Tom’s Story
By T. Cashman Avila-Beck
BECAUSE YOU ASKED: SOME REASONABLY COHERENT THOUGHTS ABOUT HUNGRY BEAUTIFUL ANIMALS, CANCER, AND JOY
In October 2015, posts started to pop up on my social media feeds about a new study that made a connection between red meat and cancer. This was the golden age of showing moral superiority and picking fights on Facebook, with both the platform and the mobile phone having been around long enough that everyone from your favorite aunt to the cousin you avoided had jumped onboard.
Lacking the wisdom, as I often do, to just sit on my thoughts, I fired off a post noting that, while this kind of research is obviously important, we need to remember that the ability to refuse food is a privilege.
What had I not considered before hitting send?
The family member who, armed with the information gathered from watching three documentaries¹, declared that a plant-based diet was easy and accessible to everyone. This declaration went over as one would expect such a statement to go on social media.
Now, a few things that are important for you to know at this point. Not, like, important in the way that, should you find yourself in a dangerous situation and you need to MacGyver a solution that this story will come in handy, but important in eventually understanding why I’m telling you this story instead of just talking about Hungry Beautiful Animals.²
It’s a process. We’re on a journey.³
Footnotes
¹ First, with apologies, but we’re going to start using footnotes. Second, this is not an exaggeration. She had watched three documentaries and set off on her new journey as a food scold. The story I’m telling here happens not too long before she used postings about the findings of this report to tell another family member, who was losing a friend to cancer, that it was probably the friend’s failure to adopt a plant-based diet that was killing her. I know. Right?
² Back when I was a seldom paid theater critic for a free weekly magazine in Washington, DC, I had an associate editor who would frequently complain, “Why can’t he just say if he liked the show or not? Why all the stories?” Reader, I have no idea except, well, it tickles me.
³ Yes. I’m absolutely being sarcastic.
It’s 2015. The part of Maine where the family member, three-doc vegan (3-DV), and I lived (and live) is at least two hours from the nearest Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. This is well before plant-based options were available at the local grocery chains or at the Walmart. This is a time when eating out as a vegetarian was largely regulated to Asian restaurants or the “sides” portion of the menu.⁴
In our area, staying on budget while avoiding overly processed foods was a challenge, forget about trying to do the weekly shopping at the two, very expensive, “natural” food stores.
It was like Martha Stewart insisting that recreating one of her 16-foot Christmas trees covered in home-baked gingerbread ornaments just takes a little care and patience. Or, you know, you could just ruin Christmas for everyone.
I tell you this, the first of what will undoubtedly be at least five tangents, of varying quality, while I wind my way to talking directly about Hungry Beautiful Animals.⁵ Don’t worry. It will be fun. If it helps, pretend I’m doing a podcast, without, you know, the possibility that we’ll solve a murder.⁶
And so, your hopes of brevity dashed, let’s talk about my cancer.⁷
In June of 2022 I was told I had cancer.⁸ This was after spending months being misdiagnosed by a physician’s assistant, one who would later read my biopsy results to me over the phone at such a pace and with such a clear lack of comprehension that I finally had to ask him, “Does this mean I have cancer? Is that what you’re saying?”
“You do,” he replied. Very long pause. “But I’ve never heard of this one.”
Which, in all fairness, I did manage to pull off a pretty fancy, though mildly insulting type of cancer. My surgical oncologist, who I thought was a riot⁹, explained my cancer by going through all the various types of sarcomas. Osteosarcoma. Osteo. Bone. Angiosarcoma. Angio. Blood vessels.
Footnotes
⁴ Except for the vegetables that had been wrapped in bacon before hitting the deep fryer.
⁵ Or, as I like to call it, Eat, Pray, Lettuce. Yes, I know. No one asked me.
⁶ Which, let’s face it, would be awesome.
⁷ Aren’t you excited?
⁸ Spoiler alert: Red meat did not give me cancer.
⁹ During one of my first evaluations Dr. Wang assured me that the 25lb tumor in my abdomen wouldn’t kill me “…this time.” Later I would tell my husband, “I’m so glad I have a funny surgeon.” Douglas looked at me and asked why I thought that. “You know, when he said ‘this time.’” “Um,” Douglas replied. “Honey, I don’t think he was actually joking.”
Now, I’m no doctor. I barely passed high school biology.¹⁰ But, I’m pretty good at prefixes and knew where we were going with this list, a list that would end with the cancer I had. Liposarcoma¹¹.
“Fat!” Dr. Wang exclaimed.¹²
That, my friends, is what we call insult to injury.
The thing about cancer, especially one that results in a tumor so large that it begins to physically rearrange your internal organs¹³, is that you want a reason. You want a study, like the red meat and cancer study, to be the answer. You want someone, like 3-DV, to tell you that your cancer is because you are still eating bacon so that you can then be mad at them for being an idiot.
But that’s not how it works. You just have cancer. You’ve won some messed up lottery with ridiculous odds and there you sit, with a tumor larger than those dogs people carry around in their handbag¹⁴.
So, you ask, perhaps pleadingly, what do these two stories have to do with Hungry Beautiful Animals and who do I see about getting the time I’ve wasted reading to this point back?¹⁵
It’s this passage from the book itself:
“I want to kick shame and blame to the curb and open the road to a gorgeous life of abundance perfectly tuned to delight the hungry beautiful animals we are— a life that satiates our deepest desires, respects our inviolable limits, and makes room for the flourishing of other hungry beautiful animals too. I want to convince you that we’re all in this beautiful thing together— not just the edgiest, eco-friendliest, most justice-driven among us, but everyone who is hungry to make the most of the gorgeous opportunity to steer a fragile body full of need and desire toward the fullest possible flourishing for all of us.”
Footnotes
¹⁰ True story, my sophomore biology teacher told my mother that, after struggling to remember me, “If I had an entire class of Toms, I would have a very boring class.”
¹¹Liposarcoma only affects about one in 100,000 people a year. See? Fancy cancer.
¹² Seriously, the dude knew the power of comedic timing.
¹³ “I love my trans kidney!” I told one cousin after learning the tumor had moved both my kidneys to one side of my body. This was in response to a much more serious, head tilt implied, “How are you doing?”
¹⁴ Which, I’m sorry but, just, no.
¹⁵ Talk to Marla. End of the hall, to the left. She’s in until 3p.
Reading Hungry Beautiful Animals, as someone who is not vegan, the thing that returned to me over and over again was the embrace of joy, that “glorious life of abundance.” This wasn’t a food scold, using the cobbled together arguments drawn from three documentaries. This didn’t dismiss the realities, like those introduced by a friend of mine in that Facebook battle, talking about her experiences working in a church food pantry. Sometimes, she wrote, a parent is going to pick the Spaghettios with hot dogs in them because that means their kid is going to go to bed a little more full and a little bit warmer even though the heat’s off and it’s winter in New England.
And, with Hungry Beautiful Animals¹⁶, Halteman doesn’t pretend it’s simple, because to do that pretends there is some rarified, Instagram-filtered world where we all have time to make all the elements of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from scratch.¹⁷
Again, from the book:
“It’s not enough to have a surprisingly good meal in a trendy restaurant. We need to know in our bones that there’s a perfect foldable slice of pizza to power us through a breakup. A superlative Friday night takeout to rinse off the week and a Saturday brunch worth showering for. A dynamite date night. Portable power foods for cookouts and camping. Quick eats for the busy times and cheap eats for the lean times and stuff that won’t provoke a hunger strike from picky kids. A Super Bowl spread we’ll live to regret. If we can’t imagine both feeding our children and overenjoying a vegan party, we can’t imagine flourishing in a vegan world.”
As I fought to regain the weight lost from my cancer¹⁸ I was told to follow my cravings and nutrition would follow. Despite working for a large environmental organization and knowing all about illegal fishing operations and the sometimes deplorable conditions fishers endure on some vessels, I craved tuna fish salad. I wanted macaroni and cheese, and, factory farming be damned, pre-packaged fried chicken tenders and I wanted to eat them in front of reruns of Bewitched¹⁹.
With Hungry Beautiful Animals, Halteman understands the reality and truth that food is as much about comfort and community as it is about sustenance and nutrition. It also avoids treating veganism as a magic trick that will solve all your problems or cure-all sold from the wagon of a traveling show.²⁰
Footnotes
¹⁶ This is where things get weird because I’m going to say ‘Halteman’ like the author is not someone I know. Sure, it’s a writing convention but, since we’re all friends here, let’s just pretend I’m doing it like I’m referring to one half of a pair of mismatched police detectives and I’m the exasperated sergeant trying to get them to stop playing by their own rules. “HALTEMAN! GET OUT OF MY SQUAD ROOM!”
¹⁷ If you have spent any time on Instagram, you know exactly who I’m talking about.
¹⁸ When all was said and done, I lost about 80lbs. The wild thing was that my lowest weight was what I actually weighed in high school. Wilder, through most of high school I was pretty sure that I was horribly overweight.
Additional fun fact, when your body is fighting something big, like a giant tumor (have I mentioned my giant tumor?), it makes choices on what to keep going and what to abandon. Growing strong nails? Thick, luxurious hair? Less important than, say, keeping your heart beating. These are things the doctors don’t really talk about until you look down one morning and temporarily freak out because you’re pretty sure you now have toe cancer. Which, you don’t.
No, I know. You didn’t need any of this information. It’s all on the house.
¹⁹ And Killing Eve. I contain multitudes.
²⁰ Cue Cher.
More than that, Halteman rejects the idea of veganism as a competition or an all-or-nothing trial. This isn’t about becoming a perfect vegan, Hungry Beautiful Animals is about giving oneself the space to try.
“You can release any motivation-sapping pressure that may have gathered around the ideal of trying to be ‘the perfect vegan,’ both because the only ideal worth pursuing is your own and because your successes and failures alike simply push out the boundaries of what is possible for you, bringing you the joy and the challenge of a new personal ideal toward which to strive.”²¹
And so, our little household has started to strive. There are more plant-based meals and experiments with new ideas. I make what I’m told is a really good vegan BBQ chk’n pizza on cauliflower crust.²²
There’s a vegan Pad Thai in the rotation, and a vegan smash burger that I now crave a couple times a week. Vegan fish and chips. Rice bowls where I break out the fancy chopsticks that were a gift and have just been hanging out in a drawer in the dining room.
There are even plant-based cookies in the pantry.²
But, even with those small steps. Here’s the actual thing about Hungry Beautiful Animals. The thing that has led me to start more than a few conversations with, “I’m not a vegan and I know you’re not a vegan but there’s this book…”
In the closing chapter, not long after admitting that he is, like me, a crier, Halteman writes:²⁴
“I don’t claim to know the meaning of life. But in my experience, the joy of living comes from the hope of learning to love so abundantly that the veil is as thin as can be as often as can be. That the barriers routinely disintegrate between self and world, letting it be that we can see what is true of life, feast on its beauty, and live well from its abundance and from our own. This joy feels like receiving now, from forces invisible, a glimmer of everything all at once inflected and improved, if infinitesimally, by my silly little offerings of attention and acceptance.”
Particularly over the last several years, we, this forced community that is the greatest experiment in democracy to ever take place, have been asked, by some, to see our time together very differently. To see life in terms of scarcity. To carry fear and hate like torches. To see ugliness and failure and decay.
I once told a relentlessly grim IV technician who was preparing me for some tests that things would go much more smoothly if we could both agree that I’m absolutely hysterical.²⁵ That’s what I do when I have to go back to the hospital to see if the cancer has come back. The cancer Dr. Wang said might kill me the next time. I make jokes. I laugh. I’m sarcastic. I poke around for those thin places Halteman²⁶ talks about.
As Hungry Beautiful Animals implores us to do at every turn. I look for joy, even in a place where others see only dread and darkness.²⁷
“The reimagination of the vegan life that inspired [Hungry Beautiful Animals] is not about arriving at a particular vegan identity as individuals, but rather about striving in solidarity— along whatever paths we happen to be traveling— toward a beautiful vegan world that is deeply desirable for human beings and appreciably better for all hungry beautiful animals and the earthly home that sustains us.”
Even if you are not a vegan. Even if you are not looking to adopt a plant-based lifestyle or attempt the world’s most ridiculously delicious sounding tiramisu recipe, the spirit of Hungry Beautiful Animals is infectious. The creativity and love and generosity it displays is inspirational and offers solace in a time of chaos. It reminds us that there are still new things to discover, new opportunities to seize, and, most powerfully, new communities of shared passion to be gathered and celebrated.
Footnotes
²¹ One of my very favorite things as a comic nerd growing up in the 1970s was when there would be an asterisk in the panel and, down in the corner, there would be a dialogue box that would tell you the character was referring to something that happened in an earlier issue of the book and it was always signed by the editor so, in that spirit: “Hey True Believer! This is from Hungry Beautiful Animals! Stay Cool! - Me”
²² Or, so says my husband. I will admit that I have still not managed to cross the vegan cheese divide.
²³ Much like the plant-based buffalo chk’n wings I really like, I do not believe that these are somehow good for me. I do believe they are delicious.
²⁴ If you jumped onto the pretending this is a podcast wagon, this is a quote I’d have an actor read with, like, an instrumental version of Billy Eilish’s ‘What Was I Made For’ playing in the background. We are going to cry, dammit!
²⁵ He was unmoved, even when I told him it was going to impact my Yelp review of his services.
²⁶ “HALTEMAN! I TOLD YOU YOU'RE OFF THE CASE! Now get outta my squad room!”
²⁷ I make a lot of cancer jokes now. A lot. I refer to my MedicAlert bracelet as my Unfit Bit.
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