style="font-size:15px;"> “This thing is bigger than you,” Jamey was telling me. The animals, the planet, our future: there could be no better motives.
In that moment, I made a commitment, but I didn’t anticipate the magnitude of the change I’d experience over the next few weeks. Up to that point in my career as a novelist, I invariably “suffered” trough periods in between books, and these periods of frustration might last up to two years. I would start a new story and read over the pages with mounting despair. Maybe I had no more novels in me—not good ones, anyway. I was trying to clamber out of one of these troughs at the time of my trip to India, but it had never occurred to me that my diet might have an effect on my creative life.
A few days after I decided to go vegan, I came down with sunstroke. Tossing and turning under a mosquito net in the “healing hut,” I felt depleted and full to bursting at the same time, and whenever I surfaced out of a fever dream I reached for my journal. I was getting ideas for everything: novels and short stories and blog posts and recipes I might invent or reinvent. Best of all, a novel idea I’d been struggling with for years finally resolved itself in two simple words: gothic satire. (I still haven’t gotten around to that one. I’m keeping it in my pocket like a cashew-milk caramel, savoring the anticipation.)
I got well again, and the ideas kept coming; since then I’ve written six more books without so much as a daylong trough. One explanation is psychospiritual: there is no angst in my creative work because I’m no longer consuming the fear and grief of cows whose babies have been taken away from them to provide milk for human consumption. There may be a scientific basis for this too: as pharmacology researchers Hassan Malekinejad and Aysa Rezabakhsh wrote in the Iranian Journal of Public Health in 2015, “The naturally occurring hormones in dairy foods have biological effects in humans and animals, which are ranging from growth-promoting effects that related to sex steroids, to carcinogenic properties that associate to some active metabolites of oestrogens and IGF-1.” (That’s “insulin-like growth factor 1,” a hormone produced in highest levels during puberty.) Scientists have also confirmed a link between cancer and the artificial growth hormones commonly used by the livestock industry, and they can offer a biochemical explanation as to why meat from stressed animals is so often discarded as “PSE” (pale, soft, exudative) or “DFD” (dark, firm, dry). Unfortunately, there’s shockingly little research on the connection between the adrenaline, cortisol, and other stress hormones coursing through a frightened animal’s bloodstream and the chronic anxiety of the human who consumes that animal’s flesh.
Framed in these terms, the dark feelings we take for granted in the creative process seem rather karmic. Just now, I found one of my old blog posts from 2008 with notes on my creative cycle, and I had to laugh out loud when I read, “I have never finished revising one novel and started writing the new one the following week or month (and I’ve always wondered about those writers who say they do).” Talk about proving myself wrong—though, unfortunately, many health professionals aren’t willing to do the same. If you Google information on vegan diets, you’ll find a great many blog articles with an obvious anti-vegan bias written by medical doctors, psychologists, and nutritionists who warn against a plant-based diet because the evidence in favor contradicts years’ worth of training. “Depression is related to inflammation in the body and low levels of serotonin,” says Dr. Ulka Agarwal of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “Plant-based foods naturally lower inflammation in the body because they are naturally low in fat and high in antioxidants. High vegetable intake increases the amount of B vitamins in the diet, which have been found to affect mood.” My own experience jives with scientific study results correlating a vegan diet with lighter moodII and higher energy levels.
In that blog post from 2008, I write about the three Hindu gods sometimes employed to personify the creative cycleIII: Brahma, “the creator,” is the electric excitement you feel when you’ve found the perfect idea, Vishnu, “the maintainer,” represents the actual work, and Shiva, “the destroyer,” ushers in a period of chaos or inactivity in between projects (or having to scrap the work altogether, Heaven forbid). These three show up very differently for me nowadays: my experience of the Brahma phase isn’t a phase at all; it’s a constant. And as for Vishnu, I go back and forth between days and weekends at the library followed by late-night typing in bed (as I am doing now) and more “reasonable” hours. And Shiva doesn’t destroy, he clarifies—though you might say clarity is a form of destruction. As Bernard Shaw writes in Major Barbara, “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.”
Visual artist Jolynn Van Asten, who teaches transformational art workshops in Phoenix, Arizona, tells me going vegan has eliminated creative block for her too and that there’s no need to “summon the Muse” anymore: “Now I can access ‘flow’ with just an intention to do so—instantly.” I can’t guarantee that if you go vegan your creative growth will be as dramatic as ours has been—“your mileage may vary” and all—but it’s certainly worth a thirty-day test run, don’t you think? I’ve explored my creative potential as an omnivore, a vegetarian, and a vegan, and I feel too full of joy and purpose ever to go back on option three.
I From the Orbital song.
II In cases of clinical depression, a plant-based diet may work in concert with medication and other therapies.
III I hope the point I’m making here is insightful enough to justify the cultural appropriation.
A knitting lesson at Sadhana Forest.
Better Than Celery for Dinner
Like we said, everything you could ever want to know about eating vegan is instantaneously accessible. So, start poking around! Search the #vegan or #plantbased hashtags on Instagram and drool over all the colorful and beautifully presented food photography, read nutrition primers (see resources on page 259) look up vegan versions of your favorite dishes, and search for any unfamiliar ingredients. You don’t even need to make or change anything yet. Just see what’s out there.
Secondly, after meals and snacks, jot down a few notes about how you feel. How’s your energy? Your digestion? Your mood? Let yourself feel more curious about what’s going on in your own body.
Sticking point #2: “Sometimes I feel totally self-assured, and other times I dislike myself so intensely that I can’t lift a finger to make anything.”
When I was a child, I loved nothing better than to draw. You could give me a small stack of typing paper and a boxful of markers, and I’d be content for hours. My parents sent me to drawing and pottery classes at the local arts center, and my teachers were very encouraging. I had ability, and I took pride in that—maybe a little too much. Our elementary school art teacher used to hang our work in the hallway outside the cafeteria, and I remember waiting in the lunch line, looking up at a row of still lifes—apples, done in pastel—and playing a game of “which drawing is the best?” I’d choose one, and when I got close enough to see the signature, I’d remember with such pleasure that it was mine.
I played this game most lunchtimes until our teacher took down the apples.
I have another clear memory of the South Valley cafeteria. Picture me: seven years old, all knees and elbows, with awkwardly cropped hair thanks to a classroom lice epidemic. I am sitting in front of a Styrofoam tray with a cheesesteak ready to be washed down with a little carton of 2 percent
