Finding Direction

My college roommate freshman year must have kind of hated me. She was pre-med. I was a theatre major with an English minor. That year I was studying the acting theories of Meisner, who believed that to get to the heart of a character an actor had to find her true motivation and really get there emotionally. To my Meisner instructor and director, it was better to do nothing and really mean it than to force some kind of action and come off as false. The goal? Think Meryl Streep, not I Love Lucy.

While my roommate was memorizing the periodic table of the chemical elements, I was feverishly looking all over our dorm room, through piles on my cluttered desk and piles in my cluttered closet, for a task to use for the next day’s acting class. We had to think of a very specific activity and give it great emotional importance.  (You can imagine how much my roommate must have sympathized with my homework…  Not much.)  Then the next day in class I had to go outside the classroom, think about why performing my activity was so overwhelmingly important, and then act out a scene with another student who was trying to keep me from my task at hand. It seemed that my teacher’s ultimate desire was to have all of her students crying real tears or breaking real chairs.  (My theatre education may not be bringing me pre-med dollars, but it was a lot of fun. It was like taking a cathartic vacation.)

The next year my roommate found another person to live with and I had a different acting teacher/director with an altogether different method. This teacher was focused on Shakespeare and her mantra was, “Fake it till you make it.” She didn’t want her Juliet sitting on the floor next to Romeo repeating the bard over and over until she worked herself into an emotional frenzy. It would be better to tear at your hair and pound at the ground falsely rather than glide through iambic pentameter understated but sincere. Her point of view was that if you point yourself in the direction of where you want to go, eventually you’ll get there. At first, it may be rocky, but eventually it will be solid.

At this point you may be asking yourself, “What does this have to do with cooking or kitchens or even veganism in general? Did Cadry’s roommate really leave over a difference in liberal arts education, or was it actually because Cadry had some creative ideas about keeping their tiny dorm room spick and span?” And here is where I evade your last question and get to the point. When I was vegetarian and not yet vegan, initially I didn’t go all the way because my thinking aligned with Meisner’s theories.  If I couldn’t be there totally and completely authentically, I shouldn’t go there at all.   One of the reasons, for example, I didn’t go vegan earlier was because I was overwhelmed at the idea of figuring out which cleaning and household products had animal ingredients or tested on animals. It seemed like too much research; I gave up and had a grilled cheese sandwich.

What a waste!   I wish I’d looked at it like my Shakespeare instructor – pointed myself in the direction I wanted to go and trusted I would get there eventually. Have cheeseless pizza and quesadillas made with hummus instead of queso, and then buy the cleaning products I was already buying with the idea that I would get to the research eventually.   It makes no sense to me now that I continued financially contributing to businesses that I knew were harming animals because I felt overwhelmed looking into companies that might be harming animals.

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau puts it like this, “Don’t do nothing because you can’t do everything.” It’s better for the animals if we do what we can now rather than doing nothing at all because we fear imperfection. We don’t need to lie. We shouldn’t say, “I’m vegetarian” if we’re really eating fish or chickens. However, if we can have a meatless meal every day until we can figure out how to have every meal meatless, then by all means we should!

With the footage that came out last week about the Conklin Dairy abuse in Ohio and the abuse at a California hatchery, you may be asking yourself how you can stop supporting businesses that do harm. When we ask people to use animals as commodities in industries that have inherent suffering, it’s sadly not that surprising when people become so distanced from their own empathy that they act out on the animals. (Interesting side note: the owner of Conklin dairy, Gary Conklin, released a statement through Huffington Post condemning the violence and claiming that, “The video shows animal care that is clearly inconsistent with the high standards we set for our farm and its workers, and we find the specific mistreatment shown on the video to be reprehensible and unacceptable. We will not condone animal abuse on our farm.” And yet, on the video at 1:29 he is shown kicking a cow in the face.)

Violence breeds violence, but peace breeds peace.   Let’s start somewhere.  At the holidays, we all say we want peace on earth. Well, let’s point ourselves in that direction.   Let’s ask ourselves, “What can I do today that is creating the world I want to see?”

Tags: change, conklin dairy, meisner, peace, transitioning, vegan, veganism, vegetarian