on the connections between animal abuse and domestic violence. Lastly, CBS News has this 2009 story of a deer hunter who shot and killed six other hunters – one of whom was female.

Canadian author Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing makes clear the connections between hunting and trapping animals for fur in Canada and the objectification of women and nonwhite minorities: “‘Do you realize,’ David says, ‘that this country is founded on the bodies of dead animals? Dead fish, dead seals, and historically dead beavers, the beaver is to this country what the black man is to the United States’” (46). And later, when the unnamed narrator doesn’t understand David’s joke that “a split beaver” (141) should emblazon Canada’s flag instead of the maple leaf, he responds, “where’ve you been living? It’s slang for cunt” (141). The narrative that kids who hunt animals grow up not to hurt women or other members of society, well, that’s specious logic at best, no matter what the context.

I’ve written too much and still managed not to say anything about Lauren Spierer, who’s still missing. And then there’s Crystal Grubb, who isn’t missing anymore. Yep, context – here as well as in matters of vegetarianism/veganism – matters.

ASLE, Animals, Contextual Moral Vegetarianism, and Me

2011-06-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

Part 1:

On Saturday, I flew back from Bloomington, Indiana, where I had presented a paper at the ASLE convention – the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. On the plane beside me sat a Bosnian guy who looked exactly like Morrissey circa 1987; he talked to me about living in the U.S., about his brother who’s still in Bosnia and likes to hunt. He’d never heard of Morrissey.

He didn't look like this version of Morrissey, but I freaking love this photo.

But I digress…

ASLE: the focus this year was “Species, Space, and the Imagination of the Global.”

I presented a paper called “The Politics of Eating Postcolonial Animals: Contextual Moral Vegetarianism and Life of Pi,” which is an excerpt from a chapter titled “Safari, Zoo, and Dog Pound: The Place of Animals in the Postcolonial Environment” in my book.

Yes, I know. Shameless. But, hey, buy my book.

OK, so before I go into further details about that presentation, there are things about the conference in general and about my inability to successfully or appropriately participate in an academic conference that need explication. And, perhaps, I can come to terms with certain aspects of my personality that make me a bad academic, at least in this aspect of my professional life. First, a bit about ASLE. This organization has been in existence since the mid-1990s, and is the preeminent scholarly organization for folks who explore environmental issues in literature and, more often than not, in life. The conference strives to make as small a footprint as possible, implementing such measures as “creating a vegetarian banquet with several interesting menu choices featuring local and/or organic foods as much as possible, including local beers and wines,” and “minimizing décor for the banquet and using artificial, reusable planters, linens, and other reusable décor items.” (This info courtesy of the conference website)

This year’s conference actually featured two panels about veganism, called “The Vegan Challenge to Posthumanism” (parts 1 and 2), and animal studies in general was a primary focus of much of the work that was presented. However, despite the seemingly obvious fact that the conference theme indicated a more global focus – and, indeed, there were panels, like mine, that examined the environment from a postcolonial perspective – the “global” was not really a major part of the agenda. The overarching and traditional discourse of ecocriticism as a theoretical perspective – and ASLE is the entity that codified that discourse into scholarly legitimacy – has been and remains entrenched in American literature written by white (often male) authors, and such was certainly the case this year in Bloomington.

The big names in the field were all there, and, by and large, the big names focus on Western writing. American literary scholar and godfather of ecocriticism Lawrence Buell was honored for his foundational work (and my friends and co-presenters Colin Christopher and Ali Brox got to eat lunch with him -- and he is, by all accounts, a seriously nice dude), but South African author Zakes Mda was a plenary speaker, as was Helen Tiffin, a prominent postcolonial scholar whose most recent work is Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. And Cheryll Glotfelty, who co-edited the foundational Ecocriticism Reader with Harold Fromm (remember him from an earlier entry? He’s the guy who, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, trashed vegans) shook my hand: her book was sitting right beside mine on the University of Georgia Press table. So the paradigm is shifting, albeit slowly. At the author’s reception, I was situated in a corner near the back of the room (Colin said, “nobody puts Baby in a corner…”), and there was much joking about my marginalization. But it’s all ok. It’s fine.

And good things happened for me, so I’ll toot my own horn for a bit: Byron Caminero-Santangelo, who moderated my panel, introduced me as “the preeminent Coetzee scholar working in the U.S.,” which made me feel really good – even if I’m not sure his assessment is 100% accurate. Still, it made my day. People bought my book and asked me to sign it; the University of Georgia Press representative told me that she sold out of it, which may or may not be impressive, as I think she only brought about five copies with her. But, hey, selling any academic books counts as a success. And I met people like Dan Wylie and the aforementioned Cheryll Glotfelty as well as a bunch of really cool folks from the University of Kansas and elsewhere. And a woman approached me after my presentation to tell me that Carol J. Adams had included my video in her famous Sexual Politics of Meat slideshow.

I really liked Bloomington; it’s such a real college town, with all kinds of neat little shops and an overwhelming number of places where a vegan can eat. I ate at Roots on the Square twice and at a Vietnamese fusion place called Basil Leaf Bistro. After my presentation, a group of us went to a place called Scotty’s Brewhouse, a sports bar with a menu the size of a short novel, in which there appeared such items as burgers with peanut butter, deep fried pickle chips, and lots and lots of items buried beneath cheese and bacon. But, of course, there was a veggie burger, so that’s what I had, as did the one other vegan in the bunch. He and I had been betting on what our options would be, noting that in the case of such places, it’s either a veggie burger or some sort of Portobello concoction. And with the check at the end of the meal, we got little boxes of Red Hots, which, sadly, aren't vegan. They contain beeswax. Who knew?

But I am bad at conferences. And all the good things that happened at this one don't really counter that fact.

I get nervous and weird, afraid to mix and mingle, intimidated by all sorts of things. And I’ve presented, at this point in my career, at zillions of the damn things. More often than not, my strategy is to attend my panel and maybe one other and then to hide out in my hotel room the rest of the time. ASLE was particularly tough on me: this is a conference that started off small but has exploded over the past several years, so in terms of sheer numbers, it’s scary for someone like me who much prefers smaller venues – like the postcolonial studies conference that I attend nearly every year in Savannah, Georgia.

Despite the fact that I don’t really feel overly intimidated by the academic rock stars that attend and present at these venues, the sheer number of those foundational figures present at this conference gave me pause. Oh, and the fact that Greg Garrard has groupies – and that I think I might be one – is also problematic.

Greg Garrard. I know, right?

The concept of “academic rock star” has always seemed both impossible and hilarious to me – we are all English professors or graduate students – but in my limited world, the way that certain of us achieve the role of public intellectual feels very powerful, and it’s both a heady and intimidating experience to encounter such beings. And we all aspire to be like them.

But perhaps what was more difficult was – and always is for me – the tension that I feel between a lived ethic or a lived activism and a theoretical presentation about how environmental or vegetarian or vegan issues are presented in works of fiction. And that tension seems to be even more pronounced at a conference like ASLE, which is, at least in theory, all about the environment but which, in reality, is all about talking about fictional representations of the environment. And, more often than not, such talk is of a very specific environment at that, one that is accessible to those of us able to participate in the fiction that what is meant by “environment” is a pristine and untouched wilderness available to us as an object for privileged consumption.

OK, perhaps I’m not being entirely fair. I’ll say more in part two, about my paper, about contextual moral vegetarianism/veganism, and about Lauren Spierer, a young Indiana University student who has been missing for over three weeks and whose image, on posters, billboards, and fliers was absolutely everywhere in Bloomington. And I’ll say more about this bumper sticker, seen in a movie theater parking lot:

Yeah, after presenting my paper, I went to see Bad Teacher. Like I said, I'm bad at conferences.

Plant and Dracula

2011-06-03T13:24:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been away from this blog long enough to have forgotten how to sign in... The end of the semester nearly killed me (it often does), and I'm just now surfacing from beneath it. It was the year of service for me: I directed the Graduate Program in English, served on the Liberal Studies task force, the International Studies advisory committee, both the college and university Program Prioritization committees, and was the Secretary of the Faculty, which means that I was also de facto on a bunch of other committees... And I directed two fabulous MA theses and have been a reader for several more.

I won't be secretary of the faculty next year, so that's a huge obligation lifted. I hope to be able to start researching and writing again, as I've pretty much taken the whole year off (wrote one book review during 2010-11). So far, this summer I've written an article on Margaret Atwood's Surfacing -- a piece for which I'm getting paid (!) -- and that's it. The vegan body project is my next priority, though, and I've just finished reading an article called "Love at First Beet: Vegetarian Critical Theory Meats Dracula," which was written in 1996 by J. E. D. Stavick. If I'm going to write about our contemporary vampires' less bloody diets, it seemed wise to start with Dracula, the bloodiest progenitor of all his touchy feely descendants.

Stavick's essay is the only scholarly thing out there that looks at Bram Stoker's Dracula from the perspective of vegetarian critical theory, and this piece is also heavy (if not particularly adept) in its use of postcolonial theory. Take the following statement, which pretty much sums up the argument: "the threat to English consumption is the threat of reverse colonization, which in this text is manifested in the vampire invasion of England by the powerful consumer 'Other,' Count Dracula, who threatens England with his violation of the meat hierarchy" (26). That hierarchy, as defined by Stavick and others, is dependent on the privileging of "bloody meat, especially beef, over all other foods" (24). It's an interesting and, for the time, original analysis.

Mmmmm.

So I promise to write more.

But in the meantime: Plant! And by Plant, I mean Jason's restaurant, which is coming along nicely. Here's the latest from the Mountain Xpress:

Planting a Different Seed
It didn't take long for the building at 165 Merrimon Ave. recently vacated by Beans and Berries to get snatched up. Longtime Laughing Seed chef Jason Sellers is joining former Rosebud Video owners Alan Berger and Leslie Armstrong to open a completely vegan restaurant there that they’ve decided to call "Plant."
Why Plant? "Because 'plant' is food to us," Sellers says. "It's the most rudimentary expression of what food is. It's sustenance and the core of our expression. Everything here will be plant-based."
To the partners, Plant expresses a philosophy of animal-product-free living and a celebration of good food.
"We're thrilled," Armstrong says. "It's so exciting to be able to take all of the things that are important to us and create this new entity. And, to be able to partner up with Jason ... how much better could you get?"
*
"We will serve flavor-sophisticated, multiculturally influenced food, using techniques that we like the best to intensify flavors based on what's available to us at the best time," [Sellers] says. "The emphasis is food from the ground up. It's exciting for us to be unique among restaurants in Asheville, as well as unique among vegetarian restaurants in Asheville."
If you're having a hard time envisioning what all of that really means, you may not be alone. That's because the chef, trained at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York, tightly intertwines his culinary creations and his life philosophies. Fortunately, Sellers is not all talk.
*
I. Can't. Wait. :)

Veganophobia

2011-03-09T19:13:00.000-08:00

A colleague of mine in the Psychology Department at WCU, Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, and Some We Eat: Why it's so Hard to Think Straight About Animals, sent me a link to the article below. This is a study of British newspaper stories about depictions of vegans, and it's one that I'd like to replicate in the US press. Here's the link to the full study.

From: "Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspapers" by Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan

The British Journal of Sociology 2011 Volume 62 Issue 1

The authors define veganism follows: “Veganism represents an opposition to violent and exploitative human-nonhuman animal relations. Veganism is defined by The Vegan Society (2008) as: . . . a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude – as far as is possible and practical – all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose [. . .] In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals" (135).

They state that “It is . . . plausible to assert that on the basis of existing evidence, veganism is understood by most vegans (though not necessarily in these terms) as an aspect of anti-speciesist practice. However, the focus on diet, and specifically on dietary ‘restriction’, in much of the extant literature, tends to perpetuate a veganism-as-deviance model that fosters academic misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the meaning of veganism for vegans (Cole 2008). In terms of broader societal dispositions against veganism, the mass media are arguably of far greater significance than academia in that they represent a key site of contestation for the meaning of veganism” (135-6).

And note that “In this paper, we approach the news media adopting a Foucauldian conceptualization of discourses, recognizing them as ‘structured ways of knowing’ which become ‘institutionalized as practices’ (Ransom 1993: 123)" (136).

Results

"Our search yielded 397 articles in which one or more of the keywords were used at least once. The articles were collated and read, and organized under three broad headings: ‘positive’, ‘neutral’ and ‘negative’ (see Table I). Of the 397 articles 22, or 5.5 per cent, were categorized as ‘positive’; 80, or 20.2 per cent, were categorized as ‘neutral’; 295, or 74.3 per cent, were categorized as ‘negative’. ‘Positive’ articles were those deemed to be favourable towards vegans or veganism, for example giving glowing reviews of vegan food or providing an explanation of one or more argument for veganism. ‘Neutral’ articles mentioned vegans or veganism in passing without evaluative comment. Nearly all neutral articles were travel or food service reviews. ‘Negative.’ ‘Positive’ articles were those deemed to be favourable towards vegans or veganism, for example giving glowing reviews of vegan food or providing an explanation of one or more argument for veganism. ‘Neutral’ articles mentioned vegans or veganism in passing without evaluative comment. Nearly all neutral articles were travel or food service reviews.

‘Negative’ articles were those which deployed one or more derogatory discourses, usually featuring one, or a combination, from a routinized set of anti-vegan stereotypes. In some cases, more than one derogatory discourse was present in the same article. These discourses, in order of frequency of occurrence, were:

• Ridiculing veganism

• Characterizing veganism as asceticism

• Describing veganism as difficult or impossible to sustain

• Describing veganism as a fad

• Characterizing vegans as oversensitive

• Characterizing vegans as hostile"

In other words, vegans come off badly in the media. No big surprise there.

The Oscars: James Franco is not a vegan...and (maybe) neither is Natalie Portman

2011-03-06T14:10:00.000-08:00

I have a love/hate relationship with the Oscars. I always watch, always bet on the winners, always get annoyed with the hosts -- and never so much as this year. First, I can't stand Ann Hathaway, but I love James Franco. Watching the two of them, however, made me mad at Franco for being such a wet rag and sorry for Hathaway who tried, in various and assorted dresses, to make up for Franco. My friend Elizabeth told me that she bets that Hathaway will plot ways to ruin Franco's career as a result (and, really, who could blame her?).

Digression #1: Despite his Oscar performance, the next day, I "liked" James Franco on Facebook and am now privy to his random cell phone films as well as to postings from hundreds (thousands?) of young women who write on his wall that they love him and want to marry him/have his babies. And I can read random comments from other people who "like" him about how if they were rich celebrities, they'd also post random cell phone videos. You can like him as well.

In an completely unrelated note, I'm actually FB friends with Danny McBride. I friended him before he had thousands of friends, and he accepted my request. How cool is that? Kenny Fucking Powers.

Mullet-tastic.

But back to how any of this relates to this blog. As with all things lately, it comes back to Natalie Portman, who may or may not be a vegan or vegetarian or carnivore, depending on the day of the week (or hour of the day) and which source one consults for information. I've written about Portman before to discuss her 2009 Huffington Post editorial about how reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals turned her "from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist." Furthermore, she has a line of vegan footwear, the proceeds from which she donates to animal related charities. In many respects, Portman is the poster child for veganism: she's smart -- she want to Haaaahvarhd, after all -- beautiful, successful, healthy, and talented.

Oh, and now she, like fellow vegan Alicia Silverstone, is prego. Her status as unwed and pregnant has garnered the attention of Mike Huckabee who denounces her thusly:

"One of the things that is troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, 'Hey look, we're having children, we're not married, but we're having these children, and they're doing just fine.' But there aren't really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie."

This on the heels of Portman's denunciation of Dior designer John Galliano's anti-Semitic comments in a bar in France. As the new face of the Miss Dior Cherie fragrance, Portman, who was born in Israel, has stated her refusal to be associated with Galliano "in any way."

Galliano. I tried to find a more flattering picture, but they all look like this.

But Portman. Is she or isn't she? Here's why one might (and many do) question: an interview with Jake Gyllenhaal in which she states that her favorite food is Carvel ice cream cake, an earlier discussion of how Toby Maguire turned Portman vegan in 2008 -- an act that didn't stick, as she went back to "strict vegetarian" status prior to coming out as vegan in the Huff Po the following year, and a January 2011 interview in Vogue that claims she's "vegetarian at home and vegan out."

What interests me more than these three instances, though, is a comment I read in People magazine on Thursday, March 4. First of all, I love People magazine; it's a guilty pleasure about which I feel less and less guilty all the time. Jason's mom has a perpetual subscription, and she saves all the issues for me so that when we go visit Jason's family, I can sit on the sofa for HOURS and read every lurid detail about every Hollywood star about whom I really shouldn't care. I'm forgiven this antisocial behavior on the grounds that everyone assumes that, unless I'm on vacation, I'm reading lots of high brow literature and theory, writing lots of thoughtful and influential criticism, and generally living the life of the mind. It's nice of them to believe so, and I'm not likely to disabuse them of this notion, no matter how many hours I may spend on Facebook or how many episodes of Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares I watch during a typical work week.

I don't have a subscription to People, but my friend Elizabeth, who came to visit me for a day at my cabin in Georgia, bought us each a copy so that we wouldn't have to share. This week's People features the train wreck that is Charlie Sheen and coverage of the Oscar gowns.

Charlie Sheen: definitely not a vegan

Natalie Portman was discussed therein, and featured in a photo with baby daddy Benjamin Millepied. The caption was about how he fed her roast chicken while she got ready for the show. I left the magazine in Georgia, so I don't have the exact quote, but I swear that it indicated that she ate chicken. When I try to find the quote online, all I get is a story about the seafood she may or may have not eaten at the after party.

What all of this tells me is something that I already know, that labels are tricky business, that classification is a kind of murder that limits possibilities and requires adherence to what may in essence be one side of a very binary equation: one is either vegetarian or carnivore; one is either vegetarian or vegan. The middle ground is difficult to navigate. I'm not obsessed with Natalie Portman's body, but this blog is about vegan bodies, about their discursive nature and significance, both in terms of the ways that they signify in the public sphere and the ways that we expect them to manifest. Portman's body is a contested site, a shapeshifting entity -- we've seen her as a child, a starving ballerina, and now a pregnant woman -- that, like all bodies, defies a static reading. A daily affirmation of veganism from her wouldn't come close to satisfying the debate that swirls around her status; she's been as political as many other celebrities with regard to her dietary ethic, but there's still reason enough to doubt, reason located in the fact that she hasn't always been vegan (and who has?) and that the media will drop enticing morsels that lead us to question what we think we know.

I discussed this issue briefly with some friends on Friday night, and other aspects of Portman's bodily and intellectual persona were evoked in terms of her credibility as a vegan: she went to Harvard. She is a brunette. She has a small chest. She is a "serious" actor. Because of these qualities, it's easier to believe her than to give credence to, say, Pamela Anderson's vegan claims. We want Portman on our side; she's someone who makes the cause look good. All the more reason, therefore, to try to prove beyond all shadow of a doubt that she's the real deal. But my sense is that celebrities waiver as often as the rest of us, that their names get attached to all sorts of causes and ideological positions simply because of their high profile status. My sense is that Portman has been a vegetarian and a vegan at various points, and that perhaps, as is more often the case than not with most people, those identifications are more fluid than fixed.

I'll get back to you about Pamela Anderson.

Vegan and Vegetarian Vampires

2011-02-27T13:26:00.000-08:00

My sis Leeann came over for dinner last night (tacos with seitan chorizo, black beans, avocado, and Dayia…yummish) and she, Jason, and I ended up flipping through channels whilst noshing on the comestibles. We landed, for reasons I may never know, on Twilight, and then Leeann and I essentially made fun of Robert Pattinson’s forced smolder (I can just imagine the director, off camera, constantly saying, “smolder more, eh, Rob?”) and Kristen Stewart’s atrociously bad sense of gloomy ennui. Jason, however, actually likes the Twilight movies, and I find this quality, in a straight, 39-year-old man, both perplexing and somewhat adorable. So he watched while we snarked.

This is Edward in a typical pose.

Watching and snarking at Twilight made me aware, yet again, of the current discourse that exists with regard to vampires and vegetarianism/veganism. Edward and his ilk consider themselves vegetarians. He states, in a moment that has received much attention in the veg press and blogosphere, that “We call ourselves vegetarians because we don’t drink human blood. But it’s kind of like a person surviving only on tofu: you’re never really satisfied.” The good and sparkly, out during the day, graduating from high school over and over again vampires of Forks drink only animal blood; they refrain from their baser desires to feed on human flesh. And because they drink animal blood – which, like tofu, never truly satisfies – they consider themselves vegetarians. Aside from this total diss of tofu, which, as the author of Dawnofanewera maintains in her criticism of Edward’s logic, “is the liquid metal of all foods – it can shape shift into just about any meal, as soy can take on many forms, tastes, and textures,” equating eating animals with vegetarianism is just plain wrong.

I must digress for a moment to say that I tried to read Stephanie Meyer’s books; I made it through the first two. And then I couldn’t take it anymore. The things that upset me the most about this series are, I think, the things that upset most women who believe that their existence constitutes more than window dressing. I tend to concur with various critics who claim that the series promotes a not so implicit valorization of abuse (he leaves, he comes back, he lies, he causes her much emotional and physical pain), that it works to undermine female agency and independence (Bella is always rescued by Edward, Bella is always put in harm’s way by him as well, and she continually enables this scenario to remain manifest), and that it reinforces dangerous and, I’d like to believe outdated, Victorian era notions of male and female sexuality: he’s a beast who must learn to control his baser lusts, and she, simply by virtue of the fact that she’s female, is responsible for inciting those lusts. And despite the fact that Bella wants sex, he just can’t defile her (t’would be so wrong), unless they get married.

Twilight makes me miss Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer all the more. Buffy is a badass, ass-kicking vampire slayer who fucked her way through a slew of guys, living and undead alike. And while Whedon’s Angel might remind me a bit of Edward (or perhaps I should say that Meyer has created in Edward a wussier version of Angel – after Angel and Buffy have sex, Angel goes all kinds of psycho), Buffy and Angel finally call it quits, realizing that not being able to copulate is simply not any fun. Better she should hook up with Spike, which is, incidentally, what I would have done as soon as he entered the picture. Angel who?

Brown chicken, brown cow, brown chicken, brown cow

To Edward’s question of Bella at the end of Twilight, “Is it not enough, just to have a long and happy life with me?” rather than get “turned” (either into a vampire or, er, “on”), Buffy would say a definitive no. And I love that about her. But back to the vegetarian issues that the film raises – and that are raised in our current vampire lore, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Twilight franchise, and Alan Ball’s HBO series True Blood.

Like Twilight, True Blood also plays with the vegetarian vampire theme, but it does so without ever explicitly stating that theme. Bill Compton, another of the many non-human eating vamps that lately populate the fictional landscape, is the only real vegan vampire of the Edward, Angel, and Bill troika; he drinks synthetic “True Blood,” a beverage that consists of neither human nor animal blood. There’s a slew of media out there about the vegan and vegetarian implications of the show, so I won’t bother to post all of that discussion here.

I will, however, post this awesome cartoon of Bill Compton.

In terms of this aforementioned troika, all the vampires in question are male, and their decision not to consume human blood is directly linked to their virility, their (in)ability to engage in sexual relationships with women – who very clearly function as consumable objects. As one of Bella’s friends tells her soon after she starts dating Edward, “he looks at you like you’re something to eat.” Edward, who doesn’t drink human blood, can’t lose control sexually with Bella. And he says so every chance he gets. Eating animals = not having sex, both here and in Buffy and Angel. When the “vegetarian” Angel has sex with anyone, bad things happen.

Seriously.

Even Bill, the most sexually functional of the three (he and Sookie boff regularly and often on the show), nearly kills Sookie after losing too much blood. She gives him her blood, and it’s overwhelming; he can’t stop himself and drinks too much.

Buffy never actively played with the linkages between non-human blood drinkers and vegetarians. I always wanted the show to do more with that, but except for a couple of nods in that direction, specifically one episode in which humans are factory farmed and another in which Buffy works at a burger joint (the Doublemeat Palace) and speculates that the “secret ingredient” may be human meat only to discover that it’s cellulous, the show just didn’t go there. But that’s certainly preferable, I think, to Twilight’s aligning of vegetarianism with the very antithesis of vegetarianism – eating animals. Despite the fact that PETA2 gave the movie a Libby award for being the most animal friendly film of 2008 (largely because, despite the fact that Stephanie Meyer’s Bella isn’t vegetarian, Kristen Stewart, who is a real life vegetarian, plays Bella as veg in the film), the movie still places the killing and consumption of animals at the fore of its narrative. And all of these recent reinventions of vampire lore still maintain the same sexual politics of blood that underscore older versions of the story, only now those politics include a tacit discourse of non-human blood as well.

As my sister astutely noted, as we snarked at Edward, “just because you’re not a cannibal doesn’t mean that you’re a vegetarian.” I’m so making a tee shirt that features Edward Cullen’s face and that statement. Wait for it.

Valentines and Vegans

2011-02-20T19:04:00.000-08:00

The last month has been a blur, and I need things to slow down. First, the state of North Carolina’s budget situation vacillates between terrifying and out-and-out catatonia producing, so my mind and my energy has been devoted to fighting that (most likely meaningless) fight. I desperately want to turn my energy back to my teaching and my scholarship, the things about my job that I like, but I keep getting drawn into the discourse of trying to justify my existence. Have you seen this video?

It has nothing to do with veganism, but it is so true. And, at present, that female professor is the embodiment of me.* But next week is spring break, and if I can just make it until then, I might survive.

* This is not to say that I haven’t also been the little blonde girl with the pigtails.

So let me pull myself out of the mire of the possible dismantling of the public education system as I know it and return to the world of the vegan blog. Valentine’s Day was pretty swell. Jason didn’t get me anything as usual, but what’s not usual is that I went into major preemptive bitch mode about the fact that I knew he wasn’t going to get me anything. I have a friend who calls such behavior “pre-suffering,” and I think that’s about right. I was, after 13 years of being in a relationship with this boy, suddenly made jealous about the fact that a colleague was discussing the Pajama Gram that he was sending his sweetie. First of all, I didn’t want a Pajama Gram, not even this one, which would make me look like a giant piece of bubble gum.

But I suddenly wanted something. What I got was a Valentine’s Day without Jason, as he was at work all freaking day and night, fixing a Valentine’s Day vegan dinner, which I did get to eat for free. It consisted of the following: first, sweet potato soup with scallion cream cheese and a candied basil leaf; second, chili rubbed seitan and grilled broccolini with smoked Jerusalem artichokes over a savory apple sauce; and for dessert, cocoa risotto beneath coconut tempura banana with a side of Kahlua ice cream. And it was excellent. So Jason is forgiven. He does this every year, and every year the meal is better than the previous one.

Today’s news contains the following top five items when one does a news search for “vegan”: an article called “What Would Vegan Society Founder Donald Watson Think” about a debate in the UK as to whether animal rights activists should tone down their focus on veganism and speciesism as these stances tend to alienate non-vegans. The author, Gary L. Francione, write about an ad in a Vegan Society publication for a bed and breakfast that serves the likes of poached eggs and Danish with cheese. He states that Watson, who died in 2005, “coined the word ‘vegan’ and founded the Vegan Society in 1944 precisely because he wanted to emphasize that not eating meat was not enough. He wanted to erase the arbitrary line that had meat on one side and everything else on the other.” He quotes Watson:

The excuse that it is not necessary to kill in order to obtain dairy produce is untenable for those with a knowledge of livestock farming methods and of the competition which even humanitarian farmers must face if they are to remain in business.

For years many of us accepted, as lacto-vegetarians, that the flesh-food industry and the dairy produce industry were related, and that in some ways they subsidized one another. We accepted, therefore, that the case on ethical grounds for the disuse of these foods was exceptionally strong, and we hoped that sooner or later a crisis in our conscience would set us free.

That freedom has now come to us. Having followed a diet free from all animal food for periods varying from a few weeks in some cases, to many years in others, we believe our ideas and experiences are sufficiently matured to be recorded. The unquestionable cruelty associated with the production of dairy produce has made it clear that lacto-vegetarianism is but a half-way house between flesh-eating and a truly humane, civilized diet, and we think, therefore, that during our life on earth we should try to evolve sufficiently to make the ‘full journey’.

A second story, a self-proclaimed “rant” by “veggie girl,” is an “Open Letter to Militant Vegans,” in which she asks militant vegans to “shut the fuck up already.” Veggie Girl is, as she states, “on your side,” but she ultimately states that

I'm tired of being lumped in with your ilk. My choices are just that -- MINE -- and I respect the rights of others to make their own choices, whether they're vegan, vegetarian, a conscious meat-eater or stop by the drive-through every night. Get off your high horse, shelve the self-righteousness and lead by example. THAT is how you change eating habits -- and lives. Otherwise, you're just an animal-loving version of Fred Phelps. And nobody likes that guy except his fellow church members. And maybe not even them.

So both of these pieces bring into relief the perceived vegan persona, legitimate or not, as alienating and off-putting, as needing to be tempered, as needing to be modified to prevent making the general public from feeling put upon or threatened. While Veggie Girl does make the claim, however unsubstantiated, between militant and non-militant vegans, the narrative that Veggie Girl and Francione evoke is one that, while they argue from opposing positions, is illustrative of the strange stance that vegans seem forced to occupy, as ethically guided by a belief that animal suffering is preventable and unacceptable yet somehow responsible for the comfort levels of those who disagree.

Other stories: Jessica Simpson is maintaining a vegan diet to lose weight prior to getting married

And Ryan Couture, some kind of fighter guy, won a fight. He’s a Los Vegan, which is nothing like being a vegan, but that’s why this story came up. File that one under who fucking cares…

Veganorxia: A Term that I Thought I Coined, but Didn’t (damn it)

2011-01-31T18:38:00.000-08:00

Well, first off, I think it goes without saying at this point that the extent of my scholarship for this semester will consist of this blog. I’ve had two conference papers accepted, one at ASLE, an extremely selective venue, and the other at NEMLA. And I haven’t written either paper. I did, however, submit a review of someone else’s book (Monica Popescu’s impressive South African Literature After the Cold War) to Safundi, and I’ve been asked for a book cover blurb for a collection of essays on J. M. Coetzee, so I guess that’s something. But all I seem to be doing is reading other people’s work, which is great, and other people’s program prioritization reports, which isn’t.

But let’s not talk about me and my university service woes. Let’s talk about veganorexia.

OK, so a couple of entries ago, I was sort of kidding when I said that my next entry would be on veganorexia and Natalie Portman’s portrayal of an uber-eating disordered ballerina in Black Swan (the first meal that she eats is half a grapefruit and boiled egg. Of the grapefruit, she claims, “it’s so pink and pretty”).

Nothing vaginal there.

I was thinking of Portman, who is vegan as a result, she claims, of having read Jonathan Safron Foer’s Eating Animals. As she notes, “what Foer most bravely details is how eating animal pollutes not only our backyards, but also our beliefs. He reminds us that our food is symbolic of what we believe in, and that eating is how we demonstrate to ourselves and to others our beliefs.”

There has been much in the media about the rigors of both actual ballet training and what Portman put her body through in order to achieve the elongated and sinewy female form that we observe, via an extremely male-oriented gaze, in Aronofsky’s film.* Victoria Looseleaf has written an essay on the ways that Black Swan fetishizes not only the anorexic body but also enforces various other forms of body fascism. So there’s ample information out there for me to make a kind of joke of Portman’s vegan constructed balletic anorexia.

This photo says it all, don't you think?

Back to veganorexia, a term that I thought I’d coined. But a search for the term pulls up all kinds of things, including an entry in the Urban Dictionary: a veganorexic is “A person with Anorexia who denies or hides it by saying he/she is Vegan.” And there is a perverse and performative vegan presence on various pro-ana web pages (note: possibly disturbing material), a call to women who want to get super skinny to become vegetarian or vegan. Even Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin’s Skinny Bitch, a book that I grudgingly admire, is, as Julie Klausner claims, “a PETA pamphlet in chick-lit clothing and an innovative fusion of animal rights activism with punitive dieting tactics that prey on women's insecurities about their bodies.”

The links between vegetarianism and veganism and anorexia are real in ways that are all too familiar to me, primarily because becoming vegan was, for me, part of a long process of overcoming a history of anorexia and bulimia, eating disordered behaviors that are defined by the willing denial of food. Far more often, I fear, veganism or vegetarianism and used as the excuse for this denial; in my case, veganism was the excuse that I needed to get over it, to eat, to empower myself to react to cultural dietary proscriptions over which I had historically had no control. And, again for me, the gender implications of becoming vegan were profound and empowering. I wish that could be the case for everyone.

But more on that later.

* I really hated Black Swan. Sorry. But this is pretty funny:

The Vegan Brain

2011-01-24T18:13:00.000-08:00

So things just got really busy: the North Carolina budget is a disaster; the University of North Carolina system is seriously affected by this reality; the university where I work is looking at ways to cut 15% (somewhere around $15 million) from its operating costs for the 2011-2012 year. As a result, all programs at my university must generate “program prioritization reports” to justify keeping the program (as opposed to seeing it axed). I had to write two of these things for two programs that I direct, so I’ve been busy; a lot goes into fighting for one’s job and the jobs of one’s colleagues.

And now we’ll all just wait for the proverbial ax to fall where it may.

But in the midst of all this – the panic, depression, and overwhelming certainty that no matter how much time and effort I put into these reports, no matter how much data I provide to demonstrate the mission critical nature of my programs, the quality of the faculty who teach in them, or their cost effectiveness, the administration will do what the administration has, most likely, already decided to do – a bit of vegan goodness came my way. So I’ll share.

A friend sent me an article about the differences between brain activity between omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans in response to images of human and nonhuman suffering. Here’s the abstract:

Empathy and affective appraisals for conspecifics are among the hallmarks of social interaction. Using functional MRI, we hypothesized that vegetarians and vegans, who made their feeding choice for ethical reasons, might show brain responses to conditions of suffering involving humans or animals different from omnivores. We recruited 20 omnivore subjects, 19 vegetarians, and 21 vegans. The groups were matched for sex and age. Brain activation was investigated using fMRI and an event-related design during observation of negative affective pictures of human beings and animals (showing mutilations, murdered people, human/animal threat, tortures, wounds, etc.). Participants saw negative-valence scenes related to humans and animals, alternating with natural landscapes. During human negative valence scenes, compared with omnivores, vegetarians and vegans had an increased recruitment of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). More critically, during animal negative valence scenes, they had decreased amygdala activation and increased activation of the lingual gyri, the left cuneus, the posterior cingulate cortex and several areas mainly located in the frontal lobes, including the ACC, the IFG and the middle frontal gyrus. Nonetheless, also substantial differences between vegetarians and vegans have been found responding to negative scenes. Vegetarians showed a selective recruitment of the right inferior parietal lobule during human negative scenes, and a prevailing activation of the ACC during animal negative scenes. Conversely, during animal negative scenes an increased activation of the inferior prefrontal cortex was observed in vegans. These results suggest that empathy toward non conspecifics has different neural representation among individuals with different feeding habits, perhaps reflecting different motivational factors and beliefs.

Mostly I read this and think: “do what, now?” I don’t know what a “conspecific” is, nor do I fully comprehend the nature of “increased activation of the lingual gyri.” But what I’m taking away from this – and what I didn’t really need a convoluted scientific study to tell me – is that people who make dietary choices based on ethics that are opposed to human and nonhuman suffering process images of suffering in ways that are different from people whose diets don’t reflect these considerations. The fact that brain functions differ between these groups seems like a big old “duh” to me.

(a wee can of duh)

But – and mind you, I’ve only read the abstract and glanced at the charts (I was like, pictures!) – this kind of research tends to show me nothing. What do we make of the differences in the way various vegan, vegetarian, and omnivorous brains process suffering? Does the brain response follow from the ethics behind the dietary choice, or do the ethics arise from a brain that is biologically hard wired differently from the majority? Ultimately, I’m not sure that finding a definitive answer to these questions really matters.

But I’ll try to make it through the full piece and let you know if I learn anything useful, like, for example, how to make everybody's brain work like a vegan brain. . . but I'm doubting that that information is there.

Alicia Silverstone is pregnant.

2011-01-16T14:42:00.000-08:00

So read a news headline in the Asheville Citizen-Times yesterday, which is weird, because, well, why the Asheville paper? I sort of ignored the story, because I really don’t care about celebrities (or really anyone else, for that matter) having babies, nor do I really care all that much about Alicia Silverstone, except that she’s vegan. Here’s her blog on the subject.

I’ve thought about this a bit: the fact that if a celebrity is vegan, I will feel a sense of connectedness to that celebrity, but that connection to a vegan community, like all other imagined communities is, well, imaginary. I guess that veganism is a pretty important thing to have in common. It implies a kind of shared ethic, a shared set of ideological underpinnings – at least in theory. But then I realize that part of my project with this project (blog and book) is to demonstrate that the very notion of a homogenous vegan identity is a fiction.

Still. What’s the first thing that I do when I start to like an actor or musician? Check to see whether or not that person is vegan. It’s easy to do this, but there is sometimes conflicting information (is, for example, Mike Tyson really vegan?). Websites like Happy Cow and Famous Vegans have lists of every vegan celeb imaginable.

When I was in New York week before last, I passed Parker Posey in the dog park at Washington Square Park.

(seriously, that's her and the dog. Photo taken by Jason)

OK, she has a dog that she takes to the dog park, so I already love her. Love her anyway (have you seen House of Yes?). When we got back to the hotel, I searched to see if Parker’s a vegan. She’s not, at least her name doesn’t appear in any list I can find.

And this being a vegan or not being a vegan is certainly not the deciding factor in terms of whether or not I like a celebrity or his or her art, but it’s still something that matters enough for me to search for it, to feel a common bond if I find it -- which I realize is perhaps ridiculous.

But back to Alicia Silverstone and her pregnancy: Alicia’s body has been an object of intense scrutiny since she starred in Clueless back in 1995. Her role in that film won her much critical acclaim, and the media positioned her as the next big thing. And then she starred as Batfgirl in Batman and Robin (1997), which flopped. And then suddenly there was all this press about how she had gotten fat. She gave up meat and all other things animal over a decade ago; the weight dropped, and she wrote a cookbook called The Kind Diet.

Alicia Silverstone’s body and her bodily decisions have always been in the media, have either been praised of maligned, from the time she was the hot young thing in all those early 90s Aerosmith videos, to her Catholic schoolgirl turn in Clueless, to the skin-tight rubber suit wearing Batgirl. Her veganism is closely tied to her animal activism, something that she has always been outspoken about, but her veganism is also the key to the weight loss that allowed her to be deemed sexy once again. In fact, she was filmed by David Meyer in a naked testimonial for PETA in which her voiceover extols the virtues of being veggie while she slips naked from a pool and basically licks the camera.

In her case, her veganism has allowed for her bodily ascension, or perhaps re-entry, into the cult of Hollywood beauty. And in allowing herself to be videotaped naked for PETA, she demonstrates a failure to connect the objectification of animals via our consumption of them, to the objectification of women via our scrutiny and fixation on their bodies. In this video, Silverstone is consumable object, panning to the very internalized male gaze that perpetuates her need to drop the pounds, and the very real and pervasive masculinist ideology that very often undermines her dietary and ethical choices.

It will be interesting to see how the media and Silvestone herself treat her pregnancy; it will be telling to see how much she has to justify in terms of her diet as she carries her child to term.

Next time, veganorexia: Natalie Portman and Black Swan. Oh, and Jason loooooves Alicia Silverstone. When I told him that she was pregnant, he sighed and said, “sadly, it isn’t mine.”

These guys

2011-01-13T17:43:00.000-08:00

I work in the rural backwater of Western North Carolina. And this is generally a good thing, except for days when I find two dogs on the side of Highway 74 on my way to work on my FIRST DAY OF CLASS FOR THE SEMESTER (in single digit weather, in the snow, dogs without tags, without microchips, without any discernible way for me to tell from whence they came, most likely because they were dumped -- maybe dumped in the hope that someone like me would pick them up and take them in).

Freaking ruined my first day back, by the way. I'm just glad that I have good friends who let me stow said dogs in their basement while I taught (and I'm so glad that I have tenure. Otherwise, my performance in my class, compromised by the fact that my mind was on the displaced dogs, might have profound implications for my career). Now the dogs are in my home office, 40 miles or so from where I found them (I work 50 miles from my house, and my journey takes me through the mountain wilds of North Carolina. It's a beautiful drive, except on days like today, when the drive is tainted...and this isn't the first time I've picked up animals along this route).

I'm one of those people who finds dogs and cats, which is to say that I am one of the ones who stops when I see them. I'm one of the ones who takes them in, one of the ones who keeps them and finds homes for them. I'm not chosen; I'm not someone special, and I'm certainly not someone who believes that it's my destiny to find stray and abandoned animals. But I am someone who notices them. And while many people might see them as they wind along the highway, most people don't stop to take them in. So in this sense, I'm special. Or whatever. But I shouldn't be.

Dogs constitute one component of our minion biota, a species that we, homo sapiens, continue to perpetuate, even as we decimate numerous other species by virtue of our environmentally destructive, overly consumptive excesses. Dogs are in the company of our other minion biota, cats, for example, as well the species that we consume: pigs, chickens, and cows. These species survive because we allow them to survive, because we need them in some way -- either as consumable objects or companions. But in both contexts, they exist at our whim; dogs and cats are still "other," creatures that we can abandon if we need or even want, if they get sick, if housing them is inconvenient. Cows, chickens, and pigs are food, manufactured for consumption, not to live a life during which they might experience happiness, comfort, or even companionship.

I have these abandoned dogs, now, and I'll find a place for them, as I've done for many others. And my feelings for them are not sentimental. These dogs (chickens, pigs, cows) should have the same right to a life without suffering that I have. So I'll do whatever I can to ensure that they get it.

No Vegetarian/Vegan series on Food Network of Cooking Channel

2011-01-12T18:31:00.000-08:00

On January 2, I accidentally caught the tail end of a show on the Cooking Channel called “Veg Edge,” which was being hosted by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. The show was unlike anything that I’d ever seen on either the Cooking Channel or Food Network, as it was focused on vegan chefs and restaurants. As far as I can tell – and after numerous emails to both networks suggesting that they consider it – there had never been a weekly vegetarian, much less vegan, cooking show on either network, so it was a pleasant surprise to see this one; not only was it focused on vegan food, restaurants, and lifestyles, but also because the people and places featured were the tough face of veganism, the hardcore, heavy metal, badass variety of vegan. The show offered a kind of response to the view of vegans as tree hugging, weak, and feminized. Of course, these two views constitute a kind of binary that seems present in the popular cultural discourse surrounding veganism – vegans as members of an anarchistic, post-punk subculture that is subversive, or vegans as ascetics, dietary minimalists, pale and ineffectual in their misplaced zeal.

Interestingly, this binary is also very gendered: the “Veg Edge” show featured both men and women, but the show did much in terms of generating a view of veganism that is highly masculinized, a version of veganism that presents a counter-discourse to the view of human herbivores as feminine or emasculated, particularly in U.S. culture where meat is presented and sold as masculine.

But anyway. I bring this up because of Jason.

I’ll go ahead and say that I’m completely biased about Jason, because I’m sort of married to him (and here's an interview with him), but the “Veg Edge” special made me angry (for about the 700^th time), that Jason doesn’t have his own show on the Food Network or Food Channel. So I wrote to Isa Chandra Moskowitz, thanking her for hosting the “Veg Edge” show and telling her about Jason, “the salad-eating vegan who can put you through a wall,” as a possible guest for the series. And she wrote me back…to let me know that the show was a one time special.

I feel pretty certain that at some point, there will be a mainstream vegetarian show on one or the other of these networks, but it hasn’t happened yet. The closest that they’ve come is the “Veg Edge” special and an episode of Food Network’s “Top Chef Masters” during which five famous carnivorous chefs made a vegan, gluten free, soy-free lunch for Zooey Deschanel – an event that sent good ole boy Art Smith into such a frenzy that he served a desert of Rice Dream and strawberry jam…which got him axed from the show. The Top Chef episode revealed just how difficult it is to make delicious food, if you don’t know how to do anything other than meat, butter, and cheese. It showed that vegan cooking requires a level of creativity – or perhaps just a different kind of creativity – that is not accessible to more classically trained chefs.

Here’s an episode of Yvonne Smith’s* “The Traveling Vegetarian” that features The Laughing Seed and Jason.

Now get off your butt and write to the Food Network and demand a vegan cooking show!

* Yvonne Smith has 3876 friends at present, which I find amazing. At last count, I have 326, which seems impressive, until you are friended by someone with 3876 friends.

More on vegan comics

2011-01-11T11:22:00.000-08:00

Things I learned from creating Stupid Vegan Comic #1:

1. “Paintbrush,” the Mac version of Microsoft Paint, is crappy. And this will be the only time that you ever hear me complain about my Mac. In fact, I hope I haven't hurt Mac's feelings by speaking disparagingly about its software.

2. And slightly related to 1 above, using a paint program on a laptop that doesn’t have an external mouse is impossible. Hence the terrible drawings. And I can actually draw. Sort of.

3. From now on, my Stupid Vegan Comics will be hand drawn, as using the Paintbrush program to create my first comic took me somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hours, and I just don’t have that kind of time. And no comments about how it took me that long because I’m technologically illiterate; I already know that.

But seriously, I got the idea to do my wee comic after reading Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh’s blog, in which she incorporates lots of drawings made in Paint. Allie’s blog and comics aren’t about veganism, but she’s hilarious, and reading her work has given me a sense of appreciation for the art of creating, well, art . . . and it's given me a profound sense of respect for anyone who can create art using the Paint program.

There are, of course, tons vegan comics out there, all of them much better than mine; a google search for “vegan comics” pulls up a veritable smorgasbord of comic art pertaining to veganism, from pieces that promote veganism, to those that poke fun at it, to those that are outright hostile. There are famous comic artists who are vegan, like Scott Adams (Dilbert) and Cathy Guisewaite (Cathy), whose work may or may not feature vegan themes, and then there are other folks, like MC Miller and Jen Hernandez, whose work is centered around veganism.

Here are a few random comics that tickled my fancy:

Frederic Patenaude has a series of Raw Food Comics.

Wiley takes on Hansel and Gretel.

And, perhaps most notably, Dan Piraro, whose page I’ve linked to on the right, uses his comic art to promote both animal rights and veganism.

Then there’s the more bitingly satirical and/or caustically critical. Marvel offers this rendition of a vegan life form:

Natalie Dee calls out vegan hypocrisy:

And then there's the strictly silly (and this one is my favorite):

* My brief foray into the world of vegan comics reveals that there is a whole weirdo vegan zombie subculture, complete with all manner of products. And maybe "subculture" is the wrong term to define this phenomenon, but there is something very compelling about the parody of rendering a cannibal as vegan; we already see this, to some degree or other -- although without the self-aware irony -- with those sparkly Cullen vampires who are vegetarian (that is, they eat animals, which is the very antithesis of vegetarianism). And I'm really sorry to have brought up Twilight, but I can tell you that it won't be the last time I do it. I promise, however, to be scathingly critical of that whole franchise whenever I address it.

And on an unrelated note, I love daiya.

Stupid vegan comics #1

2011-01-10T18:21:00.000-08:00

Quite possibly the worst drawn comic ever. But it's also my first.

Scott Pilgrim and the Vegan Police

2011-01-10T07:01:00.000-08:00

A snowy morning dose of vegan humor. This representation is demonstrative of several things in terms of the ways that vegan identity is perceived as not only holier-than-thou but also as mere posturing devoid of a committed ideological stance. Veganism as cool, as outward indicator of a kind of moral superiority dependent upon one's ability to eschew the dietary choices of mere mortals. And veganism as an impossibility, an affront to one's more human inclination to partake of animal-based foods.

But while the vegan is shown to be a fraud, the non-vegans are also satirized, depicted as policing the dietary regimen that allows for super powers. They record each transgression, determined to strip the supposed vegan of his powers (and to totally fuck up his hair). My favorite part is that the police aren't holding any weapons; they strip Todd of his powers by pointing their fingers at him.

Oh, and on a totally unrelated note, Isaiah Mustafa, "the man your man could smell like," is vegan.

Harold Fromm

2011-01-09T10:54:00.000-08:00

Since I mentioned his piece in my previous post, here it is, in its entirety: Harold Fromm's Vegans and the Quest for Purity

And here's my response, some of which was published in the Chronicle:

In response to Harold Fromm’s “Vegans and the Quest for Purity” (4 July 2010):

Ah, the othering, via sweeping generalizations, of some presumably homogenous entity known as vegans – and from someone who should know better. I have to wonder first at The Chronicle’s reasoning for publishing this piece: what is the connection between this fallacious anti-vegan rant and higher education? And second, I am concerned that such a completely unsupported argument, devoid of any concrete examples, dependent upon the stereotyping of various groups (vegans, vegetarians, and meat eaters) passes muster with the editors.

As I read through this piece, I could not help finding myself in composition instructor mode, knowing that any good first-year writing teacher would return this piece for revision, given its hasty generalizations (“Unlike vegans, who are enlisted in an open-ended but futile metaphysic of virtue and self-blamelessness that pretends to escape from the conditions of life itself, vegetarians have more limited goals and have marked out a manageable territory with fewer cosmic pretensions,” “Behind their beliefs is the hopeless longing for innocence”), its faulty analogies and slippery slope hyperbole (“But even larger creatures like cockroaches and rats, do they enter into the purview of animal-rights activists? And the HIV virus, the swine flu, tuberculosis? Do I want to eschew antibiotics and vaccines that help my life out of respect for theirs?”), and its argument from tradition: “We're compromised from the start. Evolution favored meat-eating primates, enlarging their brains and enabling them to live in more and more complex and survivalist societies that today extend our life spans, provide genteel habitats, and produce philosophers who have the wherewithal to object to the very components of their own existence.”

Who are these vegans of which Fromm speaks, these ethereal, “grandstanding,” self-righteous creatures, these judgmental and friendless beings, alienated from society (“Veganism, while perhaps harmless enough, especially if you don't care about being part of society or alienating potential friends who may find you more trouble than you're worth…”)? I’m afraid that I don’t know these folks. And I’m doubting that Fromm knows them either. Since concrete example is always preferable to nameless, faceless stereotype (like vegans, blacks, gays, women…), I’d like to introduce you to a real life vegan: me.

Since The Chronicle sees fit to entertain the subject of veganism via Fromm, it seems fair that there be a counter narrative out there as well, one straight from the mouth of a creature whose existence must be the product of selective biological evolution and the evolution of intellectual choice: a female, vegan animal. The reasons that Fromm lists for why vegans are vegan are somewhat alien to me; indeed, most of them are not my reasons. I was vegetarian first – because I didn’t want to participate in an industry responsible for what I view as so much needless suffering. I visited a sausage plant on a school field trip when I was 13. And that was that.

Veganism came later, when I was working on my dissertation on J. M. Coetzee, an author whose work Fromm and I both admire. But my decision wasn’t based on reading Coetzee, or even on a much more influential text that I read at the same time, Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat, a text that made manifest for me the connections between the subjection of animals and women. I chose to be vegan because I could make that choice, because it wasn’t going to hurt me to do so, and because, in a much larger sense, doing so forced me to come into direct and engaged contact not only with what I eat and wear, but with the capitalist economies responsible for such commodities; for me, being a vegan requires my vigilance, my attention, my focus in ways that make it impossible for me to consume anything – from food to politics to fashion –without at first considering its source. As the result of that decision, I am healthy and strong, a distance runner, scholar, teacher, and fully realized member of society. I am a person who feels a sense of internal consistency, at least in one aspect of my life.

I know that I am lucky – privileged – to be able to make the choices that I make. I never take the ability to make those choices for granted. I am fortunate to be able to take a considered approach to my evolutionary history and my biology, and to decide that simply because something has been the case in the past, it does not necessarily need to remain the case. I get to choose not to eat certain things, not to wear certain things, heck, even not to have children – a choice that clearly flies in the face of my biological “purpose” – and for the ability to make these choices, I am supremely thankful. I have never found myself hopelessly “longing for innocence” as the result of my life, but, then again, I think that the longing for innocence of which Fromm speaks is probably the same longing that accompanies any quest for meaning or truth, any attempt to make sense of one’s place in a world that is filled with suffering.

Choice is an interesting concept, if we approach it from the evolutionary standpoint that Fromm seems to embrace; if we are biologically and historically predetermined (because our evolutionary history would suggest that we are) to do such and such, how do we account for the evolution of an intellect that allows us not to? If, as Fromm states, “to be alive is to be a murderer. Or to be murdered,” then isn’t the decision not to go outside and kill your neighbor for whatever reason just as suspect as the decision not to eat a cow or wear leather (or, for that matter, kill a spider)? We all make choices with regard to what we will and won’t allow, what we privilege and what we exclude from consideration. We are all, vegan and non-vegan, involved in both destructive and creative processes.

There are many reasons for why I made the decision to become vegan; they are my reasons, and I have never tried to impose them on anyone else (although the very act of my being vegan is enough to threaten some people, like Fromm, for instance – but that’s not my problem). I am happy; I have friends – from raw foodists, to vegetarians, to full out carnivores – who eat all kinds of different things. I live in a world where there is room for differing systems of belief, different reasons why people make the choices that they make. And I’m a vegan, Harold. Now you can say that you’ve met one.

What's up with this

2011-01-09T10:46:00.000-08:00

Well, I have to start somewhere, so how about here: I'm writing this blog as a way to post and gather data for a book I'm writing called The Vegan Body Project: The Cultural Construction and Performance of Vegan Identity.

My project is informed by an examination of cultural mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights and veganism, with specific attention to the construction of the physical vegan body as a contested cite manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertizing, and news media. Karen and Michael Iacobbo, in their study Vegetarians and Vegans in America Today, note that “lingering stereotypes and dubious ‘facts’ plague the depiction of the lives and habits of . . . vegans” (58), and in a July 4, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Vegans and the Quest for Purity,” none other than Harold Fromm, the co-editor of The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (U of Georgia P, 1996), had this to say about vegans:

The grandstanding of vegans for carefully selected life forms, to serve their own sensitivities—through their meat- and dairy-free diets, their avoidance of leather and other animal products—doesn’t produce much besides a sense of their own virtue. As they make their footprint smaller and smaller, will they soon be walking on their toes like ballet dancers? And if so, what is the step after that? Pure spirit (a euphemism for bodily death)? If our existence is the problem—which it is—then only nonexistence can cure it. The supreme biocentric act is not to discover yet one more animal product to abstain from. The supreme biocentric act is dying, returning the finite matter and energy you have appropriated for yourself and giving them back to the creatures you stole them from. And what makes them so pure? Are they shedding tears as they tear you and each other apart? The real “crime” is existence, not being or using animals.

Fromm’s comments here and elsewhere throughout his essay point to varying conceptions of vegan identity as contradictory, elitist, ill-informed, and anti-social, but underlying these assertions is the very prevalent mainstream belief – even held by environmental advocates and ecocritics – that there should be a limit to an animal rights agenda that may approach, but not fully encompass, a vegan ideology. Furthermore, the acceptance of Fromm’s essay by The Chronicle points to the ire that conceptions of veganism inspire – even in academic circles – but, perhaps more importantly, such acceptance points to the ways that veganism, as a sub-cultural movement, has entered the mainstream discursive fray and the ways that vegan identity has become a loaded idiom in mainstream culture.

My study examines not only the reasons for the often negative and inflamatory discourse surrounding vegan identity, but it also explores the sexualization and often-contradictory gender-specific rhetorical constructions of both vegan and animal bodies. For example, the feminist argument for veganism offered by such writers as Carol J. Adam’s (whose foundational text, The Sexual Politics of Meat, provides a sustained analysis of the connections between meat eating and patriarchy), has very different gender-specific valiances from model and plastic surgery devotee Pamela Anderson’s identification as vegan, as do multiple anti-vegetarian/vegan ad campaigns aimed at men, which associate meat eating with masculinity. The Hillshire Farms’ ads in which men cheer, “Go meat!”, for example, offer a starting point to examine mixed martial arts cage fighting champion Mac Danzig’s (or, for that matter, Mike Tyson’s) ultra masculine vegan (or “hegan”) identity, at once derided as effeminate or unbelievable – many cage fighting discussion boards host numerous postings from people who doubt Danzig could acquire his physique without meat – and alternately embraced by animal rights entities like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

And there's more, of course. But that's enough for now. I'm looking for any and everything out there that depicts or discusses vegans, that portrays them, that stereotypes and/or vilifies, that praises and/or glorifies. Send me something, ok?