A lot of us have been wishing for this book for a long time. Now that it's here, I can hardly contain myself. Literally. Again and again, as I tried to write this afterword, my thoughts overflowed their boundaries, spilling off of the page and into each other until finally I had to accept that my hyper-excited inability to keep ideas in their places was not a temporary technical writing problem but rather a natural reaction to an anthology that is all about crossing categories to make vital connections.
Editor Breeze Harper started with simple questions about perceptions of veganism and animal liberation among Black American females. The answers she got from Black-identified vegan women led her to more complex questions about veganism as “health activism that resists institutionalized racism and neocolonialism.” Collectively, she and the contributors to this anthology set out to explore those questions while producing an antidote to the erasure of Black vegans implicit in the dismissal of veganism as “a white thing.” Since many of the contributors themselves came to veganism through books such as Queen Afua's Sacred Woman and Dick Gregory's writings, I'm sure that they hoped to produce a similarly transformative book.
They've done it. In amplifying the voices of Black vegan women, many of whom condemn injustices against nonhuman animals and almost all of whom see diet as a political choice inescapably linked to questions of social and environmental justice, this book kicks over all kinds of stereotypes about vegans, animal advocates, and Black women. But it doesn't stop there. By presenting veganism as a Black feminist and antiracist practice, this book illuminates inconvenient connections that the feminist, antiracist, animal liberation, and environmental movements have too long ignored. In the dialogues that go on across the pages, we get a glimpse of what the necessary conversations about those connections might sound like.
And it doesn't stop there! By highlighting the holistic thinking that informs the everyday choices of Black vegan women, this book puts forward a theory and practice of liberation as connection. By asking and answering uncomfortable questions about chicken wings and factory farming, this anthology demonstrates the necessity of decolonizing desire, not only among formerly colonized peoples but among all of us whose socially constructed appetites are eating up the world. In short, this collection of stories, essays, and poems by what might seem like a too sharply circumscribed demographic of contributors brings us all closer to the theory and practice we need to liberate everybody in this subdivided and subjugated biosphere.
And not a moment too soon. Sistah Vegan arrives at a particularly perilous moment in human history and, indeed, in the life cycle of our planet. Never has there been a more urgent need for us to act from within an integrated awareness not only of the intersections among race, sex, and class oppression but also of the ways that these and other disparities among people influence and are influenced by the ways that people exploit animals and ecosystems. Climate change, fueled more by meat consumption than by transportation, charges forward faster than predicted. In the context of continued racial and economic inequality, this ensures that more unnatural disasters like hurricane Katrina are on the horizon. Meantime, a worldwide surge in meat consumption further depletes and poisons world water resources while bringing the diet-based diseases that already kill so many people of African descent in North America and the global South.
Confronting these emergencies are animal, environmental, and social justice organizations that are too often compromised by internal inconsistencies and lack of solidarity with other movements. All movements seem to start out with a relatively narrow focus, which then widens in response to the recognition of the interconnectedness of oppression. All movements struggle with the tendency for societal imbalances in power and privilege to reproduce themselves within groups. The relatively young animal-advocacy movement has only just begun to wrestle with the often agonizing conflicts that always arise when social change movements broaden their analyses while addressing internal power disparities. Neither as affluent nor all white as it is stereotyped to be, nor as diverse as it ought to be, the movement is in the midst of an active process of internal change initiated by the many animal advocates who, like some of the contributors to this volume, came to animal rights as a result of commitment to social justice or environmental causes. Together, we are working toward a comprehensive analysis and activist practice that includes speciesism along with racism, sexism, and other forms of intraspecies oppression. As is often the case when movements begin to shift, this is more evident at the grassroots level than within the high-profile national organizations, where there is greater resistance to change.
Unfortunately, there has yet to be an answering engagement from environmental and social justice activists. Even though going vegan is the most effective way for people to sharply reduce their own water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, environmental organizations rarely mention this as an option, much less an obligation. Even though the action plan of the 2002 NGO Forum for Food Sovereignty included a call for people in affluent countries to “reduce or eliminate” meat consumption, that agenda has not been taken up by any of the major nonprofit organizations working in the realms of hunger, agriculture, or trade globalization. Feminist activists tend to ignore scholarly work demonstrating the historic and ongoing linkage between speciesism and sexism. Efforts to talk about veganism in progressive circles are often dismissed with the phrase, “That's a white thing.”
Besides bringing the good word about veganism into Black communities, this book encourages activists of all stripes to look at the things they haven't wanted to see. Best of all, it does so in a manner more likely to provoke change than to inflame defensive stubbornness. I think that's because so many of the contributors talk us through their own process of change. In sharing their real lives—missteps, backslides, and changed minds not excluded—they suggest how we too might realize a concept of liberation rooted in connection rather than separation. This is ecowomanism as Layli Phillips defines it: “Social change as healing rather than protest, integration rather than disruption.”
Before I go further, I ought to explain who I am. Breeze Harper asked me to reflect on this anthology from the perspective of the interconnectedness of all oppressions that informs my book, Aftershock. That perspective is an organic product of my life. I'm a white lesbian from a working-class background who now has, by virtue of advanced education, many more options than others who grew up on my block in Baltimore. I came out and quit eating meat as a teenager in the 1970s. Doing gay rights work within a multiracial organization in that Black-majority city, I began to think naively about the intersections of race, gender, and sexual orientation while I was still in my teens, but it wasn't until I was well into my twenties that an offhand remark by an African-American friend provoked me to realize how profoundly I had failed to see my own white privilege or think deeply about the impact of racism in the lives of my friends and lovers of color. What a sickening and rightfully destabilizing realization that was! My subsequent efforts to educate myself about race led me to the writings of many feminists of color, whose insights have informed my work ever since. I am especially grateful to Gloria Yamato's “Something about the subject makes it hard to name” for teaching me that it is possible to be a trustworthy white ally in the struggle against racism. My integration of a race analysis into my teaching and my AIDS activism led me to be invited to work with a center for antiracist education. I've also been involved in struggles against welfare reform, for tenants rights, against rape, for disability rights, and against trade globalization (to name a few). I used to teach speech at a historically Black university and run a chicken sanctuary in a rural region dominated and despoiled by the poultry industry, so I know firsthand the injuries that factory farming inflicts not only on the animals who are its primary victims but also on farmers, workers, and waterways.
When Breeze asked me to write this afterword, I felt uneasy. As a white woman, I felt—and still feel—uncomfortable having the literal last word in an anthology of writing by Black women. On the other hand, I was—and am—excited and honored to have the opportunity to participate in a project I support so wholeheartedly. So, please take this in the spirit it's intended, not as an exegesis by somebody who thinks she's some kind of expert on Black people who practice veganism but rather as the very excited utterances of a fellow reader who is very, very enthused about this book we've both read. That said, here are my thoughts about two of the themes that I see in this anthology and, more important, what I think we all owe its contributors.
Integrity may be the central problem of our time. We live in a social world defined by divisive lies that isolate us from the biosphere and then sort us into constructed categories. Bands of armed men compete across the boundaries of those categories, doing the same damage whether they call themselves gangs or governments. Wielding other weapons, scientists and industrialists split atoms and chop off mountaintops. Ultraviolet radiation streams in through the hole in the ozone layer as polar ice cracks under the stress of accumulated climate change.
We're born into this world with pollutants already in our bloodstreams, our bodies corrupted by atmospheric poisons all the way down to our DNA. Our relationships, both within and across the categories to which we've been assigned, are strained and often break under the weight of the lies we've been told about ourselves and each other. We're estranged from other animals and the rest of the natural world, which we can only vaguely perceive through the haze of the stories we've been told all of our lives.
Sometimes we can't even feel our own bodies! We don't know when we're thirsty or when to stop eating. We can't distinguish our own wishes from the desires implanted by the barrage of advertising and other coercive messages that batters our brains every day. How can we be true to ourselves or others in such a disconnected state? And, if we can't be true, how can we hope to do the things that we need to do to make things right?
In “Terror,” contributor Tara Sophia Bahna-James turns a familiar image upside down, suggesting that the assurance we see in the eyes of dogs is not trust in us but rather self-trust. It's not that they don't know that “someday we may casually break their hearts,” but rather that they know “they will never break ours.” The terror of the title is the fear of hurting others that we all must carry as long as we are so dangerously fractured.
Like most poems of substance, “Terror” takes some thinking about before the breadth of its implications emerge. And, of course, the implications of images differ from person to person. To me, this brief meditation on trustworthiness or the lack thereof goes to the pulsing heart of the problem addressed by so many of the contributors to this anthology: How to gain and maintain bodily and ethical integrity within the context of a world where violence is not only embedded in everyday life but also inscribed on our bodies?
Writing from their lived experience as women of the African diaspora living in North America, the contributors to this anthology are uniquely positioned to see and help their readers to see the often painful interplay between privilege and lack thereof. They know race, sex, and class oppression from the inside—often literally, as their bodies have struggled with health problems such as allergies from wading in a polluted stream and pregnancies made more difficult by misguided medical advice. Upon learning that the diseases afflicting them and their loved ones were related to diet, some were stunned to realize that among the guilty foods were those most prized by their families and communities. Legacies of slavery that had become markers of Black identity were inscribing racist oppression on Black bodies all over again. In coming to desire dead bodies for dinner, they had unwittingly become complicit in the destruction of their own bodies.
And the bodies of others. Animals. Other people. Other Black people.
For anyone who is or has been oppressed, the question of complicity with one's own or—worse—somebody else's oppression can be profoundly unsettling. Tara Sophia Bahna-James writes that, after reading The Dreaded Comparison, “I was not shocked by the existence of oppression, but rather by the complexity of my complicity.” In one of the most vivid moments in the anthology, Michelle R. Loyd-Paige, a “socially aware college professor who challenges her students to think about how . . . their privilege allows them to be unconcerned about issues they do not think pertains to them,” shares with us the moment at which she realized that in “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.”
Writing about sugar, coffee, and other destructive commodities as well as the environmental costs of animal agriculture, Breeze Harper notes that “racially . . . oppressed minorities in America . . . are collectively complicit—and usually unknowingly—in being oppressors to our brothas and sistahs.” Well aware of her mixed position on the matrix of oppression, Melissa Santosa writes of the “privileges we take for granted as humans living in the global North and the responsibility we have for the ecological, animal, and human costs of our way of life.”
Whether their emphasis is on animals, environment, or other people, the contributors to this anthology are united in their answer to complicity: integrity. Like Santosa, all of the contributors to this anthology seem to have “serious problems with dissonance.” The striving for integrity, for actions that are consistent with beliefs, is implicit on every page. Over and over again, we read of discordance leading to discomfort leading to change.
None of the contributors was raised vegan. Many made the shift after realizing that their diets were inconsistent with their commitment to good health for themselves, their families, and their communities. Often a health crisis of some kind supplied the necessary spark as when Nia Yaa and her mother decided to become vegetarian after her grandfather died of colon cancer. Other contributors learned about factory-farming practices that were inconsistent with their ethical or spiritual beliefs. Joi Marie Probus visited some websites suggested by the new (vegan) girlfriend of a friend and found herself shaken in her belief that “I already stood for and against everything worthy of my convictions.” She went vegan that day. Tashee Meadows picked up a pamphlet at an Earth Day celebration and found herself thinking about the parallels between the exploitation of animals and the subjugation of people. That launched a process of self-instruction that culminated in her going to work for an animal-rights organization.
While the stories in this volume differ significantly in their details, just as the contributors sometimes disagree significantly about the meaning of veganism, the themes of honesty, wholeness, and holistic thinking appear consistently. These are the antitheses of the divisive violations at the root of our shared sorrows.
Virtually all of the contributors approach veganism from multiple, integrated angles. Race. Sex. Class. Health. Sexual orientation. Environment. Decolonization. Animal liberation. Try to talk about any one of these in the context of this anthology and you soon find yourself talking about one or more of the others. For example, most of the contributors discuss health but none treat the meat–disease link as an isolated problem. Most contributors approach health from a perspective that is holistic not only in the sense that “holistic health care” differs from allopathic medicine but also in the understanding that personal health is a political problem. Many approach health from an Afrocentric perspective that integrates political and spiritual commitments.
Holistic thinking extends from the personal into the political. Worries about poisons in our bloodstreams lead to worries about industrial pollutants in our waterways. Questions about the wholesomeness of animal products lead to questions about the treatment of animals exploited for food. Investigation of factory farming here at home leads to investigation into slave labor abroad.
Michelle Loyd-Paige writes that, “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.” Delicia Dunham asserts that “When we as a people learn that ‘isms’ are interrelated and that oppression of any being of any kind is tied to our own oppression, then we can begin to overcome those oppressions for the benefit of all.”
For many contributors to this volume, “all” includes nonhuman animals. For Nia Yaa, the Caribbean concept of living Ital “helped me to understand the animal-rights aspect of being a vegetarian.”
Many of the contributors are animal-rights activists or support that struggle even if they are not active within it. Breeze Harper argues that “we must extend our antiracist and antipoverty beliefs to all people, nonhuman animals, and Mother Gaia.”
Some contributors disagree. Ma'at Sincere Earth says that she “doesn't understand” animal rights, feeling that time spent pursuing that goal would be better spent in the pursuit of human rights. But she, too, comes from a perspective of connection rather than lack of compassion, arguing that animal abuse is rooted in social inequality and agreeing that “they should pass laws regulating and limiting the unethical treatment of animals.” Like many animal advocates, she identifies the consumption of animals as the most urgent problem facing them.
But we ought not glide too quickly over the disagreement between Sincere Earth, who dares animal activists to “scream at a brother in the 'hood wearing a fur” and Delicia Dunham, who explicitly challenges the idea that her Black identity means that she “must be ever-rocking the chinchilla coats” and “dissing, if not totally ignoring, anyone who dares to call me out about my choices.” No, most brothers in the 'hood probably don't care what people they've never met think about their clothing choices. Why would they? Antifur tirades of distant animal-rights activists probably seem as irrelevant to them as the antigay tirades of Christian fundamentalists seem to me. That's why conversations about the ethics of chinchilla coats and dog fighting have to go on within Black communities rather than across the (real or perceived) racial divide between organized animal activism and communities of color. One of the greatest strengths of this anthology is that its contributors don't always agree. That's how such urgently needed conversations begin.
This book began when Breeze Harper “listened in” on a virtual conversation about one of the most contentious questions of all: Whether and how to compare injustices perpetrated against animals to historic and ongoing injustices perpetrated against people of African descent in the Americas. Given the media coverage of angry denunciations of such comparisons, readers may be surprised by how frequently contributors to this volume describe themselves making that link. While exploring the concept of Ital, Nia Yaa “remembered seeing animals packed on farms and in trucks. They were being treated just like our enslaved ancestors.” Tashee Meadows researched factory farming and found herself thinking “of my ancestry as a Black woman: the rapes, unwanted pregnancies, captivity, stolen babies, grieving mothers, horrific transports, and the physical, mental, and spiritual pain.” Looking at images of caged animals, she “thought of the more than two million Americans who know cages firsthand in the prison-industrial complex.”
Some of the contributors themselves may have been surprised to find their thoughts trending in that direction. Michelle Loyd-Paige writes that “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.” In her description of her chicken-wing epiphany and in other contributions, we can hear the thudding emotional reverberations of suddenly thinking something you never thought you would think.
Scholars can talk about how the idea of race grew out of the idea of breed as understood by the inheritors of patriarchal and pastoral cultures whose ideas about daughters and dairy cows evolved in tandem. Activists can and should think deeply about how that helps us to understand the sexualization of race and the “race-ing” of gender as well as the causal and continuing role that speciesism plays in both racism and sexism. But the power of such theorizing pales in comparison to the impact of the reaction—at once visceral and ethical—of a Black woman who, like the young Tashee Meadows, encounters an image of animal exploitation and thinks, “That's what they did to us. It's not okay, no matter who they do it to.”
It's that reaction, I think, that PETA tried, however heavy-handedly, to provoke with the controversial exhibit that did in fact provoke the train of thought that led to this anthology. I hope that this anthology teaches animal advocates not that they ought to be trying to provoke such reactions but rather that they can trust that people are going to make the connections that are most meaningful to them without special prompting. Tashee Meadows didn't need to be shown pictures of slave transport ships or people in prison to perceive the parallels. And, because nobody was trying to make her think about slavery, she didn't feel like the suffering of her ancestors was being manipulated to make her see somebody else's point of view. When she wrote about her own perceptions of those parallels for this anthology, she started with the plain facts about the treatment of animals and then shared her own reactions to those facts, implicitly insisting that we face the facts but not demanding that we share her associations.
In this and other contributions, we begin to see what Black animal advocacy looks like. All of the contributors who advocate for animal rights do so within an understanding that speciesism is meaningfully linked to social injustice and environmental despoliation. But note: none suggests that speciesism is worth our time only because of those links. I also notice that some of the contributors who are not advocates of animal rights still condemn the cruelties implicit in animal agriculture and sometimes go further than that.
Milton Mills coined the phrase “dietary racism” for the institutionalized racism implicit in USDA dietary guidelines that recommend daily dairy consumption, despite the fact that the majority of African-Americans are lactose intolerant. A scattering of activists and nongovernmental organizations in the global South, particularly in Asia and the Pacific Islands, have begun to agitate against the “dietary colonialism” or “dietary imperialism” that began when Europeans forcibly replaced subsistence crops with cash crops, an approach that continues with trade globalization policies that make it cheaper for poor people to eat at fast-food restaurants owned by multinational corporations than to buy healthy food from local farmers and vendors. Sistah Vegan brings us a new tool to use in the struggle against the insidious process that has brought heart disease and diabetes to people of African, Asian, and indigenous American descent around the world.
Let me say that again, because it might be hard to swallow in one gulp: desire for the steaks and shakes and deep-fried mystery meats that clog the arteries of so many African-Americans might best be seen as a form of literally internalized colonialism. And now come the sistah vegans asking other Black people to recognize their appetites as potential artifacts of white colonial rule. Anyone who has wrestled with the emotional reverberations of realizing that an intimate craving is the result of socialization—or, even worse, some kind of abuse—knows how sickening such revelations can be. And yet that nausea must be gone through in order to purge our bodies of the infectious ideologies that lead us to poison ourselves, each other, and the earth.
It may seem strange to think about going vegan as a way to take back your body, especially if you've ever resented vegetarians telling you what you ought and ought not eat. Even though eating meat is something you do to somebody else's body, it feels like a purely private choice that ought not concern others. That's because the “somebody else” in question has been conveniently erased. Also mostly invisible are the historic and ongoing social processes that have helped to shape your desires. The process of decolonization of desire requires us to give up pleasures that are hurtful to us or others but also allows us to reclaim the natural pleasures that our socialization suppressed.
Breeze Harper was maybe on to something when, at the start of the process that has birthed this anthology, she wondered whether there might be some reason that the lone voice speaking up for animals on BlackPlanet was that of a Black lesbian. And maybe it is not a coincidence that such a question would lead eventually to a theory of veganism as potentially a central component to decolonization. Those of us who come out despite societal pressure to be straight maintain our integrity by reaching for our hearts' desires rather than for the partners we have been taught we ought to take. Those of us who go vegan even though we may still desire animal-based foods maintain our integrity by forgoing desires that were implanted in us. In both instances, we preserve our ethical, emotional, and physical wholeness by resisting the colonization of our most intimate wishes.
Back in the 1970s, those of us who dared to work for gay liberation were, like the animal liberationists of today, often dismissed for the seeming silliness of our concerns. At best, we were frittering away our time on a bourgeois issue of interest only to those too privileged to worry about anything else. At worst, we were stealing energy and resources from much more serious problems. Homosexuality itself, of course, was “a white thing.”
Collectively, Black lesbian and gay liberationists (and other queer people of color) raised their voices against such misperceptions and for a struggle against heterosexism that would be linked with, rather than estranged from, struggles against racism, sexism, and other injustices. Often writing in small press anthologies like Home Girls and This Bridge Called My Back, feminists of color helped us all to think through the many ways that sexism, racism, and heterosexism support, compound, and interact with each other. I expect that this volume will be similarly helpful when it comes to speciesism.
The intersections between speciesism and heterosexism go beyond the superficially similar dismissal of veganism and homosexuality as “white things.” Most of the stereotypes by which we excuse the exploitation of animals began as justifications for animal husbandry, the success of which depends entirely on the ability to control reproduction. Homophobia serves the same essential function for patriarchy, policing gender roles so that it will be easier for men to exercise reproductive control over women.
Here in the Americas, both homophobia and factory farming are direct legacies of colonization. Often seeing themselves as superior because they ate more meat, invading Europeans brought animal captives with them. Seen by both Catholic conquistadors and Protestant pilgrims as a sign of godless animality, same-sex pleasure was ruthlessly suppressed throughout the process of the subjugation of the Americas. When the Tairona Indians on the Caribbean coast of what is now Colombia rebelled in defense of their sexual customs, the resulting repression nearly erased eighty communities. As Eduardo Galeano has remarked, it is one of the ironies of history that the Caribbean, where indigenous people literally fought for their right to same-sex pleasure, is now among the most homophobic regions of the world. Just as many African-Americans perceive unhealthy food preferences that are legacies of slavery as valued aspects of Black culture, many Jamaicans claim homophobia as an authentic element of Caribbean culture.
Even thinking about these ironies feels queasy. Speaking of them is even more jeopardizing. Confronting them truly is a process of decolonization, with all of the internal turmoil that always attends such upheavals. Nonetheless, like the contributors to this volume, women around the world are asserting their own appetites against those imposed by governments or multinational corporations. Lesbian activists continue to organize in Thailand and Uganda despite violent government repression in the name of traditional culture. From the highlands of the South American Andes to the lowlands of sub-Saharan Africa, women farmers are returning to traditional vegetable varieties, thereby improving the health of their families, the stability of their ecosystems, and the economies of their communities. And so the decolonization of desire brings us around again to liberation as connection.
Breeze Harper did us all a favor by bringing together the voices of a diverse group of Black-identified vegan women. The contributors shared their stories, reflections, and aspirations, even when it must have been difficult to write honestly about such emotionally complicated and ethically challenging subjects. Now it's our turn to extend the conversation.
Many of the contributors to this anthology write of being turned around by books. I know I have been. Maybe you have been, too. This is one of those books that will be personally meaningful to many readers while also helping to shape the thinking of scholars and activists for years to come. But only if we do our part. Small-press books don't distribute themselves. Independent publishers don't have lots of money for publicity. It's up to those of us who believe in this book to get it into bookstores, libraries, and the hands of other readers.
Share this book with your friends and relatives, veg*n and nonveg*n alike. Make sure that your local public library has a copy. Ask your local independent book and grocery stores to carry it. If you can afford to do so, buy a copy for a local organization working on issues of race, health, or poverty. Make sure your local vegetarian society knows about it. Review it on your blog, in your local independent newspaper, or for the newsletter of an organization to which you belong.
Visit the Sistah Vegan Project website (sistahveganproject.com) to find out what's next for the project. If you consider yourself a sistah vegan or ally, join the project listserv and jump into the conversation. Carry the conversation into your community by seizing every opportunity to write or talk about the ideas and information in the book. Talk with your coworkers or neighbors. Write letters to your local newspaper.
But don't stop with words. The contributors to this anthology all made changes in their lives in response to what they learned about how their dietary decisions were affecting their own lives and the lives of others. We all need to be similarly willing to change in response to new information now and into the future.
But don't stop with your own diet. Find out whether your local health-food store takes food stamps and what your local school district is putting into its free or subsidized meals. Join or initiate efforts to bring a farmers market into a low-income community or get a soy milk option added to your local school milk program. Support and defend community gardens that grow fresh food for local families while offering meaningful activities for local youth. At the national level, contest the use of your tax dollars to subsidize those one dollar cheeseburgers at fast-food restaurants, which cost so little only because of the farm aid doled out to industrial animal agriculture. Find out what the Food Empowerment Project and other national organizations are doing to empower low-income people to make healthy food choices.
Maybe you're already busy with activism in other realms. You can still be sure to integrate the connections explored in this book into your work. (And, of course, you'll have more energy for that work and more years to do it if you're vegan!) If you've not been in the habit of doing so, please do begin to include vegetarian and animal advocacy organizations among your potential coalition partners.
As contributor Layli Phillips writes, “Contrary to what others looking in might perceive, all this actually feels really good.” So let's end by remembering the joys of connection and the pleasures that come when we remember to listen to our bodies' true desires.
When we decolonize desire, we are better able to enjoy uncomplicated sensual pleasure. Fruit tastes better to tastebuds that haven't been barraged by high-fructose corn syrup. Giving up those mass-produced animal-tested soaps provokes us to explore the rich lathers and complex scents of handmade locally produced soaps. All of these and other vegan delights bring us into better communion with ourselves.
When we seek our own liberation through connection with others, striving for Melissa Santosa's “authentic life of informed interdependence,” we have more and better relationships. We have more true friends and are better friends to others. We can count on the support of the branches of a much more extensive family tree.
All of this is the icing on the (whole grain, naturally sweetened) vegan cupcake. The contributors to this volume remind us of the basic benefits of veganism: more energy, improved health, and an overall feeling of physical and spiritual well-being. It feels great to get those rewards for doing something that, in the words of Nia Yaa, can “save the world and make a better living space for us all.”
Tashee Meadows says, “If we are what we eat, we can choose to be fear and terror or bright green sprigs of broccoli. We can choose to be orphans and prisoners or strong leafy collards. We can choose to be pain and death or vibrant mangos.” The sistah vegans are going with the mangos. What about you?