and promote our work, how much compensation we’re receiving compared to other artists—and in doing so, we fail to recognize the power we do have. If somebody whines because their novel or screenplay hasn’t sold or if they plummet into existential crisis because nobody is buying their art, we tell them to pick themselves up and get back to it. We don’t feel sympathetic toward those who don’t do the work they need to do in order to succeed. Why do we expect people to take responsibility for their decisions in every aspect of life except their personal health?
Of all our cultural taboos, this I see as the most tragic. A heavy meat eater has a heart attack or is diagnosed with cancer, and we are expected to react with complete sympathy, as if the disease chose them at random. The patient’s diet is “the elephant in the room,” even as an orderly arrives with a lunch tray brimming with highly processed, chemical-laden animal products—right down to the cherry Jell-O jiggling in the little plastic cup.
Truth is—unless the options available to you are the result of systemic racismVI—your diet can never be a “personal choice,” because what you choose to eat affects both the animals who die to become your dinner and every human in your life who will bear the burden of caring for you when you get sick. Blaming bad genes while continuing to eat food that research has proven time and again to be detrimental to our health would, in a saner world, be one definition of insanity. It makes me wish people would just come out and say “You know what? I love steak and hamburgers so much that I really don’t care if I end up on an operating table twenty years from now.” That, at least, would be honest.
And yes, there will always be anecdotes of spry centenarians who indulge in bacon and cigars on a daily basis, but as vegan dietitian Marty Davey quips, “Everybody has an Uncle Fred—the rest of us follow biochemistry.” It’s not intelligent strategy to live as if you’re destined to be one of the outliers.
This isn’t a hypothetical, either. A colleague I met at a literary festival over a decade ago, a bestselling thriller writer, recently posted on Facebook that he is facing open-heart surgery. Needless to say, he is scared out of his mind, and hundreds of friends left comments with heartfelt wishes for his swift recovery. I wanted to be one of those friends. But if I were to message him and say, “Hey, once you get through this, look into switching to a plant-based diet, okay?”, my concern might read too much like sanctimony. I can only hope this friend discovers the medical research on his own.
Kerry Lemon went vegan to help heal an illness, and looking back on that difficult period, she says, “I now feel oddly grateful that I became unwell and was forced to live a more ethical life.” So, you, the artist, have a critical decision to make—a choice you still make by changing nothing. You can take the risk of, twenty or thirty or forty years from now, logging weeks in a hospital bed awaiting triple-bypass surgery, enduring the indignities of Jell-O for lunch and your bottom hanging out of a skimpy blue hospital gown.
Or you could do what you need to do to ensure that at seventy, eighty, and ninety years of age, you’ll be at your desk or easel or microphone where you belong.
Better Choices = Better Health = Better Art
Stepping into your creative destiny requires accepting responsibility for your actions (and inactions). Open your notebook and spend some time considering how you might be giving your power away.
Part two: are you able to see your creative practice in a more holistic manner—to recognize that sound physical health results in greater productivity and artistic satisfaction?
If you don’t feel ready to eschew all animal products just yet, make a note of everything you eat for the next three days, including portion estimates. Then visit the USDA National Nutrient Database (https://ndb.nal.usda.gov) and make a note of the saturated fat and cholesterol content of each item. Tally it up. You may be shocked at what you find, especially if you like to think of yourself as a relatively healthy eater. Once you’ve switched to a vegan or mostly-vegan diet, you can use this site to tally up the protein content of everything you eat—and as long as you’re eating balanced and colorful meals, that number will be a pleasant surprise.
V Incidentally, America’s most famous pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, recommended a plant-based diet for children in his seventh and final edition of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, published in 1998 (two months after Spock passed away at nearly ninety-five). Spock himself had begun eating vegan in 1991 after a series of illnesses, and in those last seven years he enjoyed a fifty-pound weight loss and increased mobility.
VI It isn’t a simple matter of “personal choice” even when fresh produce is available, as Starr Carrington writes in “Food Justice and Race in the US,”. “Before imposing shame upon the consumer, one needs to truly analyze the difference between accessibility and affordability.” (187) Check out Madrabbits.org for solid advice on eating well in a “food swamp” and/or on a fixed income.
Sticking point #6: “Too many of my ideas don’t seem worth executing. Maybe I have nothing new to offer.”
For two decades now, a group of ten Viennese musicians have visited the local produce market in search of new instruments. One chooses a pumpkin to serve for her drum, another a large head of celery for a guitar, another a calabash for a horn. Back at the workshop, a flutist drills a hole through the core of a carrot of improbable size, which begins to resemble a woodwind instrument the more he labors on it. The members of the orchestra spend hours fashioning these vegetables into leek violins and cucumber-o-phones, and then they go on stage to perform original compositions inspired by Kraftwerk, John Cage, and Frank Zappa. After the concert, the audience is invited to partake of a stew made from every last scrap of produce that wasn’t used in the performance.
When I hear someone lamenting their inability to come up with ideas that please them, it seems to me the artist in question needs to approach their work from a radically different angle. The underlying trouble isn’t a lack of fresh or viable ideas (or talent), it’s a deficiency of curiosity resulting from fatigue and/or discouragement, which can usually be remedied with a good night’s sleep, a wholesome breakfast, and a block of time set aside for deliberate, yet spontaneous, exploration. You don’t have to leave your house, or your kitchen. Food is the obvious place to begin reviving yourself. You are literally refilling your well, yes, but when you go out of your way to try something new, or when you prepare familiar foods in unfamiliar ways, you are forming new pathways in your brain that will eventually lead you out of your rut. After declaring that there is no such thing as originality, the adman John Hegarty writes in his book Hegarty on Creativity: There Are No Rules, “The value of an idea is in how it draws its inspiration from the world around us and then reinterprets it in a way we haven’t seen before.”
I’m not an entrepreneur, but I find vegan food research and development incredibly inspiring. Tell these geniuses it can’t be done—marinated soy protein you could mistake for real pork, or a cultured “cheese” that’s as rich and tangy as a dairy product—and they will make it happen, even if it takes years and years of trial and error. And if it hasn’t been done yet, I promise you they’re working on it.
What do innovative thinkers from Leonardo da Vinci to the Vegetable Orchestra have in common? A healthy disrespect for tradition. A tradition is self-justifying—we should do it this way because we always have—and while culture and tradition give us a vital sense of continuity and belonging, they also discourage innovative thinking. Over time any given culture must evolve into a wiser version of itself, and it’s up to individual members to make that evolution happen. “I assure you, even
