Valija Evalds is currently an Art History professor at The University of Kansas. Before that, she taught at Yale as a grad student, and at Smith as an adjunct lecturer. Going even further back, her vocational attempts have included children’s book illustrator, nun, revolutionary and museum tour guide.
But the main reason I interviewed her is that she was veg*an for about 15 years, from 1981 to 1996.
It may also be worth mentioning that Valija is the sister of Lierre Keith, the author of The Vegetarian Myth. I conducted most of this interview before vegans smashed pepper-laced pies onto her sister’s head during one of her public appearances, but Valija did have something to add about that.
What got you into veganism?
When I was a freshman in high school I met another student whose family was macrobiotic. She was very convincing, and I was very idealistic. My mother was NOT pleased. In fact she was very worried. But my sister took to it immediately.
Why do you think you and Lierre found veganism so appealing?
I think Lierre and I took to it because we were already quite passionate about justice and wanted to live in a world without violence and oppression. Veganism seemed to be the most righteous path.
Did veganism become like your religion?
Veganism was only one part of a whole worldview that was political and spiritual all together. It seemed a logical piece of being a feminist, an environmentalist, an anti-imperialist, an anti-capitalist. It seemed to embody a larger reverence for life and for the planet. Yes, it was religious.
Were any vegan leaders or books particularly influential?
Laurel’s Kitchen, Diet for a Small Planet, and all the stuff coming out of the Kushi Institute are what I remember most.
Did you visit the Kushi Institute? While I was vegan, I thought it would be fun to stay there for a few months.
Yes. My “macro” friend and I hung out there often, because her mom worked there. I got a couple of good shiatsu massages from massage students. I remember everyone looking very brownish gray, like grains of rice, and the men being so terribly, terribly gaunt.
What arguments for veganism were most important to you—animals, health or the environment?
All of the above. That was the beauty of it. It all seemed to fit. This one way seemed to address so many problems.
How did veganism live up to its end of the bargain as far as improving your health?
The first thing, a couple of months into it, was terrible low blood sugar. Then about a year into it, after I started eating a lot more soy, I started getting horrendous menstrual cramps. This was the beginning of what became endometriosis. I also became depressed and listless. I was cold all the time. I lost all of my color. In time I developed some ghastly stomach problems. When I was 16 or 17 I started to get continual pain in my knees and ankles.
I fluctuated between being vegetarian and being vegan. These problems were always with me, but they were better when I was vegetarian, and eating butter and eggs. The last year of my veganism I tried to go totally fat free. I had read that fat was bad for you and thought if it was bad, I would do without it altogether. I gained ten pounds very quickly. I was a wreck, emotionally and physically. I had depression and insomnia. My blood sugar would crash every hour. I was so exhausted I thought I had chronic fatigue syndrome. I had a yeast infection for over a year.
With all these problems, why stick with veg*anism for so long?
It never occurred to me that my problems could have anything to do with being a vegan. I had heard so many stories of people becoming healthier, thinner, more energetic, their skin clearing up, everything that was good. I assumed that any problems I was having were due to my lapses during the times when I ate dairy products.
In time, popular culture increasingly adopted a low-fat refrain, and it seemed to corroborate what I had heard from the macrobiotics, ie: that life without animal products was healthier.
Being veg in the 1980s must have been harder than it was now, because there were fewer products and awareness. On the other hand, I bet it was also harder to quit, because less was known about “failure to thrive” and all the people who crash and burn on it. What was most difficult about starting veg*anism in the early 80s - staying with it or quitting it?
It was hard because there were almost no replacement products. We made our own soy milk which was absolutely undrinkable. Soy ice cream only came out after a year or two of my being vegan.
We lived in Boston, and there was one macrobiotic restaurant. But otherwise there wasn’t much out there. People had no idea what I was talking about and acted as if I were from Mars when I described what I ate.
Of course there were nice things about that, too. We did a lot of cooking, my sister and I, and we had to be very inventive. We couldn’t just buy things, so we had to do it ourselves.
What got you out of veganism?
I was absolutely desperate. First of all: picture trying to start a PhD program without enough tryptophan to make seratonin; with a serious deficit of the amino acids that you need to make dopamine, endorphins, adrenaline, cortisol, ie: all the things that help you deal with stress, that give you courage and joy. In addition, as I said, I was physically devastated.
I went to an acupuncturist, one I trusted, to whom I had been for many years, when I could afford it. She was able to help a little, but finally she said, “I can only help you so much as long as you don’t eat meat.”
Because she was not a western doctor, and because she had helped me, I decided to try it. It was a miracle. Though I have to say, I was also helped tremendously by cutting way back on carbohydrates. I stopped getting low blood sugar. The yeast problem evaporated in the first week.
Do you think that the longer someone is vegan, the harder it is for them to stop being vegan because of all the time and life “invested” in it?
It can take a long time to rebuild your entire worldview and your ethical system the way that you need to do to start eating meat again. I suppose that is harder to do, the longer you’ve been at it. But, personally, I couldn’t face it until I was absolutely forced to, after a decade and a half had passed and taken my health and strength with it.
Do you have any regrets about being veg*an so long?
I am much, much, much better off than I was in 1996, when I finally had to give up veganism. But I suffered from unnecessary pain, fatigue and depression for years — years when I was still growing and when I needed all the energy I had to get through school and start a career. I think I will never be quite right. I am permanently exhausted. I had to have my uterus out last year. (I kept on eating soy for several years after I started eating meat again, before I became better informed about its drawbacks; and endometriosis tends to be a progressive disease.)
Most current vegans will probably think that you had health problems because you “did veganism wrong.” Or that the problems were genetic.
One can never know how one’s health might have developed in different circumstances. I do have some problems that are obviously genetic: I had pleurisy three times in graduate school, for instance. The grandmother I take after had TB as a child. This is a clear connection. But most of what I went through after becoming a vegan was marked, and uncharacteristic of the rest of my family.
Meanwhile, what my sister went through was downright bizarre. She went undiagnosed for years simply because it never entered anyone’s head that an 18 year-old who had not suffered a severe injury could possibly have four degenerative discs in her back. And the fatigue she suffers from is like nothing else from her genetic inheritance: my father’s people are very, very hardy. My mother’s father’s people were Valkyries.
I will say that we have depression on both sides. But we both have responded to increased protein and saturated fats so dramatically that it is pretty clear that veganism exacerbated a natural weakness with disastrous results.
I want to be quite clear that my health problems are not the result of having done veganism the “wrong” way. For 15 years, I could count on one had the number of times I ate white sugar. My sister and I were extraordinarily thorough in our quest for health. Our mom was very nervous when we went vegan, and she picked up Diet for a Small Planet on the recommendation of a friend from work, and then we got Laurel’s Kitchen. One whole wall of the kitchen was covered with amino acid charts and we chose our grains and beans accordingly. (We even had a little song about complementing your proteins.)
I almost never ate white flour. I avoided all chemical additives. I ate seaweed. We had miso and brewer’s yeast every day in an attempt to get our B12 vitamins, and started taking B12 supplements just in case. I drove hostesses to despair. I was very very thorough.
It doesn’t matter how unrefined your grains are. They are still carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are sugar. I became hypoglycemic on organic scotch oats, brown rice and quinoa and the occasional dose of barley malt or grade B maple syrup.
Nobody bothers with protein complementing anymore, but I bet that complementing your proteins song still holds up. Do you remember the lyrics?
I’m sorry, but I don’t believe wild horses could drag it out of me.
Though many vegans have health problems, and health is often a factor that leads someone back to animal products, the image of veganism being healthy persists, and even non-vegans sometimes assume veganism is the healthiest diet. Any idea why?
I wish I knew. At the moment our culture is obsessed with the idea that low fat means health. It may be relevant that the “healthy” grain-based diet that is being advocated everywhere is also one that is generating a great deal of profit for some very large corporations that own an awful lot of farmland in this country. Much of the American diet is essentially industrial waste.
But I don’t know that it is really a conspiracy. Maybe it is the old American tendency to link morality with abstinence. I recently heard someone say that in America food is the new religion. I hear this in conversations, especially among women who are very satisfied when they have successfully struggled against some fatty temptation, or when they are berating themselves for giving in and eating something with fat, or when they are discussing their husbands’ unhealthy cholesterol and lack of interest in low-fat food. It could almost be a discussion about virtue and sin, purgatory, confession, salvation.
As a professor, do you encounter a lot of college students experimenting with veganism?
It’s awful. I can’t tell you how frequently I encounter exhausted, ill vegetarian and vegan students in my office. I know them instantly, because I was them. It is horrible to watch. I would like for them to be able to learn from my mistakes. But I have to keep my mouth shut. It’s not my place to comment upon what they eat. I am an art history professor. It is not appropriate for me to give dietary advice to my students. But it kills me to see them.
Lierre lasted a few years longer than you. What did she make of you quitting veganism?
I was really afraid to tell her, but actually she was very nice about it. (She was never a really pushy vegan, I have to say.) She knew I was a mess. Meanwhile, she was such a mess herself that she had begun to do a great deal of research about nutrition.
Lierre was the one who first told me about what eating too many carbohydrates can do to you. She was still a vegan, but she started eating a lower carbohydrate diet to try and help with her blood sugar. (This is an extraordinarily difficult combination. Nuts and soy products are your only significant protein sources. There is little else you can eat except vegetables.) She encouraged me to try it just for a week and I did so. This was a few months after I had started eating fish again. It was miraculous.
I am so very grateful that I had the benefit of her research as I came out of being a vegan—even while she was still vegan, I learned an awful lot about insulin and carbohydrates that I had never known before, and it helped me to put myself back together. Since I was teaching and writing a dissertation through all of this, I never would have had time to research it myself.
Then as she began to face the fact that she had caused herself grave injury and that she might have to eat meat again, I was able to benefit from her knowledge about sustainable farming, soil, ecosystems, etc. and from her development of a new ethical outlook. As she began to eat meat she did yet more research about nutrition and I was able to benefit from information about saturated fats, amino acids, omega 3s, and from learning that meat from grass-fed animals is different from meat from grain fed animals, etc.
She began to keep chickens and I learned about death. That death is inevitable if we are to live, and more importantly if the soil is going to live; that one can choose either a kind of death that leads to more life, or a kind of death that wipes out whole ecosystems. I am enormously grateful for this. I came to eating meat again on my own, but I don’t think I would have recovered to nearly the extent that I have if I had not learned about all these things.
In addition, I am grateful for the way that her thinking put my ethical world back together again, and that I had the benefit of this before it hit the bookshelves. Lierre is extremely thorough and very persistent. When she does a thing, she really follows it through. She was living with me and my partner while she was writing much of The Vegetarian Myth, and I was able to hear her thoughts all the while.
In the end it was more than just putting my body back together. She made it all make sense again. The ethics of it, the politics of it, the health of my body and the health of the planet all came together again. I still hate that animals have to die for us to live. But I no longer see it as being at odds with a reverence for life and the planet.
I’m going to try to put you in a bad position. Do you disagree with anything in The Vegetarian Myth?
As I said, I am enormously grateful to have had the benefit of Lierre’s thinking. My criticisms have been editorial (though I think much of the writing quite beautiful). But in the great scheme of things they are minor. The content of this book is a great gift, and it came at immense cost to the writer.
That having been said, I would have put a paragraph here or there into footnotes. And I really wish we could get an index on the thing.
What do you think of the general vegan reaction to Lierre?
I have been stunned by some of the criticisms I have read, usually by people who have not read the book, and the very odd theories some people have about who she is. They have NO IDEA.
Lierre? A jetsetter paid off by the meat industry? She lives in a trailer on the pittance that the government pays to people on disability. She has lived in poverty her entire adult life. She has NOTHING. I bought her the computer that she wrote The Vegetarian Myth on. I bought her the socks she is wearing because every single sock she owned had giant holes in the heels.
Lierre? Eat factory farmed meat? She’d rather starve. Lierre? Exaggerating her illness? She hardly ever mentions it unless you ask. She has been in excruciating pain every day of her life since she was eighteen and a half years old. Do you want to know what doctors say when they look at her MRI? Lierre? A half-assed vegan? You could not FIND a more fundamentalist, purist, thorough vegan. No animal product touched her body.
I remember one year when she decided to live entirely without plastic. She was baking her own bread. She had a wooden toothbrush. This is a woman who lived her ethics. And these particular ethics nearly killed her. Vegans need to understand this: she IS the poster child.
Lierre gets many vegans so angry that it’s almost as if she, rather than factory farmers, is enemy number one. My interpretation is that this is because many vegans care less about animals and the environment than about maintaining their vegan identities. And Lierre poses a greater threat to the vegan identity than actual animal abusers do.
I think you are probably right. I think they probably also feel attacked by her. I think back to how I felt when I was a vegan. While I tried never to proselytize, I felt very passionately about it. And of course many attacks against vegetarians and vegans come from people who scoff at the very idea of trying to live carefully, of trying to find solutions, of taking the experience of other sentient beings seriously. Many people think it is laughable to imagine a world where anything but human gratification and short-term human benefit dominates.
This is not Lierre Keith. What Lierre’s attackers need to understand is that she actually IS in their camp. She has the same underlying motivation, and in the case of many of her attackers, she went farther with it than they have, and she’s been at it for longer than most of them have been alive.
Recently, three vegans approached your sister from behind as she lectured about factory farming, and hit her with pepper-laced pies. What does this say about the attackers and those vegans who supported it?
Well that is my question exactly. Is there no one practicing vivisection in the bay area? Are there no factory farms between Oregon and San Francisco? Do we not know the names Monsanto, Cargill, ADM? And THIS is your target?? A woman who has been working for social change longer than you’ve been alive? A middle-aged, disabled person living below the poverty line and in chronic pain? What does that say about your movement? The planet is dying and THIS is your action?
I would also like to say that over the past 25 years and more Lierre has faced violence of all kinds at the hands of police, state troopers, military police, court security guards, prison guards, pimps, rapists and drunken frat boys, all in the pursuit of a more equitable world. Is that the camp you really want to be in? Because that’s where you are standing right now.
Do you miss anything about veganism?
I miss the simplicity. It really seemed that our personal choices could save the planet and bring about all of this justice. And it seemed that we could separate ourselves from death, that we could not be a part of it, not be the cause of any creature’s suffering. We thought we could be clean, that the blood would not be on our hands, at least. We thought there was some meaningful distinction between animals “with faces” and animals without faces. (Which animals don’t have faces? Did we mean bugs? Did we mean creatures whose faces are not visible without a microscope? How did we not know that we are dependent on organisms that don’t necessarily resemble us?)
Now I understand that there is no personal solution. If we want justice and a sustainable food system and health we have got to do larger and more complicated things. We have got to raise animals in such a way that they build topsoil and we have to face their deaths. We have got to change the way our continent is being used and destroyed, rather than accepting what large corporations call healthy. We have got to kill and to retain our reverence at the same time. It is all much, much harder.
