Drinking Pus
I have a vegan friend at work who pulls a face at drinking lattes made with actual milk.
“How’s your pus?” she’ll ask, as I sip my drink.
And although I find it in poor taste to ask a former anorexic how their glass of pus is, I can’t help myself from feeling anything but sympathy.
Here’s why:
Once upon a time, I was vegan, too.
After two years of beans, greens, and grains, it took me a long time to finally accept that my Perfect Vegan Diet was essentially a suicide mission marketed to me as a panacea. That’s a story for another time, but my point in mentioning this is that in the painfully slow dismantling of my Vegangelical altar, I started to notice that food itself was repulsive to me.
You see, I’d absorbed a lot of disgusting ideas about food over time. When I thought of meat, I saw only a vessel of stress hormones that flooded an animal’s body as it was slaughtered. My stomach turned at the thought of eggs coming from sickly, overworked hens. Milk summoned images of “rape racks.” And one time, I nearly passed out from peeling shrimp. Sitting lightheaded on the kitchen floor in a cold sweat, I remember wondering: “How did food become so offensive?”
Of course, part of my disgust was stemming from the physiological hiccup of my anorexic brain. But I knew my disgust with food wasn’t just confined to me: many people I know are repulsed by omnivorous diets. In large part, I knew my abhorrence to eating animals was predominantly the result of a complete lack of exposure to actual food.
Essentially, what I mean to say is that we’re so far removed from food, we’ve grown an aversion to it.
We’ve become softened by clean plastic packaging, colorful labels, and neatly-butchered chicken breasts. We’re so enclosed in our contrived societies that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a human on this earth. Most of us have zero exposure to our food before it’s removed from nature and presented to us. In fact, just this morning, the two women in line behind me were debating whether there’s a difference between a sailor and a fisherman (there definitely is). Heck, until this year, I didn’t even know what a sesame was (ever wonder where all those seeds on your bagel came from?).
Let me ask you something: when was the last time you saw a chicken being plucked? How about an oyster being cleaned? A shrimp deveined? Escargot being served? A fish scaled? Duck hunted? Elk butchered? Pâté made? Eggs laid? Cows milked? Honey harvested? Beans sorted? Yogurt fermented? Butter churned? Or even grains milled?
People think to themselves: “I could never slaughter a cow, so logic only follows that I shouldn’t eat them.”
Ah yes, logic. Ever the more effective when it’s ubiquitously applied.
Should surgery not be performed? Blood tests never drawn? Diapers left unchanged? Compost abandoned? Birthday cake not served after the five-year-old spit all over it made a wish? Ever seen Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs on TV? Need I say more?
What about something as innocuous as organic veggies? If I tossed every head of romaine that had bugs infesting it, I’d never eat salad again. Bugs are objectively disgusting - yes - but so is brain surgery. And if organic lettuce and life-saving surgery are icky, does that mean they should be abandoned altogether?
Point being: all of these “disgusting” ideas I’d been brainwashed by PETA and Netflix documentaries to associate with animal foods weren’t exactly giving me the full picture, which is:
Life is gross; nothing is perfect.
Even if you held steadfastly to an Ideal Vegan Diet ‘till the end of time, unless you left your head buried deep in the proverbial dirt, you would still have to face the facts. If you want to pretend those bananas in your Kind Diet vegan smoothie weren’t picked at the hands of child slave labor; preserved in a state of hibernation on pollution-emitting cargo ships; ripened in temperature-, humidity-, and gas-controlled facilities; and then distributed by plane, train, and automobile to your local grocer with a fresh batch of fruit fly eggs waiting to hatch all over your kitchen… be my guest. But at least make the informed decision that you’re paying to support human trafficking and slave labor because you find the work of butchers to be more repulsive.
We’re so far removed from nature, we don’t recognize food any more.
We willingly buy into the many science-washed, utopian ideas that food companies mercilessly shove down our throats. Plant-based foods are so well marketed to us that they practically come with automatically assumed halos of “healthy,” “ethical,” and “sustainable” built right into their branding; no matter if they’re selling diet sodas or grain-free breakfast “cereals.” At this point, they could likely sell us anything with a leaping bunny on it, and consumers would be lining up to participate in whatever overpriced, plastic-wrapped, faux-solution is purported to be the cure to both their health and climate woes. Unsurprisingly, many of us would rather elect to drink a puree of grains, water, synthetic vitamins, and seed oil packaged in trendy, toxic, plastic-coated Oatly cartons than have to suffer the indignity of swallowing “animal secretions.”
What does it mean to be repulsed by nature, when we’re an inextricable part of it?
This morning, I overheard a woman chatting with her friends about how she “can’t even look at her fingernails any more.” Apparently, she’d been wearing fake nails for so long, the very sight of her natural hands repulsed her. (Eavesdropping comes easily when you’re in cacophonous New Jersey.)
Increasingly, I’ve noticed that most women my age can’t seem to stand the sight of themselves sans-modification. We spend hundreds of dollars making ourselves over from tip to toe. We sit for hours at hair salons, stick our foreheads with neurotoxins, and hire non-english speaking immigrants to beautify our toes. I actually know someone who needs an hour’s notice before going to the grocery store, just so she can properly “ready herself.”
At arm’s length, it’s easy to assume we’re all competing for attention. But I’d argue the production is actually for ourselves: we can’t stand our own reflections in the mirror, nor our unfiltered selfies on the screen.
It all makes me wonder:
Is our disgust with ourselves indicative of a chauvinistic disgust with nature in general?
Tragically, the more we focus on our bodies, the more we tend to separate ourselves from them. We’re effectively objectifying our own vessels. And the more we view ourselves as things to be altered, the more blinded we become to the reality of who we are as women. That is to say: we’re animals, too.
What is a woman?
By seemingly unpopular opinion, I’m inclined to agree with the following statement:
“I believe a woman is a human being who belongs to the sex class that produces large gametes. It’s irrelevant whether or not her gametes have ever been fertilized, whether or not she’s carried a baby to term, irrelevant if she was born with a rare difference of sexual development that makes neither of the above possible, or if she’s aged beyond being able to produce viable eggs. She is a woman and just as much a woman as the others.
What makes her a woman is the fact of being born in a body that, assuming nothing has gone wrong in her physical development (which, as stated above, still doesn't stop her being a woman), is geared towards producing eggs as opposed to sperm, towards bearing as opposed to begetting children, and irrespective of whether she's done either of those things, or ever wants to.”
A woman is a human with the astounding ability to introduce new life into a world in which that life previously never existed nor will ever exist again. Take away the makeup, the highlights, and the press-on nails, and we’re actually more magical than we give ourselves credit for.
Regardless of the way we package ourselves, we are a part of the world, and we are a part of nature. And you know what comes with the nature of bearing new life?
Making milk.
Yep. The very substance spoken about with adamant derision. The supposed impetus behind our food chain wreaking environmental destruction. That concoction of nefarious-sounding words like secretion and lactose that your vegan “doctor” influencers warned you about. That’s what they call the inextricable, fundamental part of your womanhood.
It’s peculiar to me how vegan activists inadvertently belittle the very things they supposedly seek to protect. In their mission to reduce the amount of humans consuming milk, vegan “advocates” effectively render other females inanimate, relegating their bodies with derisive descriptors like excrement, secretion, and pus.
In contrasting light, milk is actually the one thing you as a woman will naturally offer to enable the life of your most vulnerable loved one. The problem is, most people are so taken away with the misogynistic, anti-milk rhetoric that they fail to realize for themselves how magical milk is.
It’s not common knowledge that your child’s saliva will inform your mammary glands about their health. Nor is it widely known that the very composition of your milk will instantaneously alter itself based on this feedback. We’re not taught about the ability of a mother’s immunity to protect her child through drinking her milk alone. Nor even the simple brilliance behind a mother’s milk being higher in cortisol in the morning to wake her child up, then higher in melatonin in the afternoon to help her baby sleep. I could continue, but for fear of getting lost in the weeds, my overarching point is this:
Despite widespread anti-milk propaganda coming from vegan activist groups, milk is a female masterpiece.
Whether you choose to eat cheese or butter doesn’t negate the fact that relegating milk to the word ‘pus’ is anti-feminist at best, and contemptuous toward nature at worst.
Milk is a female design. Milk sustains life, fights infection, shares immunity, stabilizes mood and wakefulness, and provides everything that could possibly be needed to keep another being alive and healthy with the addition of absolutely nothing else. And so, much in the same way that I wouldn’t pigeonhole another woman by naming her Shrill, Slutty, or Hormonal, I’d be hard-pressed to belittle milk in the way of calling it pus.
Drink it or not, it’s hard to deny that in it’s most basic definition, milk is feminine magic made substantial.
Maria
