Archive for March, 2011

I love cooking.  When I went vegetarian in my pre-teen years and then vegan in high school, my family didn’t really know what to do with me, so I learned pretty quickly to make my own meals.  (I remember, actually, that I had a Mickey Mouse cookbook when I was, like, seven or eight years old, and I’d make simple dishes like macaroni and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from its pages.  I thought I was so accomplished.)  Even now, years later, one of my favorite activities is to make and share a meal with friends; there’s something cathartic about chopping vegetables, stirring pots, and making food magic from raw ingredients.

I’ve been talking with friends lately about how food is sometimes treated as “toxic” or “bad,” especially by female-identified people.  There’s such emphasis on thinness in western culture that we are taught to feel guilty about putting food into our mouths, despite the simple fact that it’s food that keeps our bodies functioning normally.  One friend of mine remarked that her female coworkers are always lamenting what they ate the night before and are endlessly resolving to go on a diet.  And, sadly, vegans are not immune to this kind of behavior, either.  Veganism has been sold as a dietary panacea, and the underlying implication (or sometimes, the straight-up message) is still “fat=bad.”  I’ve had my struggles with this in the past, and one of the things I’ve been working on for the future is eating as much food as my body needs, without feeling bad or guilty about it, and making a point to incorporate as much healthy, local, sustainably-grown foods as possible into those meals.

I keep a pretty good-sized pile of vegan cookbooks on my shelves, and I’m quite adept at Googling for recipes containing a particular ingredient, but I often bump into a few issues when I am trying to plan a cooking extravaganza.  For one, I don’t have a lot of money.  I’m not someone who can waltz into the natural foods store and drop $20 on a jar of coconut cream and then use a tablespoon of it in a recipe.  In fact, I pretty much have the same twenty (cheap) ingredients on-hand all the time and try to incorporate them into different recipes to keep things interesting.

The other problem I have, especially when finding user-created recipes on the Internet, is that sometimes the written directions aren’t very clear.  I’m a kinesthetic learner, meaning that I prefer to see and do something with my hands in order to commit it to memory, so reading words on a page (or a screen) doesn’t always translate into a delicious dinner.  However, the Internet saves the day again, because ingenious people have begun making vegan cooking videos and sharing them with the rest of us, for optimum kitchen awesomeness.  Check these out, and if you’re inspired, send me your videos.  Maybe we will start a regular L.O.V.E. featured video cooking series, which is a lot more fun and energizing than always writing about heartbreaking things.   (Though I will probably still do that as well.)

The lovely P.M.A. (aka Tara) has created a charming series of vegan cooking videos that include easy, simple gluten-free and vegan recipes for both humans and nonhumans.  Here is her delicious tofu scramble:

The folks over at Veganism Is the New Evolution (VINE) have started a video series called Cooking With Real Vegans, featuring sanctuary founders Aram and Miriam in their real kitchen making real food.  This is making me hungry:

And finally, I love Manjula’s Kitchen.  She creates simple, delicious, vegetarian Indian dishes, including this tantalizing plate of chola tikki:

I find these videos so much more instructive than looking at letters on a page.  The filmmakers and hosts are so charming, I sort of wish I was in their kitchens making these dishes with them.  As it stands, I’ll probably just haul my laptop into my tiny New York kitchen and try to find room to mince garlic on the keyboard.  That can’t be bad for your computer, can it? Well, if I never write a blog again, you’ll know what happened.

At first glance, this seems like such a fender-bender in a world that is otherwise full of overturned eighteen-wheelers.  In fact, when I first heard about it, I didn’t even think it worthy of a mention until a few days later, when I had mulled it over (actually, I couldn’t STOP thinking about it) and decided that it warranted some further analysis.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that even these seemingly insignificant, nit-picky points about the message by which we deliver our activism can have a huge impact on the world.  For one thing, if individuals and organizations continue to make these tragic missteps, the heart of the vegan argument — don’t exploit animals — is going to get completely lost amongst the outrage; in fact, I barely read any of the rest of the article in which this particular offense is contained.  Not only that, but we are going to actively lose allies if we continue to ignore the voices of those not in power: if we repeatedly perform actions or make statements that contribute to women’s exploitation; if we disregard the histories and stereotypes that contribute to the exploitation of people of color; and if we make a mockery of people’s gender identities and sexuality, they and their allies will not want to align themselves with animal activists.

We cannot afford to lose anyone.

Anyway, the story.  An article called “5 Reasons to Thaw Your Frosty Relationship With Winter” was recently posted on Vegan Chic, a fashion and lifestyle blog for (primarily women) vegans.  It was written by self-described “Ethical Man” Dan Mims, who also posted the article at his blog.  So why did this particular piece ice me up instead of thawing me out?  There’s a teeny, tiny line in the section of the article devoted to snuggling that caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end.  “In the early stages of a dating relationship, gauging each others’ interest isn’t so easy,” writes the Ethical Man.  “Boundaries have to be respected, but they also have to be pushed.”

Insert sound of scratching record here.

In a paragraph about presumably consensual contact with a romantic partner, Ethical Man Dan Mims suggests to his (predominately male) audience that it is ok to push boundaries.  Not only that, but they HAVE to be pushed.  Can we talk for a second about why people have boundaries in romantic and sexual relationships?  How about the fact that one in six women has survived a sexual assault (a statistic, by the way, that does not account for women who were repeatedly assaulted)?  Or the global cultural narrative that women’s bodies are for consumption and men are the ones who do the consuming at will?  The less-privileged groups in this equation (women, gay men, trans- and gender non-conforming individuals) have been forced to establish boundaries for themselves because otherwise, we get attacked.  We get assaulted.  We get killed.

It is the opposite of ethical to suggest that those boundaries be pushed.

And this is why we have to be so careful with our words.  I am not saying that Dan Mims is encouraging his audience to assault women (just as feminists have been arguing that we don’t detest rape jokes because we think the people telling them or laughing at them are or will become rapists).  What I am saying here is that this inattentiveness to the lived experiences of disempowered groups is not only detrimental to the cause of animal activism and indeed all social justice, but it is also straight-up dangerous.  In my activism — and in my vision of a vegan world — people listen to one another.  We consider whether our words will inadvertently trigger or cause discomfort to the people to whom we are speaking.  And if we are called out on our mistakes, we apologize, we educate ourselves, and we fix it.

No one is free when others are oppressed.