REFLECTIONS OF A SISTAH VEGAN
It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2005. I was out shopping at the local mall when my husband called and asked me if I would pick up a six-piece chicken-wing snack for him on my way home because he was tired of the turkey leftovers. Soon after his call, I found myself at a fast-food chicken restaurant. I was standing in line trying to remember what type of sauce he said he wanted—Was it the hot barbeque, the honey mustard, or the teriyaki? Was that with or without ranch dressing?—when, from out of nowhere, I began wondering what happened to the rest of the bodies of the three chickens it took to create this snack for my husband that I was about to so casually order. Almost immediately, other questions popped into my head: Just how many other people would stand in this same line in this restaurant to order chicken wings today? And how many other fast-food chicken restaurants are experiencing an increase in business today because people are out shopping and they are tired of leftover turkey from Thanksgiving? Just how many chickens were being grown so my husband, and three hundred million other Americans, could have chicken wings anytime they wanted—not to mention in the world?
Little did I know that my questions about chicken wings on that day would lead to a radical change in the way I eat. Believe me, it's not that I have some great love for chickens as a part of God's creation and think that they should have the same sacred status as cows in India or humans in every part of the world. My thinking and eating habits changed as a result of what I call a kairos moment. Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning the “right or opportune moment.”1 In my faith tradition it also means “the appointed time in the purpose of God.” At this appointed time, four previously unassociated thoughts—the content of a lecture I had just presented four days prior on the global inequities in food distribution; a vague recollection of a statement from PETA about the cruelties associated with chicken production; the remembrance of how surprisingly good I felt physically while on a forty-day spiritually motivated fast from meat and dairy at the beginning of the year; and my own desire to live an authentic life—yanked me into an uncomfortable realization that, when it came to food consumption, I was not living according to my beliefs.
I did purchase the chicken-wing snack for my husband, but with that sales transaction I began earnestly thinking about what I ate. I became conscious that what I ate was not merely a combination of taste preference, convenience, and cultural heritage. Before that moment in the chicken restaurant, I had given very little thought to how the food I enjoyed got to my table, and I certainly didn't think I was hurting anything or anyone. I am a socially aware college professor who challenges her students to think about how their social (and predominantly white) privilege supports the inequities that position people of color on the fault lines of life AND how their privilege allows them to be unconcerned about issues they do not think pertain to them. How could I be guilty of the offense with which I indicted my students?
As a middle-class citizen of the United States, I had been exercising status privilege every time I went to the grocery store or picked up a takeout dinner on my way home from work or shopping. It's a privilege to be able to eat what I want without ever having to think about how the food gets to my table. As I exercise this privilege, I am unconsciously participating in patterns of indifference and oppression. I was guilty of the offense with which I indicted my students! And here was truth in a Styrofoam box, which held six whole chicken wings covered in hot barbeque sauce with a side of ranch dressing. The truth is that no matter how good a person I was, my eating habits were contrary to what I believed. All of my actions either contribute to patterns of social inequities or to the solutions to the ills of our society. All social inequities are linked. Comprehensive systemic change will happen only if we are aware of these connections and work to bring an end to all inequalities—not just our favorites or the ones that most directly affect our part of the universe. No one is on the sidelines; by our actions or inactions, by our caring or our indifference, we are either part of the problem or part of the solution. I was beginning to see my lifestyle as it really was: a part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Not liking what I saw, I made a conscious decision to change my eating habits so that they would more closely represent my thinking on issues of social justice, the equitable use and distribution of global resources, and the health-diet-survival connection for African-Americans. Since my kairos moment in a chicken fast-food restaurant, I have chosen to eat like a vegan and have changed my shopping habits. I now buy fair trade tea and chocolate, and when possible, I purchase fresh and organic produce from local farmers. I do have a few nonvegan-friendly clothing items hanging in my closet from before my transformation, but none of my post-transformation clothing purchases contain animal skins or animal products.
My initiation into veganism actually occurred eleven months before that kairos moment in the fast-food chicken restaurant. I usually spend the first weekend of a new year on a personal spiritual retreat. In January 2005, I also participated in a month of fasting from meat, dairy, and sugar, facilitated by my church. The fast was voluntary and was supposed to detoxify the mind, body, and spirit. My church called it a “Daniel Fast.” With the exception of the sugar restriction, the diet fit the vegan way of eating—soybean products became the mainstay of family and church dinners. (I'm sure the local health-food store was wondering what was going on with all these Black people buying up everything soy during that month.)
Twenty of us stuck with the fast for the entire month without slipping back into old eating habits. We all saw improvements in our health. Not unexpectedly, we lost weight; I lost ten pounds. But to my surprise, by the end of the month I was also experiencing fewer hot flashes (associated with approaching menopause) and was sleeping better at night. However, as soon as the fast was over, I added poultry, dairy, and sugar products back into my diet. Red meat was no longer on the menu in my home because it was giving my daughter headaches and my husband had been told to change his diet in order to lower his cholesterol levels. A month after reintroducing these foods to my diet, the hot flashes began to return. Several months after the reintroduction of meat and dairy, right around the time of the chicken-restaurant moment, the hot flashes were becoming so bothersome that I actually began to think seriously about hormone replacement therapy. I spoke to my doctor, and he suggested that I first consider adding the soy back into my diet.
I now credit the end of my hot flashes to the elimination of all meat and dairy from my diet, the eating of organic produce (when possible), and the daily consumption of soy. January 2005 marked the beginning of my understanding of how food affects the functioning of my body. It was November 2005 that marked the beginning of my understanding of how the food I ate contributed to social inequalities, and it marked my transformation to eating like a vegan; in late November I began thinking and eating at the same time.
Thinking about what I was eating led me on a search for the answer to the question I had raised to myself about chicken consumption in the U.S. I discovered that in 2005 the total number of broilers—chickens raised for their meat—produced in the U.S. for the year was 8.87 billion.2 “Each week, Pilgrim's Pride (the number-two poultry producer) turns about 30 million chickens into nuggets, wings, drumsticks, and sundry other parts.” According to the National Chicken Council, “American consumers are eating an unprecedented 81 pounds of chicken per person this year . . . and plan to purchase more in the months to come.”3 The U.S. appetite for chicken has grown steadily since 1970 when the per-person average was 37 pounds.4 Americans eat more chicken than beef (69 pounds) and pork (52 pounds). The amount of meat in a typical American diet far exceeds the daily allowances suggested by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's food pyramid.5
The sheer number of feed animals necessary to satisfy the American diet is staggering. In order to keep costs low and production high, animals and chickens are routinely crowded in to small pens or cages, mutilated, and drugged with antibiotics and growth hormones. Crowded and stressful conditions have been associated with feed animals and chickens becoming ill. Because chickens in such conditions will turn on each other, chickens are de-beaked so they will not kill each other. Feed animals that do not grow fast enough or are too old or sick are sometimes killed and ground into animal feed. Cows, who are by nature herbivores, are routinely fed a protein mixture prepared from ground cows.6 Laying chicks who are the wrong sex are discarded in garbage bags—sometimes still living.7 The conditions under which many feed animals are raised are inhumane. While humankind may have been granted dominion over animals,8 I don't believe we were also given the right to be cruel, brutal, and heartless in our treatment of them. Animals are a part of creation, just as humans. Treating them so callously is symptomatic of a general disregard for anything our culture defines as inferior and expendable.
In the U.S., how we treat food animals is reminiscent of how people of color were treated. Andrea Smith made such a connection with Native women and children and animals in her book Conquest:
Native people often view their identities as inseparable from the rest of creation, and hence, creation requires care and respect, but colonizers viewed Indian identity as inseparably linked to animal and plant life, and deserving of destruction and mutilation. This equation between animals and Native people continues.9
Smith's statement was in the context of discussing the U.S. government's practices of medical experimentation on Native inhabitants in reservations. African-Americans have also been used as human guinea pigs for some of our government's medical experiments: The Tuskegee syphilis studies are a well-known example. Africans were brought to this country in mass numbers as slaves. They were chained together and kept in the cramped holds of ships as they crossed the Atlantic. In order to justify the brutality of slavery, the oppressors deemed Africans as less-than-human and undeserving of decent housing, education, food, health care, justice, or respect. African women who were enslaved were often used as breeders for a new crop of slaves. It was not uncommon for Africans who were too sick, too old, or too rebellious to be killed if it was thought cheaper to replace them than to keep them. Prized animals were often treated better than slaves.
Seeing a connection between the treatment of feed animals, laying chickens, and people of color is a rather recent phenomenon for me. Two years ago, I wouldn't have believed there was such a connection. Today, I know better. The connection becomes clear with a careful reading of our history and an understanding of the true nature of food production in the United States. The connection, however, is also observable by a thorough analysis of today's headlines and an informed critique of social policy and community life. Understanding the connection strengthens my resolve to continue eating like a vegan. Choosing to eat this way is a reminder to myself and a demonstration to those around me that all of creation is worthy of respect and humane treatment, even chickens.
At the time I raised my questions about chicken consumption, I was simply curious about how many chickens Americans ate. As I searched to satisfy my curiosity of that day, I have changed from wondering about numbers of chickens to the costs of the American diet. What are the health-related costs to the lives of people eating a typical American diet? Why does it cost more to eat healthy? Why is it “unusual” to have a meal without meat? Why do feed animals need so many growth hormones and antibiotics in their feed? What do these animal growth hormones and antibiotics do in our human bodies? Why do we commit so much of our land and water resources to growing feed for animals when we could grow grain that is a healthier source of protein? Can we really afford to not know where our food comes from and how it is produced? I am convinced that eating a meat-based diet—not to mention dairy products, eggs, and fish—is not only hazardous to food animals and harmful to the land, but, more important to me, perilous to the health of my people.
The top five leading causes of death among African-Americans are: heart disease, cancer, cerebrovascular disease, accidents, and diabetes.10 Currently, 27 percent of deaths in the Black U.S. population are from heart disease, and the death rate from diabetes for Blacks is twice that of whites.11 According to the American Heart Association, women of color are particularly vulnerable:
African-American and Hispanic women have higher prevalence rates of high blood pressure, obesity, physical inactivity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome than white women. Yet they are less likely than white women to know that being overweight, smoking, physical inactivity, high cholesterol and a family history of heart disease increase their heart disease risk.12
The prevalence of being overweight (including obesity) in African-American women is 77 percent; the prevalence of obesity is 49 percent.13 Obesity has a strong correlation to diabetes. The traditional African-American diet is loaded with deep-fried chicken; meats are smothered in cream-based gravies; vegetables are slow-cooked with pork and pork fat until the color of the vegetables is no longer bright; and desserts are loaded with butter and cream. Soul Food (a.k.a. Southern home-cooking or comfort food) is often jokingly referred to as a “heart-attack on plate.”
For African-Americans, however, it's no laughing matter. We are literally killing ourselves and decreasing our quality of life by the way we eat. Of the leading causes of death for African-Americans, all but one, accidents, have a connection to diet and lifestyle. Heart disease, obesity, and diabetes do not have to be such a prominent part of the African-American experience. Switching to an all-plant or nearly all-plant diet is one of the most effective ways to stop the progress of heart disease,14 reversing the tendency to obesity, and controlling the onset of diabetes.
Every now and then my husband will ask me, “How long are you going to eat like this?” He used to ask because he and the rest of my immediate family thought that I wasn't going to get enough protein in my diet. Through my sharing of nutrition facts with them, they no longer think that eating like a vegan is unhealthy—strange for a Black person, perhaps, but not unhealthy. In fact, my husband has switched to soy butter and eats several meatless meals a week with me. My mother has also declared that a vegan restaurant I introduced her to is now one of her favorites and has dined there several times without me. Now when my husband asks, “How long are you going to eat like this?” it's because he has noticed that I no longer have hot flashes and he wants me to stay hot-flash-free, because “if momma is happy, everybody is happy.” Although he appreciates the improvement in my comfort level and disposition, he and I are reminded of just how challenging it can be to maintain this lifestyle every time we try to go out for dinner, attend a birthday party, or go to a church potluck.
I'm the only vegan in my household. I think I'm the only Black female in all of western Michigan who eats like a vegan; if I'm not, it sure seems like it. There are no true vegan restaurants within ninety miles of our home. The closest vegetarian restaurant is forty-eight miles away, in a trendy, white, college-student side of town. When we do go out to eat (which is not very often) I usually opt for a salad without meat or cheese. Family holiday dinners, church potlucks, and birthday parties call for several different strategies. There's the “I'll be happy to bring something” so I can be sure that there's at least one item I can eat; there's the “Really, I am full. I just ate, all I want is a glass of water” so I don't have to explain to sistah sistah why I'm not eating her prized chicken salad; and then there are the times when I feel up to being an educator and I share with people why I no longer eat meat.
How long will I continue to eat like this? I can't see returning to eating meat, eggs, or dairy products, even with the inconveniences associated with eating out, dinner parties, church potlucks, family holiday dinners, and birthday parties. I am healthier now. I know too much now. I am committed to living an authentic life and to working for the elimination of all forms of injustice. I am now thinking and eating at the same time. There is no turning back.