A Bright Clean Mind. Camille DeAngelis
sausages, and chicken strips that taste disconcertingly like the real thing, and their biggest competition is another California startup calling itself—with amusing irony—“Impossible Foods.”
Impossible is a foolish word indeed, so you may as well quit using it in relation to veganism. Here’s my theory: begin to experiment in the kitchen—as methodically or meanderingly as you please—and you will notice new tendrils of possibility unfurling in your primary creative practice. A year or two after going vegan, I found myself combing Google Books for vintage British cookbooks to see what kinds of dishes people were eating in Scotland in the late eighteenth century. When I discovered Susanna MacIver’s Cookery & Pastry—first published in 1773 after years of teaching cooking classes to young housewives in her Edinburgh flat—it occurred to me that, blood pudding and potted cow’s head aside, I could veganize many of these recipes: potato fritters and almond custard, “green meagre” soup, and mock venison pasties filled with minced seitan marinated in red wine. And when I finally get back to the book that I needed this research for in the first place—the “gothic satire” I mentioned earlier—this culinary experimentation will hopefully render my Pythagorean characters all the more vivid.
Jerry Drave, How Vegans are Born, digital comic, 2018.
Of course, there’s no need to fall (however happily) down a research rabbit hole. “For a while I’ve followed the tenet that if I don’t recognize a fruit or vegetable, I buy it and Google it when I get home to find some recipes,” vegan web designer and podcaster Paul Jarvis writes in Eat Awesome. “This approach keeps things fresh and interesting in the kitchen.” Better yet, Google while you’re still at the store so you can pick up anything else you might need for that recipe. Do you want to be the kind of person who bypasses the kohlrabi because it looks weird, or would you rather charm your friends with kohlrabi schnitzel? (That is a real recipe, by the way. You’ll find it on the blog Elephantastic Vegan.) Look for liquid smoke, too, which is just the condensation from a hickory-wood fire. When I made a pot of split pea soup and added half a teaspoon, one of my meat-loving relatives went on and on about how delicious it was. It had never occurred to her that split pea soup could be just as satisfying without ham.
© Philip McCulloch-Downs,
Nurture/Nature, acrylic, 2019.
Leonardo da Vinci—a vegetarian, and surely one of the most innovative thinkers who ever lived—conducted his artistic and scientific experiments with what he called ostinato rigore, “obstinate rigor”—a daily practice of following his curiosity wherever it might lead him. And should we do the same, that obstinacy will carry us to inconvenient places from time to time; but when it does, we’re bound to come up with an idea worth getting excited over.
Divergent Thinking in the Kitchen
J.P. Guilford is best known for the concept of “divergent thinking,” in which you generate as many solutions to a given problem as you possibly can. So, play this game with yourself (and maybe with your partner), especially when you’re running out of groceries: how many delectable meal options can you find for what’s already in the fridge and pantry? With its inherent values of curiosity and open-mindedness, veganism fosters divergent thinking—as opposed to the “one right answer” of the standard Western diet. After all, there’s so much more to the culinary world than three sections on a plate marked “protein, vegetable, and starch”!
Sticking point #7: “Before I can begin my work, I have to be thoroughly prepared against any pratfalls by which I might humiliate myself.”
I’ve never met an artist who didn’t have an anecdote to share about childhood bullies, though some stories are more infuriating (and heartbreaking) than others. In her book, Beasts of Burden, vegan artist and activist Sunaura Taylor, who was born with a condition called arthrogryposis, recalls how her classmates taunted her for “walking like a monkey” and excluded her from playground games in which she could have easily participated. My experiences were mild in comparison: a drawing of a dog on the sewing-room chalkboard labeled “Camille”; acrylic paint chips thrown at my head in art class whenever our teacher turned his back; an enormous dead insect left stinger-side up on my chair in Latin class with a note that read SUCK MY GLADIUS. Even now, at the age of thirty-seven, my stomach drops whenever I hear teenagers laughing in the street. It depresses me to think of all I haven’t said or done for fear of ridicule, then and now.
Last fall, I went for a three-hour drive with a friend who was starting the audiobook of Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, and as we listened to Brown’s explanation of what she calls the “Viking or Victim” mentality, I remembered not just those bullies from my middle and high school years, but the teens since then who have committed suicide after one too many run-ins with Internet trolls, the students and teachers gunned down in their classrooms, the unarmed Black men and women murdered by the police. Brown writes, “Either you’re a Victim in life—a sucker or loser who’s always being taken advantage of or who can’t hold your own—or you’re a Viking—someone who sees the threat of being victimized as a constant, so you stay in control, you dominate, you exert power over things, and you never show vulnerability.” Time and again, my parents would say the kids who mocked me were only diverting attention from their own insecurities, but, even as a child, that explanation struck me as inadequate. The “Viking or Victim” mindset is encoded in our most fundamental patriarchal notions of what it means to be human; it is a very old (and thus taken-for-granted) paradigm dictating that you cannot empower yourself without disempowering someone else. In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown also writes that “cruelty is cheap, easy, and chickenshit,” but I can only agree with her to a point. Eating and wearing animals are the easiest cruelties of all.
© Jerry Drave, Song for a Lost Home, digital illustration, 2018.
It is no great stretch to suppose that we learned how to dominate and brutalize our fellow humans by practicing first on domesticated animals, controlling every aspect of their reproduction before violently ending their lives. The connections are blatant: Southern plantation owners treating humans like livestock; Black Americans “animalized” in various ways by white supremacists to this day; Jewish people transported to the Nazi death camps in cattle cars; the US Department of Homeland Security literally caging children they’ve separated from their parents; Donald Trump saying of “undesirable” immigrants, “These aren’t people, these are animals.” A figure like Trump draws power from victimizing others, in this case by denying these “aspiring Americans” their fundamental needs.
To come to terms with the various ways in which the “Viking or Victim” psychology has affected our emotional and creative lives, we must acknowledge that we ourselves have practiced cruelty by proxy. Behind the bacon is a creature who has suffered tail and ear clipping and castration, all without anesthesia. Behind the breakfast omelet is a system in which the boy chicks, “useless” to the industry, are thrown into a trash can or ground up in an industrial macerator, and in which chickens’ beaks are cut or burned off (again, without painkillers) to prevent them from pecking each other out of sheer frustration inside their tiny battery cages. Behind the milk is a mother whose children have been taken from her again and again until she is too worn out to continue—so that she may very well be inside your hamburger as well. All of these animals endure excruciatingly painful lives in cramped and filthy conditions (lying or standing in their own and