“Thinking and Eating at the Same Time: Reflections of Sistah Vegan” by Michelle R Lloyd-Paige illustrates Lloyd-Paige’s point of view on animal products and her quest to be spiritually sound as a result of the evident correlation, she found, between her academic work and the treatment of animals and humans. In this chapter of Sistah Vegan Lloyd-Paige portrays her identity as a black woman through food knowledge. Lloyd-Paige began her veganism through a spiritual movement at her church, her and many other church goers, predominantly black women, began a fast at the beginning of each year where participants were not permitted to eat meat, sugar or dairy (Lloyd-Paige 3). “The fast was voluntary and supposed to detoxify the mind, body and spirit (Lloyd-Paige3).” Routinely after the fasting, Lloyd-Paige would reintegrate body, meat and sugar back into her diet; however in 2005 she found that her body was reacting poorly to the reintegration and her doctor recommended that she reintroduce soy products (a staple during the fast) into her diet (4). In November of 2005 she recognized “how the food [she] ate contributed to social inequalities, and it “marked [her] transformation to eating like a vegan (4).” Lloyd-Paige states earlier in her realization of the need to eat vegan is that her lifestyle did not match up with what she believed and taught. She recognized that being able to choose what to eat was a privilege by middle to upper class citizens and when she made a choice in her food she was partaking in “patterns of indifference and oppression (2).” Thus, Lloyd-Paige came to the realization that her eating habits were radically different than what she taught and practiced, she states that “the contents of a lecture I had just presented four days prior on the global inequities in food distribution; a vague recollection of a statement from PETA about the cruelties associated with chicken production; the remembrance of how surprisingly good I felt physically while on a forty-day spiritually motivated fast from meant and dairy at the beginning of the year; and my own desire to live an authentic lie—yanked me into an uncomfortable realization that…I was not living according to my beliefs (1-2).” Her awareness of the mistreatment of animals also related to how she felt people of color were treated historically and in the present. She argues that the blatant disregard for how animals are treated is inhumane and we have no valid right to treat them this way. She states that although humans feel they have some sort of “dominion” over animals “we were [not] given the right to be cruel, brutal and heartless (Lloyd-Paige 4).” She compares this treatment and domination over animals to the treatment of Native Americans in the European conquest of Northern America (5). Although she does link her vegan practice to healthy living standards and the remarkably increasing number of obese African Americans and Hispanics (6), she mostly correlates it to her belief in the innate human and animal right that all are worthy to be treated humanely and with respect. Thus, her eating habits are recognition of how animal products are produced and marketed as a direct correlation to the treatment of people of color throughout time and she has continued a spiritual journey of veganism as a means to resist being a contributor for inequality and oppression. Therefore, her eating habits are also a representation of her ideology of social standards.
Adjusting food intake habits as a means to represent a particular ideology is a common practice among not only black female vegans but also in American Christianity (Griffith). In “Don’t Eat That” Griffith explains the Christian discipline of historically fasting, or obtaining thinness as a means to receive “true nourishment” from Christ (Griffith 36). Within the Christian doctrine the body should be perfectly modeled because the body was also seen as “central for pushing the soul along the path to progress (Griffith 38).” Thus, excessive weight from food intake would limit the progression of the soul and Christ’s workings within the Christians body. However, the Christian diet also influenced eating purposely and embracing the food one ate, “the pleasures of eating, like other physical pleasures, were to be savored and taken very seriously…lest one fall into gluttony (Griffith 39).” Thus the Christian dieters believed that they should eat foods that would replenish the bodies and eat with care because too much was a bad thing (Griffith 39). Griffith states, “The advice to eat only such foods as were individually pleasing was followed by a lengthy exposition of the proper and most spiritual diet (Griffith 39).” This concept of food intake is similar to Lloyd-Paige’s refusal of animal products because it is shaped by an ideology or spirituality that makes the individual or group pay particular attention to what they put in their body. In both situations the individual cannot consume what conflicts with their belief systems; for Lloyd-Paige she is a vegan because of the treatment of animals and the Christian dieters, Griffith speaks of, must control their eating and weight to take pleasure in their food experience as well as acquire a closer relationship to Christ.
On the same note Macrobiotics also shapes eating habits through a spiritual ideology of yin and yang, furthermore it allows women to balance gender inequalities, similar to Lloyd-Paige’s lifestyle to stop eating animal products to make an attempt to balance societies social inequalities. Macrobiotics is part of the “diet culture” that always pushes the practitioners to “do the right thing” because there are so many constraints on the individual to follow the right eating habits and attain balance (Crowley 37). Crowley argues here that Macrobiotics “in fact offers practitioners a fluid gender identity, and that this is one sources of its lasting popularity (Crowley 38).” Therefore Macrobiotics offers the individual the opportunity to “manipulate how the spiritual essences of yin and yang manifest themselves in the body (Crowley 38).” Different types of food can either be masculine or feminine and how they are prepared for instance “grilling a (yin) celery stalk changes the structure and quality of the celery’s gender—from female to male, from passive to strong (Crowley 40).” By identifying gender through food women are capable of adjusting sexist gender roles, as woman proclaims, “I could not be teaching or have published books, if it weren’t for the power macrobiotics gave me (Crowley 46)!” The practices of Macrobiotics enables these women to change the roles of gender practices so they are able to have a balanced spirituality, like Lloyd-Paige’s veganism as a means to stand up for social equality and increase the respect between humans as wells as animals.
Unfortunately though Nutritionism has become nationally accepted as a way to view food and in turn has affected consumption patterns in terms of what people think they should eat. Scrinis argues that the “focus on nutrients has come to dominate, to undermine, and to replace other ways of engaging with food and of contextualizing the relationship between food and the body (Scrinis 39).” The problem with this re-contextualization is it limits people to interacting with their food that allows for social identity, spiritual identity and gender identity. Furthermore reducing food into nutrients and numerical symbols limits its functionality and forces it to move on from “food discourses and consumption practices (Scrinis 42).” In the case of Macrobiotics the problem is that food here represents so much of being able to balance an entire gender identity—by limited foods to nutrient based ideology it ignores the cultural constructs that my enable a women to empower herself through use of yin and yang. Furthermore, Scrinis presents the marketing of food as a means to “distract attention from both the overall nutrient profile of a food” but by doing this it also takes food out of a political context, such as the political ties that Lloyd-Paige explains with meat products and the treatment of people of color. Food practices varying but in these situations it seems that food is tied to a spiritual belief or social order that enables the individual.
