Vegan Minded

By Christine Cook Mania

According to readers, the stories in this book make being vegan accessible and demystify veganism for nonvegan readers. Anyone who is striving to make a positive difference in the world should read this book.

After reading Eating Animals, a national bestseller, by Jonathan Safran Foer, Christine Mania was left frustrated. Foer told the critical story of animal agriculture and factory farming including the brutality, devastation, and the moral dilemma of eating animals. Where Eating Animals left off, Vegan Minded picks up with stories and reflections on what it's like to live vegan in a world set up for meat-eaters.

Meet the vegan girl next door as she explores the journey to veganism and beyond. Like many people, Christine just wanted to fit in and belong. And yet, how do you fit in when you don't want to eat what everyone else is eating? Food can be a big, contentious topic—just like sex, money, and politics. In her memoir-in-essays, Christine explores navigating a true path for herself in a culture set up to use animal products at every turn. And then, just when she thought she had it all figured out, she married an environmentalist. Now faced with more big changes, Christine had to figure out how to thrive in the world as a vegan environmentalist.

Part memoir, part informative guide, Vegan Minded covers topics ranging from vegetarianism to veganism to yoga to diets to dating to climate change to pets and to activism. Each topic circles back to looking at the world through a vegan lens. Every essay was influenced by her studies of animal protection, environmental ethics, human rights, and culture & change. With heart and humor, this book tells a story of transformation, fortitude, and joy.

Vegan Minded will set you on a path to your own transformation including steps you can take to change the world and leave your own legacy of compassion and stewardship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: North Star PNW
• Release date: Oct 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223640097

Book preview

VEGAN MINDED

Becoming a Steward for Animals, People, and the Planet

CHRISTINE COOK MANIA, MA

VEGAN MINDED

Becoming a Steward for Animals, People, and the Planet

Copyright © 2023 by Christine Cook Mania. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written consent from the copyright owner. For permission, contact the author via her website at christinecookmania.com.

Front cover design: Amanda Checco

Back cover and interior design: Christine Cook Mania

Content editor: Sarah Mania

Copy editor: Edward Jean

This is a book of personal essays. Each essay reflects the author's present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated.

First edition.

To all the vegans who blazed the trail

I walk today, thank you.

***

To the generations that follow,

may the trail widen and the journey

be welcoming and accessible for all.

Contents

Dear Reader: An Invitation

CHAPTER 1 The Vegan Girl Next Door

CHAPTER 2 What’s a Vegan?

CHAPTER 3 Stages of Change

CHAPTER 4 Beyond Compromise

CHAPTER 5 Veganism Is Not a Diet

CHAPTER 6 The Social Dilemma

CHAPTER 7 The Joy of Missing Out, Part 1

CHAPTER 8 You Can Find Anything on the Internet

CHAPTER 9 Vegan Gal with Three Cats

CHAPTER 10 Better Together

CHAPTER 11 We Are Nature

CHAPTER 12 Cat Lady Adopts a Dog

CHAPTER 13 Shelter in Place

CHAPTER 14 Blondes Have More Fun

CHAPTER 15 The House Is on Fire

CHAPTER 16 The Joy of Mi$$ing Out, Part 2

CHAPTER 17 Best Friends Furever

CHAPTER 18 Turning Toward Hope

CHAPTER 19 You Can Change the World

CHAPTER 20 How to Be Vegan Minded

Epilogue

The Vegan Minded Library

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Invite the Author

Let’s Connect!

One Last Thing

It is very easy to conform to what your society or your parents and teachers tell you. That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living...To live is to find out for yourself what is true.

{Jiddu Krishnamurti}

Dear Reader: An Invitation

The seed for this book was planted over fifteen years ago when I went to a coffee shop after work one evening and started to write. I worked on it for a few years but eventually I set the project aside and let it simmer in my mind until the spring of 2020, when I started from scratch and began to write in earnest. Vegan Minded became my pandemic project. While many people were making bread, I could be found hunched over my laptop stringing words together, allowing for ideas to rise and flourish—each one powered by my beating heart.

When I started sharing these essays with my writing cohort, my colleagues encouraged me to write a how to be vegan book, but I wanted to write a memoir about what it’s like to be vegan in a world set up for meat eaters. Ultimately this book is neither a how-to nor a memoir. Instead, it’s a book of personal essays about transformation—my personal path of change from being an omnivore to becoming a vegan environmentalist. You might call it a memoir-in-essays.

I always thought I would be writing this book to raise awareness for farmed animals. And, I am. But I also wrote this book because we are living in a climate emergency and eating a vegan (or plant-based) diet is one of the top solutions to this crisis. It is something almost everyone can do, especially the most privileged among us. I invite you to read these essays with an open mind and allow yourself time to reflect and process new information before turning away and moving on. There may be parts of the book—even if only a few sentences, in a chapter or two—that are challenging to read. Keep going. Don’t look away. The animals and the planet need us to bear witness. It’s better to know how animals are treated and how climate change is impacting the planet and all beings that live here, than not to know. It’s better to know, so we can create solutions.

Each essay covers a topic related to veganism or climate change or both. You will learn how I’ve managed to evolve over the years, even if it was at the pace of a turtle, and the struggles I’ve experienced (and mostly overcome) as a result of being vegan. At one time, I too ate animals and treated the planet as a commodity with unlimited resources. Cognitive dissonance ruled my actions until one day I knew I had to change. My transformation was slow and is on-going. I continue to change and that is my hope for all of us—that we transform ourselves so we can transform the food system to be more compassionate and equitable, to bring ourselves and our food into harmony with the health of the planet.

Wherever you are on your journey—whether you eat animals or are a long-time vegan—I hope that these stories and reflections inspire you to widen your perspective. Above all else, we must stay hopeful, and to do that, we must act. Hope combined with action is the recipe for creating a just world for the animals, people, and the planet. Choose a cause that resonates with you—one where you feel called to act, then act. You might start by asking yourself, what do I love? Do you love nature? Do you love farmed animals? Do you love wildlife? Identifying what we care about is a good place to start. None of us can do everything but we all can do something, and when we act on the behalf of someone or something we love, our lives will be filled with purpose. Everyone is welcome and all are needed.

From my heart to yours,

Christine Cook Mania

July 2023

CHAPTER 1

––––––––

Animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.

{People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals}

The Vegan Girl Next Door

I’m not giving up cheese. And I’m not wearing ugly shoes, I said to myself after reading a newsletter from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) almost forty years ago.

I read that newsletter from start to finish sitting in our wood-paneled family room with my cat, Corky, on my lap. It was 1985 in Evansville, Indiana. Population: about 165,000. It was, and still is, a conservative town in a red state. Not exactly a hotbed for bucking the system. Evansville sits in the southwest corner of the state on the muddy Ohio River. This is where I grew up. The closest big(ger) cities were a couple of hours away—St. Louis to the west, Louisville to the east, and Indianapolis to the north. At seventeen, I had lived in the same house since the day I was brought home from the hospital. I attended high school with the same kids from kindergarten. Raised to fit in, I’m your typical girl next door. Or so I thought.

On my way home from school in my brand-new, burnt-orange Chevy Cavalier, I stopped to pick up the mail that crisp November day before I headed down our long driveway. I loved retrieving the mail. It was about the only thing I took responsibility for from the time I had been a child. Maybe I always knew that something important was coming. I don’t know why PETA sent us a newsletter. My parents certainly weren’t animal rights activists. They were more the kind of folks who might give ten bucks to the local humane society to save dogs and cats or pay membership dues for Ducks Unlimited, but that’s about it.

The PETA newsletter showed at least a dozen black-and-white photos of bunnies and monkeys in lab cages and cows and chickens on factory farms, exposing cruelty unlike I had ever seen. The articles on animal testing prominently displayed photos of monkeys with electrodes attached to their heads and rabbits with a foreign substance oozing from their eyes. They were all staring out at the camera as if to say, Help me.

There was never a time when I didn’t have a companion animal as a child. If an animal could be domesticated, they had a good chance of finding a home with my family. Dogs, cats, bunnies, parakeets, horses, goats, fish, and turtles lived with us over the years. Animals were my friends. We gave them names. I talked to them. (I still do.) There was Sport, Snowball, Sylvester, Sounder, Candy, Flash, Mucho, Corky, and Friday, and those are just the ones I remember. That newsletter shattered my perception of how other kinds of animals were treated. I couldn’t believe monkeys, rabbits, cats, cows, chickens, or animals of any kind would suffer so I could eat a cheeseburger, wash my hair with a certain kind of shampoo, or wear leather shoes. It was the first time I consciously connected animals to the food on my plate, the shampoo in my shower, and the shoes on my feet.

Immediately after reading the newsletter, I declared myself a vegetarian—someone who avoids eating meat, including cows, chickens, pigs, lambs, turkey, sea life, and other animals used for food, but continues to eat eggs and dairy products. I promptly informed my family I wasn’t going to use any products tested on animals, eat meat, or wear fur. I definitely didn’t want to be a part of this system that treated animals so cruelly.

Today, I hear about parents doing research[1] when one of their kids decides to go vegan or vegetarian. Ha! My parents were like, Whatever. I was the youngest of four kids and my parents were tired and not concerned—at least not for nutritional reasons. Luckily, there was no reason to be. And because health was the last thing on my mind at seventeen, the thought of a vegetarian diet possibly being unhealthy didn’t even occur to me.

I’m not sure that anything could be worse than what I had been eating. Fried food was my favorite food group. I also loved anything that came in a box, especially Kraft Mac & Cheese. (Today you can now buy vegan Kraft Mac & Cheese.) Another favorite of mine: Oscar Mayer hot dogs with processed cheese squeezed down the center. I also must mention slices of summer sausage sitting on a cracker topped with mustard. Better still, skip the cracker. I loved processed, fatty, and salty foods, even though my mom encouraged healthier choices. She cooked dinner almost every night. Homemade meals were the norm when I was young. You might have found any of the following on my plate when we sat down at the kitchen table: pot roast and vegetables, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, breaded fried pork chops and corn, homemade mac and cheese, or spaghetti and meat sauce. I was a picky eater, so basically a brat at dinnertime. I started cooking my own meals around the age of fourteen. I enjoyed being in the kitchen and experimenting, whipping up my own recipes. With this nifty crepe maker we had, I made crepes and stuffed them with all kinds of creative fillings. My crepes loaded with spicy taco meat were some of my most popular. I was making fusion cuisine before it was a thing! Once I even served my taco crepes at my mom’s dinner party, where they were well received. My friends liked my hamburgers, which I sprinkled with a secret ingredient—Lawry’s seasoned salt. I’m surprised we all didn’t die instantly from the large quantities of fat and sodium. And I could doctor up a can of Campbell's soup into a gourmet dish. Creativity in the kitchen was my thing. Healthy cooking not so much. Cooking turned out to be not only a fun hobby, but a way for me to take control of what I ate, even before I gave up meat. It was good practice for things to come.

Once I stopped eating meat, I ate a lot of cheese. I loved cheese. Melted cheddar was my favorite. And brie. Oh, how I loved eating brie and crackers at the holidays or on special occasions. I mean I loved cheese, and I was never going to give it up. Even if it felt like the right thing to do, I wasn’t going to do it. Ever. That year during the holidays, I mostly ate side dishes, which are typically vegetarian, like potatoes au gratin, cheese pudding, and dressing (not the kind stuffed inside the turkey, though). I remember eyeing fried chicken fingers at a party, but I stayed true.

Eating differently from my family and friends proved difficult. I love my people. I didn’t want to be different from them. I wanted to be like them. My goal as a teenager was to fit in and belong. And yet, I chose to be different because of the photos I had seen of cows, chickens, and pigs suffering on factory farms. Once seen, these images are impossible to unsee. How do you forget what a downed cow looks like? She’s lying on the ground helpless, in pain, and staring at the camera, or more likely the human behind the camera, hoping in her animal way for help. My conscience is a driving force in my life. Sometimes this feels like a curse. I have always been a little bit in awe of people who are impetuous. I am not that. I’m an overthinker and mostly prudent. I don’t like to hurt others. This includes nonhumans. When I hurt someone’s feelings, I feel bad about it, and it takes me a while to recover. I’ll ruminate over it for days sometimes. I’ve also been on the receiving end of physical harm—my siblings and I were brutal with each other when we were growing up. I know what physical pain feels like. I cannot imagine intentionally harming a cow or rabbit or monkey or cat or dog or chicken or pig. So, I didn’t want to eat or use them anymore, but I also really didn’t want to be a vegetarian. I had to be a vegetarian.

Now that I knew how these animals were treated, how could I take part in this system as a consumer? I felt each animal’s pain as my own when I read that newsletter. This is what I now know to be empathy, which is like stepping into someone else’s shoes and feeling their pain—not just imagining it but feeling it emotionally and sometimes physically. The sensations may not be exactly the same as theirs, but I am feeling something that is not mine. I suppose this is why I have been told over and over, especially by my dad, that I’m too sensitive. But you can’t be too sensitive. I’m just sensitive and highly so. I had to do something.

I don’t remember everyone’s reactions when I declared myself a vegetarian, but I do recall a few weeks later my mom showing up at my sister’s wedding shower wearing a brand-new, full-length mink fur coat. Animals killed for fur are not a by-product of the meat industry, as many people think. The fur industry is an industry in its own right: fur factory farming, to be specific. Minks, just one kind of animal killed for fur, live in small, filthy cages without room to move around and are killed by neck snapping, gassing, or electrocution.[2] As my mom’s friends gushed over her new coat, my heart sank. I felt betrayed and angry. Righteous even. But to be fair, my mom probably bought that coat before I told her I was going to be a vegetarian. I like to imagine that she at least felt some internal conflict when she connected the dots between the coat and her newly vegetarian daughter. I would probably be wrong.[3] At the very least, it was bad timing for both of us. At seventeen, I didn’t understand how those who supported me and my decision to be vegetarian could also still have wildly different views about animals. Soon after, my older sisters started eating vegetarian food too. This was the validation and support I needed. It was good while it lasted.

That PETA newsletter made a clear case for veganism, and while I knew I wanted to be a vegan, I compromised with my conscience and became a vegetarian. It’s not that I wrestled with this decision much. Being vegetarian is easier, and it causes less friction socially. Maybe I would have felt differently had I known a vegan, but I didn’t. I didn’t even know any vegetarians. So, I was scared to commit to being vegan. It was just too much to ask of myself at seventeen. I wouldn’t have been able to handle it, so I chose the path of least resistance. I lacked the emotional maturity required for such a significant and life-changing decision. I would need time to develop the strength and conviction—the fortitude—that being vegan requires. It felt like I would be giving up everything, and it was so different from the way I was used to living—where my mom wore fur coats, we ate meat at most meals, and my dad hunted on Thanksgiving with his beloved dogs. I