know perfection is unattainable. But if I can’t do it as perfectly as humanly possible, why do it at all?”
In the 1940 film, My Favorite Wife, Cary Grant plays a presumed widower whose wife (played by Irene Dunne) was lost at sea seven years before. Naturally, Irene finds her way back from the desert isle just as Cary’s about to marry again. As the long-separated couple reacquaint themselves, Cary becomes suspicious of the man with whom Irene was shipwrecked (played by Randolph Scott). How could they be stuck on an island together for seven years without any messing around?
Cary’s first glimpse of his competition happens as Randolph executes an impressive dive off the high board into a hotel swimming pool. When the three sit down for lunch, Cary seems desperate to pick any sort of hole in the man’s genial and confident demeanor (especially when he finds out they’ve spent the past seven years jokingly calling each other “Adam” and “Eve.”) His perfection is infuriating. When the waiter recommends the turkey à la king, Cary turns to Randolph with a steely glint in his eye. “Does turkey appeal to you, or do you confine yourself to raw meat?”
“Never touch it,” the man replies blithely. “I am strictly a vegetarian.” He proceeds to order “a glass of carrot juice, a milkshake, and some raw carrots” (your clue that the screenwriter would have ordered the turkey). Randolph tells Cary that while he and Irene never behaved dishonorably on that desert isle, now that Cary is about to be remarried, he’d like to marry Irene. “I’ve known your wife for seven years,” he says, “and no man could ask for a better companion, a truer friend, or a more charming playmate.”
“Isn’t he impulsive?” Irene laughs, and Cary loses his temper. “Impulsive? He’s full of carrots!”
Randolph’s character is strong, handsome, easygoing, respectful, and sincere, but the audience knows he doesn’t stand a chance. Cary’s jealousy is comfortingly realistic, whereas a man such as Randolph could not possibly exist in real life.
Popular culture loves to paint vegetarians—never mind vegans!—as humorless clods strapping themselves to an impossible ideal, and they’ve been doing it since PythagorasIV (who isn’t nearly as well known for his ethical vegetarianism as he is for a2 + b2 = c2). One of the more notorious examples in the history of animal-rights activism is Henry Brougham’s dressing-down of Joseph Ritson, author of An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty, in the Edinburgh Review in April 1803. Not only was Ritson writing his treatise using quill-feathers stolen from geese and oak-gall ink (inevitably containing crushed insects) by the light of oil from slaughtered whales, but as Tristram Stuart wryly recaps, the author (along with every other human who ever lived) was “murdering whole ecologies of microscopic organisms every time he washed his armpits.” Ritson wore wool and leather, drank milk stolen from calves, and ate eggs that should have grown into chickens.
IV Since Pythagoras was the most renowned vegetarian of the ancient world, we were called “Pythagoreans” before the word “vegetarian” was coined in 1842.
Brougham was right. There are animal byproducts in all sorts of things I use, from the tires on my rental car to the glue that holds my secondhand furniture together. The lettuce I buy at the grocery store might be grown using fertilizer made from cow manure. If I were to adopt a cat, I’d have to feed her meat because cats are obligate carnivores. I’m killing ants and God only knows how many more creatures every time I go for a walk in the woods.
So why am I sticking with this lifestyle if I can’t do it perfectly? Why even bother?
Because Donald Watson and his Vegan Society cofounders knew full well that none of us could possibly “do” veganism to perfection. That’s why they defined it as “a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.”
If I had said, “I must write the perfect novel; my prose must be as shiveringly gorgeous as Angela Carter’s, my world-building as visionary as Octavia Butler’s,” then I’d turn into that character in The Plague by Albert Camus, who pens the opening paragraph of his magnum opus and spends the rest of his life fussing over it. People like Henry Brougham see the imperfect mess of real-world living as a convenient escape hatch: there’s no dodging hypocrisy, so it doesn’t matter if we engage in the avoidable forms. The person who lives his life by this line of thinking most likely won’t ever recognize its destructiveness—not even on the day he finds he can’t lift himself out of his favorite armchair, his feet swollen and purple with gout and his arteries hardened to caulk.
There’s always been a great deal of avoidable harm in the arts too: the living animal body transformed into a glassy-eyed unmoving copy of itself, a delicate design etched into the tooth enamel of the sperm whale, the ivory tusk fashioned into piano keys. Scrimshaw and taxidermy have long since fallen out of fashion for ethical reasons, but there’s plenty more that’s not so obvious: the mink and camel hair in our paintbrushes, the glue made from marrow, the ink from bone char, the ox gall in the box of watercolors. All the trees felled to bear our words or the tubes of dried-up acrylic paint destined for the landfill. We don’t like to linger on how much destruction has to happen to make our creative pursuits possible, but why destroy more than we have to?
The justifications for continuing to eat and use animals seem to parallel the justifications I hear for why they’re not following through on the art they once seemed so eager to make. “I’m not good enough.” “This is just the way I’m built.” “I could never do what you do.” I feel saddened and frustrated by their defeatism—which is, in essence, not much more than egotistical problem seeking. They look at me and see the straight man who wouldn’t lay a finger on somebody else’s exceptionally pretty wife in seven whole years of solitude, a person who orders carrot juice for lunch. If the standard is impossible, it’s much easier to let themselves off the hook.
As counterintuitive as it may seem at first, going vegan has made me less of a perfectionist. Much of this mellowing out has to do with what I call “ego management.” No one ever enjoys realizing they’re wrong, that they’ve been laboring under a misapprehension, and so, this lifestyle has helped to crystallize a fundamental truth for me: that I can’t truly grow before owning up to my flaws.
I understand now that my skills are best put to use in advocating for those who cannot speak for themselves, at least not in any human language. Even when I’m writing fiction that seemingly has nothing to do with animal rights, I keep in mind something Plath once wrote, that “perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.” A fertile mind is an intricate tapestry of contradictions and desires that are, as Brougham put it, “lamentably incongruous and motley.” But perhaps our consistency lies in always aiming to do better.
Go On, Ask for the Carrot Juice
Think of a person for whom you feel an intense admiration, someone you’ve always wanted to be more like. Maybe they devote much of their free time to an important cause, or they’re amazingly productive and fulfilled in their work, or they just seem so darn happy all—the—time.
If you actually know this person, take a deep breath and ask if you can speak to them candidly for a few minutes. Tell them how highly you regard them and ask if they have any advice to offer you. If this person is a celebrity or someone else you can only observe at a distance, spend some time searching online for any interviews they’ve done or pieces they’ve written about their background, beliefs, and motivations.
Either way, the chances are exceedingly high that this person you revere isn’t some kind of superhero who lives up to impossible standards—that the qualities you most admire in them are qualities you can cultivate in yourself.
