My First Vegan

Mindy Cardozo

I’m not writing to present an airtight argument for vegetarianism.  As an occasional but careful Brooklyn omnivore, that wouldn’t make much sense.  I will tell you that when Donald Trump got elected, I found myself unable to eat any animal flesh for months.  Like a teenage girl trying to ward off her adult body by refusing calories, it was a way to say “No, uh-uh,” all day long.  I never imagined this would bring on his impeachment; it was my own private response to the violence he represents. In another age, it’s possible I could have easily become a nun or a cult member, and not exactly because of any personal flair for zealotry. I simply like a complete bodily attachment to accompany my intellectual passions. I like teaching as much as I enjoy spending hours in the library. I mostly read theory, but also enjoy the awkward, halting reality of practice.  For years my main method of employment was to deliver food made in a kitchen by other people to anxiously awaiting diners, but the joy on their faces as they ate did not outweigh my own excitement for tasting new dishes before service or cashing in on my employee discount after a shift. I am a florist who will never ungratefully receive flowers. I study the things I want to experience, and I like to have a partner in crime. My Dad once stood in front of my bookshelf and complained: “Why do you have so many books about sex?” But I look at the same titles and see a preoccupation with desire.  Yes, the “heart” wants what it wants, but isn’t that satisfaction also delivered through the body and the head? And, for our purposes here, through the mouth?

One place to begin is in my junior year of high school in Gainesville, Florida. I had Honors American Literature with a teacher named Ms. Maples. She was a tiny, serious, ginger with a soft Arkansan drawl.  In her class, I read what remain to this day my most important novels: Beloved, The Scarlet Letter, and Their Eyes Were Watching God.  In them, I realized my heroes were zombies, sluts, and firebrands: iconoclasts of unkillable, unshameable, necessary desire.  As she introduced our syllabus, she told us the story of a prank pulled a few years earlier, and why she no longer assigned The Last of the Mohicans. The offending shenanigans involved students sneaking into her front yard in the middle of the night and transforming the space into a literary cemetery. She awoke the next morning to a sea of tiny flickering tombstones, as they had attached every single page of Cooper’s novel to sticks, then staked them across her lawn. The light in her eyes as she recalled this event twinkled pure satisfaction.  This dismembering of the text, and the organization amongst teenagers it had required, was participatory and loving. Driving the point home, they’d left behind a kiddie pool in which they’d floated a lone copy of Moby Dick.  “Fuck you, normative literary canon!” this performative re-assemblage of Cooper’s words screamed to me.  “We live in the belly of the beast! No time for your dull-ass prose!” They even toilet papered her trees for good measure.   I was a 16-year-old virgin living in a highly analog historical moment, and something ignited in me as she told this story.

That year, the year I did not read Moby Dick and actually still have not, I would also drop acid for the first time, lose my virginity, quit the cheerleading squad, get my first job in a restaurant I wound up working for well into my PhD coursework, abruptly stop believing in a single Christian God largely because of a Howard Zinn essay Ms. Maples assigned, and discover the Smiths, Joy Division, and the Sex Pistols.  My oldest brother safely returned home from the first Gulf War, and I became a vegetarian. But all of those things came later.

One of the many perks of growing up in Gainesville in the Nineties included the proximity of the Phoenix family, who, notably for this essay, were also vegetarians. Little Leaf of Spacecamp fame (nèe Joaquin) was in my Jazz class the year we performed a routine to “People Are Strange” by the Doors. River’s bands performed in local clubs and even once at a Clinton/Gore rally on campus at UF I had attended with my newly returned brother, who caught me just before I hit the ground—(another) first of many unexplained fainting spells at shows. I remember seeing River at Kesl’s Coney Island, the epic vegetarian restaurant downtown, shortly before he died. That fateful year, I also developed a mean crush on a sweet boy who sat close to me in American Literature, who I would later discover was either a cousin or maybe just a close family friend of River’s. Like the rest of the Phoenix clan, he had taken a very un-Biblical hippie name.  In college we would suffer through Japanese classes 5 days a week together, but that year it was strictly English. At the time, I had very thick, very long, very blonde curly hair. Most of my outfits came from Contempo Casuals at the mall, except on the frequent occasions when I had to wear my cheerleading uniform to school. He had a long black ponytail and rough skin. His accent came from a different south, and he bore a very fortunate resemblance to fellow Floridian Johnny Depp. In short, I simply was not his type. One morning, digging into the stash of peanut M&M’s I was selling to raise money for the squad, I got up the nerve to offer him some for free. He politely refused, citing his veganism as the reason. Later he would recommend John Robbins’s Diet for a New America, which I quickly devoured. Deeply altered by this crush, the books, and the Meat is Murder cassette that never left the tape player of my Honda Civic, I had soon removed all flesh from my diet.

In addition to Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, we also read Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, and The Prince of Tides.  This was public school in semi-rural North Central Florida in the early Nineties, and we had been gifted with this totally non-canonical year of reading.  I would not encounter the possibility of desire as a serious subject of academic study until my senior year of college, but what I had been allowed to spend a year considering in the safety of that classroom gave me the courage to look at the precariousness I’d experienced throughout my own childhood, and to stop hiding my own experiences of the ways class politics are necessarily lived through race and sex/gender.  These writers presented me with evidence that these vectors of vulnerability were not something that other people only experienced as shame. They didn’t have that luxury.

Through a series of lucky accidents, becoming a vegetarian gave me one small way to break the script, to challenge what was supposed to be natural and good, but also to enter into community with people who seemed to be both more brave and more careful than the normal kids I’d been so bent on trying to run with.  If this doesn’t make any sense, then close your eyes and try to picture Donald Trump as a vegetarian. I’m not kidding. Try to picture him calling countries “shitholes,” picture the confused children in airports who might never see their refugee parents again, Puerto Rico, Colin Kaepernick, the taunt of “fake news,” the administration’s policy on methane gas, his attempt to ban trans troops in the military, and hear him talking about grabbing pussy.   Then try to imagine some things that never happened: picture him calmly explaining in an interview why he doesn’t consume meat, or is against factory farming. Picture him telling the story of how he raised Ivanka vegan. That these scenarios could be nothing but absurd fantasies says something important to me about “meat.” The quotes here indicate both animals slaughtered for consumption and the ways we use meat as a metaphor.

Meat: like words, like the sweetest parts of our lovers, like medicine, we put it in our mouths. One of the stories the vegetarians so provocatively remind us about nature is that, like other slippages of authenticity, it is often used to promote fantasies of necessity.  It is many narratives about lies my Capitalism told me. Allowing our desires to be a part of the ways we must reconsider consumption if we understand sustainability to be more than a buzzword can take many different paths, and while I’m not mapping that journey for anyone, I do think we’ve all got to start walking.