Worthless and Invisible: the Economic Erasing of the Animals We Eat

Years ago, I read something that struck me and has stayed with me ever since. It went something like this: if fish could talk, “water” is the last word they would use to describe their environment. What we are immersed in, we don’t notice. From my conversations with people who eat animals - good people, kind people, aware people - I find this adaptation to using animals for our ends to be so fully integrated, it’s not even noticed, like the air around us. When we are so surrounded by a prevailing set of beliefs from birth on that we internalize it as a universal law or truth, we scarcely notice it. What humans do to other animals, and our self-imposed position on the hierarchy of importance, is one of those things we take as a given human right. The essential conceit that animals are ours to use as we wish is often invisible and unspoken yet is as omnipresent as the air we breathe so it’s not surprising that most fail to notice it. When this is underpinning the privileges we enjoy and want to continue to enjoy with an untroubled conscience, it is all but imperceptible to our eyes. 

One of the most glaringly obvious examples that should give people pause is how animal products on the market are priced compared to those items that are without them. Vegans notice this because we have a different lens through which we view the world but it is not something I see acknowledged by those who consume animals. What I am referring to here is this often complete devaluation of the animals humans eat. The instances of this are too numerous to cite here but here are just a few examples I encountered in a conventional grocery store, a natural foods grocery store, and a couple restaurants. What does this say about us? What does it say about our values? What does it say about whom or what we 

value? What are the deeper implications?

Dairy

We see that potato chips with sour cream cost the same as potato chips with salt and pepper. The milk products added to the sour cream variety pass no costs on to the consumer. To produce the milk that humans consume, heifers are forcibly impregnated and their calves are taken from them very shortly after birth so the milk produced for their babies can be sold at our markets. The female calves will be born into the same captivity as their mothers, and the male offspring will largely fuel the veal industry. The females will continue the cycles of forced impregnation, gestation, birth, and milking until she is no longer deemed profitable to the industry and then she is killed for meat, too. The sour cream variety of Kettle brand potato chips has been priced equal to that of salt and pepper. This means that the experience of the female cows born into this cycle of exploitation and violence, and that of her calves born into the same kind of subjugation, is either of no additional cost to the industry and consumers or is considered the same value of salt and pepper. Actually, since the sour cream variety already has salt in it, the milk from a cow is equal to pepper.

Still on the chip aisle, we see the same phenomenon: dip with beans and tomatoes cost the same as queso, made with cow’s milk. Keeping in mind the costs of the animal foods industry on our taxpayers and quality of life - the overflowing fecal lagoons, diminished air quality, climate change attributable to the industry and so on - makes this same price confusing. Considering that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that animal husbandry accounts for 18% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, and how deeply the steep financial and personal costs of climate change will be felt for generations to come, the fact that dairy milk costs no more than another product seems hard to accept.

Think it’s just the cheap dairy? Think again. Please keep in mind that dairy cows on organic farms are kept in the same cycle of forced impregnation-to-milking until they are no longer deemed profitable and the male calves still are born to the same fate as their conventional dairy counterparts. 

Eggs

Whether these bagels are simply plain or have added egg, they are same price here: .59 cents each. This means that the eggs have no added cost to the consumer and are presumably inexpensive enough for the producer to not have to recoup the expense of that added ingredient. Layer hens are often considered the ultimate devalued beings: they are maintained as virtual egg factories, most commonly de-beaked, kept in overcrowded, unnatural conditions, often put through a torturous forced molting to prolong their egg-laying capabilities and killed for cheap meat when they are considered “spent.” Male layer chicks, worthless to the industry whether they are organic or not, are killed through whatever means are easiest - suffocation, gassing, crushing - shortly after they are born. Despite their suffering and the damage egg production wreaks on local ecosystems as well as the global repercussions of the industry, there is no difference in cost between an egg bagel and a plain bagel here.  Egg or no egg, you pay the same. The hens and all they went through to produce their eggs, all the killed male chicks and captive female ones, are erased from the experience altogether. 

Even pastured, so-called free range eggs from local farms may have no value added. These hens lived and died to satisfy our taste preferences and habits yet their eggs weren’t worth anything. 

Chickens on a "free-range" farm.

Surely an animal’s actual dead body must have some value, though, right? 

Meat

Not necessarily. These beans with bacon and vegetarian beans cost the same price despite the addition of animal flesh in one. To create the bacon humans eat, pigs are often castrated, have their ears notched and their tails cut without anesthesia. Breeding sows are impregnated, their piglets are removed from them shortly following their birth and they receive some early milk through the bars of a farrowing crate before they are removed in order to maintain meat production; most breeding sows are kept in gestation crates for nearly their entire adult lives until they are killed. Whether they are given organic feed or not, pigs are still bred and killed to satisfy our taste preferences. Despite the feel-good message of the organic and "free-range" meat industry, there is simply not enough land mass to give the animals people eat for food any decent quality of life given global consumption habits. It is a mathematical impossibility. It is an elitist, unrealistic product still entrenched in violence.  

Large concentrations of animals also cause tremendous ecological damage: waste runoff from hog and chicken farms pollute our waterways with nitrogen and phosphorus, which cause algal blooms that deplete the oxygen necessary to support marine life. The Chesapeake Bay on the East Coast, once a flourishing estuary with a diverse variety of species, was identified in the 1970s as one of the first marine dead zones. The cost of cleaning up the bay was estimated at $19 billion, $11 billion going toward “nutrient reduction.” Today, there are more than 400 dead zones throughout the world, yet these beans with bacon cost the same as vegetarian beans. 

The "Big Stuff" crackers with cheese is still the same price as the regular crackers with peanut butter.  

Eating out, we see the same principle of devaluation again and again. 

At Subway, their “value menu” of $5.00 sandwiches includes the Black Forest Ham, B.L.T., Cold Cuts, Egg and Cheese and Veggie Delight. All include cheese, vegetables and condiments. For a vegan, the cheese would be omitted from the Veggie Delight. Even though these other sandwiches contain animal flesh or eggs, they cost no more than the Veggie Delight and they can also include all the same other components. In the case of this $5.00 menu, either the meat and eggs are of no added monetary value or those who order the cheeseless Veggie Delight are unfairly subsidizing another’s purchase. Perhaps both factors are at play here. 

Subsidizing the industry is nothing new: it’s been happening in the United States since the 1933, when President Roosevelt signed the Agriculture Adjustment Act, a regulatory system aimed to support farmers hurt by the Great Depression. On a personal level, when we order a vegan sandwich at Subway that is priced the same as those that include meat and animal products, we are, in essence, helping to financially float the person after us who is ordering the B.L.T. On a societal level, we are also deeply subsidizing meat and animal products with programs that include industry bailouts (the federal purchase programs) and the marketing of commercial products, which is a big part of why a sandwich with animal-derived ingredients can still cost the same as those without. Between 1995 and 2009, the U.S.D.A. distributed more than $246 billion to subsidize commodity crops, such as soybeans, corn, wheat, sorghum, barley and oats, crops which are primarily used to feed animals in food production. (It is estimated that only 6% of the worldwide soybean crop is grown for human consumption.) Between 1995 and 2009, the dairy industry received $4.8 billion through various subsidization programs offered by the U.S.D.A., which included $1 billion during that time to compensate for low market prices. By law, children at public schools, regardless of whether or not they have lactose intolerance, receive a carton of cow’s milk if they participate in the School Lunch Program. The Chicago Public School system spends $92,000 a day for 400,000 mandatory cartons of milk, up to half of which are thrown away. This is just one example of the federal government’s buttressing of the industry and erasure of the experience of dairy cows. 

At this independent restaurant, the chicken, steak and chorizo burritos do cost more than the vegetarian ones: .05 cents more. This was what their lives amounted to, presumably. The shakes here cost the same whether they are made with water or dairy milk (cow’s milk is the same price as water) but are .45 cents more with soy milk. 

There are other costs, too. With heart disease, stroke and obesity linked to the Standard American Diet, health care costs go up and productivity declines. Antibiotic-resistance due to overexposure through eating animals routinely fed them has created “superbugs” that leave us vulnerable to infections and this is estimated to cost $30 billion a year. (Eighty percent of the nation’s antibiotics are used in animal agriculture.) Even those who avoid eating animal products are vulnerable to food-borne illnesses like E. coli, a bacteria found in animal manure that can find its way onto produce through applications of manure-based fertilizers or exposure to agricultural runoff. Estimated costs associated with E. coli in the United States are $405 million. Why aren’t these deeper costs factored into what people eat? How does the industry consistently avoid being saddled with these costs? 

The next time you buy something to eat, look at these jars of marinara and beans, bagels and sandwiches. Did those sensitive beings deserve to be born into enslavement and turned into "products" for our cravings and habits? Certainly, there is no amount one could assign to these lives that would justify how we treat them, but should they be entirely worthless? Should their lives and experiences - the suffering, the forced impregnating, the separating of mother and baby, the denial of comforts, natural habits and sovereignty - be completely erased, even in the price tag? To me, this is the ultimate statement of our devaluation of animals in society, worthless to us yet essential to our habits, their lives and deaths just the price of not having been born human. What crime did they commit to deserve what we do to them? 

The change is up to us. We can refuse to participate in another's suffering and devaluation. We can live with our habits in alignments with our values. Do it for them. Do it for you. Do it for all of us.

The Messengers

There was an interesting program on our local public radio station on Memorial Day. It was an hour long, broken up into segments, but the part that interested me most was about war veterans, particularly soldiers and photographers, and the difficulties they face finding people who are willing to acknowledge their experiences back home. The sense they get is that the public - meaning civilians - may ask about it, but they don’t really want to know about the devastation and brutality in honest, unflinching detail. 

During the program, I couldn’t help but find parallels to the animal liberation movement and the courageous people who are working to bring what is largely concealed, mythologized or abstracted to the public view. It seems that our larger culture is able and at times even eager to acknowledge dark times from our collective past that we have now evolved beyond (for example, slavery) but when exposed to the horrors that are being inflicted in their name in the present-tense (for example, current wars or violence against animals), most people shut down. They cover their ears, sometimes literally. They turn away. If the violence is happening in this moment, painful feelings of personal complicity or guilt arise. The emotions that people cannot face or reconcile drive them to want to silence or avoid the messenger, covertly and sometimes overtly.

This reveals something unfortunate about human beings, of course, and how we would prefer to live in denial rather than face the reality of our choices, but it also reveals something encouraging: that our essential instinct is one that is not welcoming to violence. For vegan activists, we have an added challenge to overcome and it’s a big one: it is one thing to feel guilt by association because of a war one’s country is involved in, but it takes on a much more unavoidable implication of personal responsibility when it comes to one’s own role in perpetuating violence. By accepting the oppression of animals because our preferences for taste or convenience undermines our deeper values, we are tacitly but unmistakably saying that violence is acceptable to us. It is no wonder that people shut down when presented with the unvarnished truth about the horrors we inflict upon animals. When confronted with our own culpability with a violent system that we are at odds with, it’s understandable that many people would rather reach for far-fetched, deeply deceptive fairy tales about happy cows and contented chickens than put themselves through a much less forgiving internal reckoning.

As messengers of something that is difficult to face, much less accept, how are we supposed to get over this resistance? Individuals acting in conflict with their values have a vested interest in not facing the reality of their actions, and it’s a pretty powerfully motivating one. It’s a matter of self-respect. How can we tell ourselves that we are kind, compassionate, loving and so on when we maintain habits that are deeply in conflict with this? And this is where the wall that vegan advocates need to scale comes up. As if family traditions, social pressure, big business, government collusion and institutional reinforcement weren’t enough to overcome, we have that very influential personal motivator, too, to circumvent. We have guilt.

On the radio program I heard, the panel did not offer pithy solutions to overcoming the challenges war veterans face when returning home, they simply acknowledged that this drive of the public to avoid or try to control the message of those returning is a very real thing. As activists, we have also heard many different versions of this unwillingness to hear, ranging from “I don’t want to know!” to “Couldn’t you just focus on the positive things? You’re too negative.” These are examples of people attempting to silence or restructure the message from those of us who are trying to get the public to understand the reality of what is happening. Most cannot handle it.

So what do we do? How do we chip away at this massive wall, cracked and crumbling in some places but still mammoth?

There are no simple answers and there is no one approach. The radio program host asked a guest if there was something intrinsically wrong with portraying a war as it was happening and the guest responded, “Well, we’ve never really done it...I think what you’ve got is a public that’s basically embarrassed by what’s going on and doesn’t want to look at it.” They are embarrassed. They don’t want to look. This makes sense. What we need to show people is that there is an alternative to covering their ears and their eyes, an alternative to guilt or shame, one where they can take their power back as conscious individuals who are living in alignment with their values.

Given this, I believe that we need to find a multitude of entry points because what might make one person shut down, could make another person think, and that person who has shut down could be more open with a different approach. I’ve said this before but I believe it in my core: we need artists and nutritionists, scholars and leafletters, architects and poets, piano tuners and bakers to get the word out. Most of all, we need to be smart, creative and adaptive with our outreach. We’ve also got to see that most of the people who are not there yet - the ones who shut down when we try to talk to them - are essentially good people and they are reaching for what they can to avoid an internal crisis. We need to have empathy with them and help them through to the other side because if we just hit and run, most will just retreat to a more comfortable, safe place. Why wouldn’t they? We have a difficult message, one full of triggers and the potential of doors slamming shut on us, but also one that carries within it an accessible solution that someone can begin at any moment.

We are the messengers. The responsibility and power of this cannot be underestimated, which is all the more reason why we need to be smart and thoughtful with our messaging. 



Soy Will Kill You DEAD, Part II: Revenge of the White Menace

Because what prequels, sequels and cheap genre film knock-offs lose in originality, they make up for in sheer bombast.

A couple of years ago, we explored the nuttier side of the Weston A. Price Foundation with this leaked (and almost certainly satiric) article from their (completely made up but they should totally have one) Office of Soybean Literacy. Today, we are presenting some rough film sketches should the WAPF ever want to dabble in filmmaking. Why should they limit themselves when the opportunities to expand the reach of soy demonizing scare tactics are so abundant? 

You’re welcome.

Single White Soy

Soy answered the ad for a roommate. Soy seemed kind of shyly awkward at first in a way that was kind of charming but that didn’t last long. Now you have a mess on your hands. Soy has an unnerving habit of staring at you while you eat. Soy smirks when you stub your toe and coughs without covering its mouth. Soy brings one of your magazines into the bathroom, stays in there for forever, and never washes up afterward. You are pretty sure that soy eats straight out of the peanut butter jar. Soy puts its dirty dishes under the couch and slathers the fancy preserves your parents brought you back from Europe on cheap gas station bread. Soy’s friends are also all gross and rude and quite possibly kleptomaniacs. Soy borrowed your bra without asking and you found your favorite leggings in soy’s dirty laundry, all stretched out and ruined. Soy smokes late at night and leaves stubbed out cigarettes in your favorite aloe vera plant. Soy uses the last of the toilet paper and doesn’t replace it, eats all the ice cream and then puts the empty carton back in the freezer. Soy hides the bills and gets the utilities turned off. It gets worse: soy has loud sex with some creepy low-life it picked up late at night. When soy tries to seduce your boyfriend, steal your identity, impersonate and stab you to death, it should come as no surprise.

The Soy Next Door

Everything was really nice and peaceful on your block until soy moved next door to you. Now in the summer, soy sets its sprinkler so the water hits pedestrians and in the winter, soy never, ever shovels the sidewalk. Soy scratches itself impolitely in public and belches. Soy lets its baby walk around all day in the same nasty diaper. Soy answers the front door in its dirty underwear. Soy’s front yard is strewn with litter, Popov vodka bottles and weeds. Soy smells like b.o., cigarettes, cheap beer and God knows what else. Soy sits on a stained couch with springs poking out of it on the front porch, leafing through a Hustler magazine and makes everyone in the neighborhood uncomfortable. Late at night, soy pulls bulky industrial garbage bags out the door and buries them in its back yard. Soy is damaging your property value every single day. Soy has a beater car on concrete blocks on its oil-stained driveway that cats are yowling and breeding in. Soy hocks loudly and spits on your roses. Soy has some really trashy exes and they are uniformly crazy; they stagger around outside soy’s house in the middle of the night, drunk, crying and screaming, banging on the door. Soy stares at your ass when you walk by and sometimes does a slow whistle. Soy brings back losers from the sleazy bar down the street and they have loud fights and puke on your lawn. They may even do worse. Oh, Jesus. Is soy touching itself? Soy does not give a fuck.

A Nightmare on Soy Street (Other possible titles: When a Soya Calls; Parasoya Activity; Children of the Soy; Creature from the Soy Lagoon; Edamame Dearest)

Soy occurred in a disastrous laboratory experiment when the DNA of a psychopath got mixed with rabies, herpes, car alarms, mosquitoes, primordial sludge, used tissues from the Westboro Church office bathroom and whatever disgusting gunk they could scrape off the floor of a peep show in the world’s seediest neighborhood. The lab, built on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground, is also cursed and radioactive. Soy overpowered the laboratory worker and ran into the night. Soy is actively reproducing itself, building a formidable army of unstoppable, dead-eyed soys. Soy feasts on wide-eyed young virgins. Soy will also feast on you. Soy is scaring you late at night and no one believes you. Soy is looking in your window; soy is hiding in the back seat of your car. When the phone rings and all you can hear is breathing on the other end, it is soy. Soy is now living in the sewer, having scared away that freaky clown from that Stephen King book. Soy has sharp daggers for fingers. Soy is watching you when you’re fooling around and it’s safe to say that soy doesn’t like it one bit. You can run and hide, cowering in a closet, but soy knows where you are and will keep coming at you. Soy implants itself in you, grows like a demonic phytoestrogenic fetus inside you, leaching off of you and your organs until it has come to full-term and no longer needs you as host and then soy will horrifically explode out of your ribcage, spraying blood and viscera everywhere. You may think you’ve killed soy but soy springs back up again and again and now soy is beyond pissed.

It’s no laughing matter. This little bean is a cold-blooded, serial-killing machine right down to its very fiber.

I'm thinking Wes Craven or Rob Zombie.

Random Things That Only Other Vegans Will Be Able to Innately Understand

Did you know that vegans possess: Superior knowledge? Uncanny intuitive abilities? A new emotional spectrum? The ability to perform feats of uncommon cunning? Being a vegan in this world is a little like being a circus performer in that we have quirky little idiosyncrasies that are uniquely ours, though ours are adapted by swimming against the current in our culture. Some traits are impressive and useful, others are simply bizarre and perhaps annoying, but all of them are interesting.

As a vegan, you alone understand...

* The concern that you may actually be creating a new lung disease from inhaling too much nutritional yeast.

* That feeling of being super-excited when someone tells you that she is thinking about giving up meat but you feel like you have to sit on your hands to not start jumping around in excitement so instead, you pretend to be all blasé while you’re mentally checking off every link you are going to send her.

* When you go to your first all-vegan event and you know that you can eat anything there but you still can’t stop asking if everything is vegan because you are so used to having to do that. Oh, and then you end up eating every speck of food you can get your hands on just because it’s vegan.

* You sometimes want to tell the rest of the world that vegans totally knew kale before everyone else did.

* You are the one who your co-worker goes to when her cousin wants to ask some questions because her ex-tennis partner is considering going vegan but is worried because she heard soy will kill her.

* You learn about a new vegan cheese that’s just The Best! and you’re all “Z!O!M!G!how-can-i-get-some?!” and you spend all day trying to track some down unsuccessfully but it’s all forgotten when you hear about the new vegan Butterfingers-style candy bar and then you spend another day in fruitless pursuit of that instead. You console yourself knowing that tomorrow there will be something else you can’t get until the novelty has worn off.

* When your best friend breaks up with the “last hetero vegan male on earth,” you listen to a Colleen Patrick-Goudreau podcast together over a box of tissues and some Fair-Trade chocolates before helping her create a new profile on a vegan dating site.

* The anxiety you feel when dining out with a group of meat-eaters and the idea to order ”family style” is brought up.

* You have a habit of scoping out someone else’s animal product-free grocery cart (“cart snooping”) when you’re in the checkout line and then trying to figure out a non-creepy icebreaker to find out if he’s vegan. You're not even sure why you need to know this.

* You can skim a label, a menu and a recipe like you’ve graduated magna cum laude from the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics program. Relatedly, you can look at any recipe and see within moments how easily you can modify it to being vegan.

* Upon hearing that a celebrity is vegan, you’re all like, “Yeah, right. Not falling for that one again. Next!”

* The first thing you look at with a pair of shoes you like is not the price but the manufacturer’s tag inside it. (I don’t have to explain this because the vegans will understand.)

* You align yourself with the Abolitionists and you are not even a Civil War reenactor.

* The server at your local Thai place automatically repeats back to you, “Tofu, no fish sauce, no eggs,” before you even order.

* You consciously route out your trip through the grocery store so you won’t have to pass the corpses.

* If you are a freelance writer, you refer to animals as “he” and “she” and this is duly noted by your editor but whatever. She can take out your pronouns but you won’t.

* The first thing you look at when you visit another vegan’s home is her cookbook collection, which might even be more impressive than your own, you note with awe.

* Your egg salad sandwich that supposedly tastes “JUST like eggs!” probably won't to omnivores but that’s perfectly okay. (Similarly, when we say, “You can’t taste the difference,” about anything we make, well, that’s probably not true but, again, perfectly okay.)

* You understand that if you arrive at the vegan potluck even ten minutes after people start eating, all that will be left for you to eat are some oily craisins at the bottom of a bowl so you always arrive early to, um, help set up.

* When you see children eating red popsicles and you know that in addition to the high fructose corn syrup, they are eating tiny cochineal insects.

* You possess an encyclopedic knowledge of every way in which humans abuse other animals.

* You understand that building excitement as you are reading the ingredients on a label but then the crushing disappointment when you are 3/4 of the way through reading it and you see the words “whey” or “lanolin.”

* You bring your own food when you visit your parents, even if you’re only there for a couple of hours. You also find yourself in the rare role reversal of admonishing your parents to eat their vegetables.

* When the only item a restaurant offers is a hummus wrap, it feels like an act of aggression against your very person.

* When you and your vegan friends talk about someone you know who is an ex-vegan, your somber, hushed tones makes it sound like you’re talking about somebody who has died in a horrible accident. Conversely, it may sound like the person is an axe murderer.

* You automatically can name a couple of vegan restaurants in practically every major (as well as some minor) U.S. city whether you’ve been there not. You may even be very familiar with the menu, weekly specials, and Yelp rating.

All this and more...

On Never Growing Up...

I’ve been told my whole life that I’d give up or grow out of my convictions. Certainly, there are a lot of things I’ve grown out of, for example: 

* Ding-Dong-Ditch and prank phone calls
* The Electric Company and my membership in the Sonny and Cher Fan Club
* Grape Fanta and Bubble Yum
* Black fingernail polish and purple hair dye
* Bad-for-me boyfriends and waking up with hangovers 


These things come and go, as they should. The idea of dropping my core values like they are last year’s embarrassing fashion trend, though, is something entirely different. I have been assured by people most of my life that I would do just that, though. Quite simply, they were wrong. 

When I was fifteen and a new vegetarian, I was told in no uncertain terms that I would go back to meat the first time I really craved a hamburger, and I was told as a young feminist activist that when I eventually understood “how the world works,” I would just learn to accept it. Neither of these predictions repeated to me as fact by so many people came true. At all. As a new vegan, I was told by countless people that I would abandon my veganism once it stopped being convenient and as a new mother, I was told that I wouldn’t be able to sustain my goals of breastfeeding and cloth-diapering.   


These gloomy forecasts were repeated to me in a matter-of-fact, confident manner by those who, by their own accounts, had tried and failed to maintain those same aspirations. People who had once been “like me” took it upon themselves to debrief me on my inevitable future defeat, letting me know that eventually, I would settle into a comfortable place of acquiescence with the Real World, just as they had. I’d be humbled. I’d realize that these were just impulsive, ill-considered whims. In the mean time, my puerile zest was kind of sweet and adorable. 


There are some key designations society tries to affix to those who reject the status quo. One is that it is arrogant to do so, and another is that it is naive. There are some even more cynical insinuations about those of us who are guided by our values, implying that it means we are self-absorbed, rude, immature, attention-seeking. The skeptics can pull the “I was once like you so I can speak of this with authority” card to try to legitimize their opinions and get the final word. “I know better than you because I once was you,” as one former vegetarian told me.  


Why are people often so resentful of values-driven action? Why is our society so dead-set on trampling down those who are being led by their passions and values? Why do those of us with deep convictions ignite a desire in so many others to keep us in our place even if we are just minding our own business? What is behind this pessimistic drive? 


I’ve been lucky enough to be able to reconnect with old friends in recent years and it’s so interesting to me how many tell me the same thing after we’ve caught up with each other: “You haven’t changed.” Not in a negative way but in an admiring way. Even after becoming a mother, even after a few grey hairs, even when it can no longer be attributable it to naiveté, I am still who I always was. I can only wonder, though, why I wouldn’t still be passionate about the things I cared about when they first knew me. What does this say about us, and society’s expectations of us, as we mature beyond that first blush of our enthusiasm? 


Our society considers idealism and convictions to be endearing but childish qualities that we will eventually grow out of, once the we’ve been disappointed too many times or had enough of life’s hard lessons knock them out of us. There are those of us, though, who have been disappointed plenty and who have had lots of life experiences and yet we still retain our core values. Why are we perceived as such rarities? I have to say, I’ve only felt my beliefs and determination flourish over the years, the fire burning brighter as I check days off the calendar. Yes, the rougher edges that come with youthful zeal have been softened some, and I can certainly accept the complex nuances of human behavior more now than I did as a neophyte. Instead of knocking me down, though, life’s turbulence just serves to make me less easily distracted and more focused on the things that excite me and bring me joy, which, naturally, includes some things people think I would have grown out of long ago. Do I have a preternatural discipline? An iron will? I wish I could say so but, no, I don’t. I am just living proof that there is no reason that our unique ethical drives, as personal to us as our own fingerprints, should be expected to wither away over time. We still retain our fingerprints as we grow older. Why shouldn’t we still have our unique passions? 


I think that one belief that might age us most is accepting the false dichotomy that tells us that we must give up the things we love and compromise our values for what we believe we should be doing with our lives. Giving them up because of this faulty idea makes us cynical, older than our years, resentful and even suspicious of those who haven’t. When I think of people who really thrived in their elder years - Georgia O’Keefe, Howard Zinn, Gandhi, Martha Graham, Studs Terkel as well as every senior with enduring, quirky, consuming passions - all I can think is, “Thank goodness they didn’t tamper down their enthusiasm and drive in exchange for some slippers and an easy chair.” Thank goodness for that. 


I have not given up my values and convictions but even as they have become more nuanced  and complex over the years, they have also become more heartfelt and integrated to who I am. They have also become more personal. Giving them up would be giving up essential parts of myself and that’s not going to happen. They are still unfolding and ripening, too. I know that I am not alone with this. 


Let’s hear it for never growing up. Never, ever do it. The best things in the world depend on this. 

Shining the Light

“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.” - Anne Frank

Will we ever collectively grow out of our most cruel and violent impulses? Haven’t we explored slavery, war, rape, cruelty and murder enough over these many thousands of years of human existence to internalize the lesson that they are very bad things? Despite our more sophisticated language, if we strip the horrors we inflict on one another, the animals, and the earth to their essence and germ, are they any different now than they were 150 years ago or 2,000 years ago? We have some new, horrible weapons at our disposal but they are essentially born of the same twisted root. 

With the Boston Marathon bombings, we are reminded again how vulnerable we all are to this dark side of our collective nature. It may be a sick and deviant side, but it has reliably made itself known throughout human history. Today, there are drones in Afghanistan, child armies in Uganda, thousands being murdered in Syria, billions of animals brutally slaughtered every year. 

Will we ever evolve beyond this base, reptilian part of the brain? I don’t know. I do know that perhaps the best we can is simply keep shining the light of kindness and awareness wherever we can. As long as we are moving more forward than we are backward, this may be the most that we can hope for, really. All we can do is keep shining a light on the path toward justice and compassion and keep doing our part to move humanity in that direction.  

My personal window into the dark side of human nature started in fifth grade. I was that kid who was picked on, one of many, I know, but I can only speak of my own experience. 

From fifth grade through eighth grade, I was picked on and apart daily by the mean kids who prowled my school, kids whose eyes lit up with a sadistic glee when they saw me. They loudly inventoried every possible flaw I was guilty of: my hair was unkempt (so it had to follow that I had lice); my skin was a flaky, itchy mess from psoriasis; the ointment I used for the psoriasis covered my skin with a greasy film (so it was determined by a panel of my peers that I must not be bathing); I developed breasts early so open season was declared on my bra straps by the boys who sat behind me in history and English. Every day, walking into gym or the cafeteria, I felt a painful, twisty knot in the pit of my stomach: what humiliations were around the corner?

At home, believe it or not, things were worse. An alcoholic, frequently raging, and unpredictable parent tends to make the bad things in your life inevitably, incalculably worse. So every week day morning, I walked out the front door, shook off whatever had happened the night before, and entered the war zone that was my middle school. And every week day afternoon, I left the hell that was middle school - that day’s taunts and assaults against my self-esteem still reverberating in the echo chamber of my head - and returned “home” to perhaps worse. There was no true sanctuary, save for the occasional weekend with my grandparents. In seventh grade, though, my grandfather started developing dementia, so I eventually lost that, too. 

Through it all, though, there were kind people. There were a few friends who thought I was funny, who never made fun of my hair, who helped me forget that most of the time I wanted to curl up and die. (God, this is depressing and revealing and uncomfortable but I hope that it serves some purpose in the end.) When nothing else could be counted on, when even my dog growled at me (which was kind of a lot because he was a gorgeous but inbred cocker spaniel), I had my friends. Perhaps because of this reason alone, I could see some glimpses of sunlight through the persistent gloom of my childhood. They risked their own security at school by being friends with the girl with the weird hair but they did it anyway. My life improved by leaps and bounds after I left my home and went to college but I will always be someone who is immensely grateful for these pockets of light, wherever I can find them. I seek them out like my cat seeks out the sunny spots on the radiator. 

After college, I worked in humane education at a large animal shelter. At the shelter, I saw the best and the worst of humanity routinely. I met people who would keep dogs chained outside in the Chicago year-round with just a dirty plastic bowl of water, and I met people who would break into these horrible back yards in the middle of the night and take the dogs to place them in loving homes.  I met people who turned in their 12-year-old cats because they found a great new apartment that didn’t allow pets and I met people who would be homeless before they would give up a family member. I met people who would set fire to animals and I met people who would cross busy lanes of traffic on the highway to rescue strays. Most of the people I met through working at the shelter were in the middle of this continuum but there were staggering highs and crushing lows on either side. As soon as I thought I’d lost all hope in humanity, I’d meet someone who was so compassionate and generous and truly saint-like, my hope would be more than restored. This was daily life at an animal shelter. While there, I learned that humanity is capable of shocking acts of brutality and an essential goodness that would leave me speechless, humbled, awed. 

There will probably always be kids who are picked on. We need to be raising children who are self-assured enough to outshine that. There will probably always be this nugget of cruelty hardwired in our DNA. We need to keep shining a light on a different way to live, to behave and exist. We may always have senseless brutality and violence; making peace with this might mean that we will keep shining our light regardless, focusing our efforts on moving toward the evolutionary leap that may or may not ever happen. Even if it this shift doesn’t happen biologically, existing this part of our collective brain, we are moving more in that direction. We just need to keep shining our light.

I believe that the good in humanity far outnumbers the bad and that we are the ambassadors for ushering in positive change. Keep shining your light. It may not feel like enough, you may feel crowded out by the darkness, but you are not. In the end, this light may be the only real tool we have and this is just fine because it may be the only tool we need. Keep shining it. 

20 Things I’d Rather Do Than Hear You Go On About Your Paleo Diet

1. Drop a kettlebell on my foot.
2. Get pulled over for speeding with an expired license in a car that has failed the emissions test with a “Bad Cop, No Donut” bumper sticker.
3. Be the sole adult responsible for two dozen 3rd graders at a large waterpark on “free soda refills” day.
4. Learn that the guy sitting next to me on my six-hour ride airplane is an evangelist who also sells timeshares. Plus, he’s very chatty.
5. Run into an ex on sweatpants-and-shower-free Sunday.
6. Forget to bring any of my 3,068 canvas bags on the day that the teacher who runs my son’s Green Team is behind me in the checkout lane at the grocery store.
7. Notice just a little too late that the expiration date on my coconut yogurt was two weeks ago.
8. Be on a nearly empty train and have the guy who keeps muttering, twitching and scratching himself decide to sit down right next to me.
9. You know that feeling when your car seems a little louder than usual and keeps pulling in one side and you’re all like, “Please don’t let it be a flat tire,” and then you hear that flapping sound so you pull over to check and, indeed, it’s flat? I’d rather feel that.
10. Get stuck on an elevator with the guys from #4 and #8. And a small marching band.
11. Walk barefoot over a floor my son has scattered with Legos. (Wait, I already do that.)
12. Mistake the curry powder for the cinnamon on my morning oatmeal.
13. Get on the bus driven by the driver who has decided that today is the day she’s going to show the other motorists who’s boss.
14. Hear the train approaching as I am putting my money in to get a train card but the machine keeps spitting out my dollar and the train is getting closer and I am desperately trying to flatten out the dollar against the machine but goddamn it! It’s not working.
15. That little speck of dust on my dog? It just jumped and, upon closer inspection, there are many, many more of them.
16. Realize that my keys are in my other coat pocket after I’ve already pulled the locked door shut. And so is my phone.
17. Notice that my parking meter is expired two minutes after the person writing the ticket did.
18. Have someone discreetly whisper to me that my skirt is tucked into my tights at a big event I’ve organized twenty minutes after I was last in the bathroom. (I speak from experience on this one and I’d still rather have this happen again.)
19. Remember at 10:30 p.m. that we are out of toothpaste.
20. You know how sometimes the bunch of bananas you bought looked fine on the outside but then when you pull down the peel, they’re all weird and squishy and rotten inside? Yeah, that. Plus now you have fruit flies.

All this and more, people! How about you?