This Book Made Me Vegan

Reading has always operated as an antidote to my general ignorance. I’ve never been one to watch documentaries or listen to podcasts, narrative has always been my go-to form of media consumption. Having read more in the past year than I ever had in my life, I found myself feeling more inadequate in regards to general intelligence than ever before. The more I read, the more distant I felt from the truths of the world. I eased my way into nonfiction via memoirs. Memoirs and autobiography felt like a narrative way of developing my general knowledge and learning about history. It’s no secret that my favorite memoir is The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting by Evanna Lynch. In her memoir, Evanna describes her relationship with disordered eating in grueling detail and eventually explains that her relationship with eating reached a climax in recovery through veganism.

My relationship with eating has been a source of anxiety since childhood. Food could be a source of comfort or a vessel for malaise. Distrust towards food and a reliance on purging became my norm, this was a derivative of having extreme anxiety. My bulimic tendencies were a result of the need to have some control over how my body physically felt. My apprehension towards eating was to avoid how the food would make me feel, not how I looked. The need for thinness was not why I developed a habit with disordered eating, therefore gaining weight was not the solution. Oddly enough, I never developed dieting habits. I never limited the types of food I ate, I only limited how often I ate or if I’d allow myself to digest it. As a teenager, I quickly developed “appetite curbing habits.” I started habitually drinking and smoking cigarettes by the time I was fourteen, which quickly transformed into generalized addiction. As my reliance on drugs worsened, my issue with panicking mutated into bipolar II. Although I wasn’t yet diagnosed, I could recognize that my brain chemistry was changing. Most of the symptoms I fell victim to were horrendous and terrifying, one of the only enjoyable elements of my transformation was that I had absolutely no appetite. I vaguely remember living off of iced coffee and unflavored oatmeal, at most eating once a day. Eating vanished from my agenda, stealing the anxiety it perpetuated and replacing it with mania. 

Fast forward to getting into recovery. Getting sober was the much needed first step on my path to wellness. In doing this, I managed to clear my head enough to understand that recovery meant more than just not doing drugs. I needed to recover not just from substance abuse, but discover why I was so anxious, how I could heal myself and develop a plan to keep myself from eroding. After a week in an inpatient facility, I returned home with the validation that there was something wrong with me outside of my control. Getting diagnosed with bipolar disorder validated 1. That I needed to retain my sobriety, no matter what. 2. What I was suffering from was partially due to my genetic makeup, I wasn’t being dramatic in my belief that I was suffering. 

Reading was integral to my recovery. It was routine. It offered a moment of peace for me, everyday. I set goals for myself and rewards for when I met them. I felt better about myself because I was learning. Reading Evannas book validated the feelings from my youth and provided me with a figure I could relate to and look to for guidance. I emulated some of her methods and was intrigued by her veganism. I had always seen veganism as a form of restriction and couldn’t see how that would be beneficial to someone like her or I. 

Via Evannas Instagram, I found We Are The Weather by Jonathan Safran Foer. The heading of the novel read, “Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast” a concept I was completely ignorant towards. We Are The Weather is Foers subsequent nonfiction piece on animal agriculture and how it affects the anthropocene, a drastic change of pace comparatively to how his literary career was birthed with fiction novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. 

We Are the Weather was a beautifully written book that incited a change deep in my soul. Jonathan Safran Foer found a voice in his introspection and creates a dialogue about accountability and the evolution of our species by comparing the struggles of his ancestors to the way he raises his children and the unthinking nature of all humans. In his first chapter “1. Unbelievable” Foer writes, “Our minds and hearts are well built to perform certain tasks, and poorly designed for others. We are good at things like calculating the path of a hurricane, and bad at things like deciding to get out of its way. Because we evolved over hundreds of millions of years, in settings that bear little resemblance to the modern world, we are often led to desires, fears, and indifferences that neither correspond nor respond to modern realities.” I have been moved by this concept. The future is unknown, the past is something that has already lived. It’s in our nature to feel nostalgia, to look back at periods of time that seemed simpler and therefore more idyllic, but the future is inescapable. Society will evolve in speech, technology, ideas and art but in what direction are we going? 

Art is and will always be the backbone of civilization. Told in periods such as renaissance, romanticism or realism: what defines the period of art we wade in today? The society we live in today is defined by capitalism. Beat poetry is a fine example of an artistic movement that defines the way our generations think now. Anti-consumerism and anti-conformism was all the rage, it gave us punk, ideas of free expression and an alternative way of thinking. Now, in the year 2022 those ideas have become corporate. “Hippie” is an aesthetic rather than a way of being.  The new wave is already cascading, diverting from the narrow paths that are “fuck capalism, I want nothing to do with it” or “use my promo code and recieve 15% off.” We are being presented with the notion that it is okay to consume, we all have to, but the way we consume needs to change. 

There are ironies within this concept. Zara, one of the most polluting fast fashion companies going without plastics in their packaging. KFC, a company that kills around 850 million chickens a year, selling vegan “chicken” nuggets. In We Are The Weather, the nuances of these behaviors are written about objectively but the message is clear. As consumers, it’s our job to prioritize being ethical and the only ethical thing to do is boycott. While veganism is a boycott opposing the meat and dairy industry, it should also be a boycott against any company that is willing to sacrifice ethics, empathy, the health of consumers and our planet for their profit.

“Belief can’t be willed into being.” I’ve never thought of myself as a malicious person. Because I couldn’t see the harm that I was inflicting by supporting certain industries, I didn’t think I was causing any harm. Claiming I was ignorant is still a lie. When I ate meat, I was aware that I was eating a being. When drinking milk, I knew it was filled with toxins. As a boy, my father briefly lived next to a slaughterhouse for pigs; I had listened to his horror stories, I ate pig anyways. I can blame this on indoctrination, living in the United States, coming from a rural area, we are gluttons and we have detached ourselves from the cruelty that we cultivate. This is still nothing more than a hollow excuse: I was weak and I was selfish. I regret that now. We Are the Weather laid all of that injustice before me and pushed me into a space where I felt like I had to hold myself accountable and it did so by acknowledging that we are all this way. There is no such thing as being a perfect vegan or a perfect person- I was changed by a plethora of ideas and facts within his books, the most simple being this statement written by Foer: “Is there anything more narcissistic than believing the choices you make affect everyone? Only one thing: believing the choices you make affect no one.” 

In the past five months, I’ve completely refrained from meat and have nearly completely eradicated all other animal products from my diet. My diet feels healthy and my relationship with food has transformed. I still experience symptoms due to my condition, but my symptoms have lessened in potency and in frequency. This isn’t due to veganism but veganism assists my recovery and has elevated it into a new space that I am eager to explore. Veganism as a practice has strengthened my confidence, emboldened my empathy and given me a space where I can consume without as much guilt. 

In other ways, admittedly, becoming informed and willing myself to change was moderately harmful to my mental health because I am more aware. Not only when I see meat being consumed by my peers or at my restaurant job, I am repulsed but I am also enraged. My heart breaks for these animals that are being tortured for our food because of what I learned in We Are The Weather. I understand now that the way we engage with these companies directly correlates to major animal and human rights violations. 

Below I’m going to include some more quotes and facts that the author included in his book that have opened my eyes and changed my perspective. I hope you read this book and I hope it allows your empathy to grow the way it has mine. 

“You are entirely capable of doing things you aren’t moved to do and refraining from things that you want to do. That doesn’t make you Gandhi. It makes you an adult.” 

“Humans represent 0.01% of life on Earth.” 

“Because righteousness and blame are contextual. Being a good person at Normandy on June 6, 1944, is not the same as being a good person in the grocery store in 2019.” 

“Ninety-six percent of American families gather for a Thanksgiving meal. That is higher than the percentage of Americans who brush their teeth everyday, have read a book in the last year, or have ever left the state in which they were born.” 

“According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, if cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States.” 

“Not eating animal products for breakfast and lunch has a smaller CO2 footprint than the average full time vegetarian diet.” 

“Seventy percent of the antibiotics produced globally are used for livestock, weakening the effectiveness of antibiotics to treat human diseases.” 

“On average, Americans consume twice the recommended intake of protein.”