In 2013 a woman from Dallas was riddled with malignant tumors. Doctors gave her a terminal diagnosis. Within two months, her tumors were benign. Medical experts can’t explain why, suggesting there’d been some sort of misdiagnosis. The woman’s daughter, whom I know, is equally confused. What she does know, however, is that when her mother was diagnosed with her terminal illness she left Austin to be with her. And while my friend was with her mother, she did something for her everyday, three times, and with the purest love: she cooked. Vegan.
And not just vegan. But healthy, macro-driven vegan. NO exceptions. When I asked my friend what her mother ate she simply said, “I know how to cook beans, grains, and vegetables, and that’s what I did and that’s what she ate.” And that’s what she’ll icontinue to eat.
My friend, humble soul, had taken no credit for saving her mother, who, it should be noted, ate a typical meat-based American diet before her daughter commandeered the kitchen. But it’s hard not to flirt with the logical sin of at least allowing cause and coincidence to flirt rather seriously.
It is perhaps the lack of a nutritional smoking gun that defuses the power of these sort of anecdotes to achieve permanence in the public imagination and, in turn, become a mainstream force for change. There’s so much quackery out there that it’s hard not to be drowned out by it when you think out loud about kale curing cancer. Having been trained from an early age to seek evidence, evidence, evidence – from the most reputable authorities – to buttress every belief and claim, I’ve been reluctant to make too much of these stories myself.
But here’s the thing: I hear them too often for there not to be some truthiness in there somewhere. And when you are facing death, and there’s the chance that a radical change in diet can save you, truthiness is pretty damn good.
When I saw the happiness in my friend’s face as she told me this story, when I saw her hands tremble, I decided that it was high time to start listening more closely to these narratives, sharing and collecting them, and fighting harder than ever to condemn the food products that not only harm animals, but the decent and loving people who eat them as well.
