Christine Mi | Vox Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters. 2024-10-18T17:16:52+00:00 https://www.vox.com/authors/christine-mi/rss https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1 Marina Bolotnikova Christine Mi <![CDATA[I gave up meat and gained so much more]]> https://www.vox.com/climate/24131229/vegan-vegetarian-meatless-climate-solutions-recipes-connection 2024-10-18T13:16:52-04:00 2024-04-22T07:00:00-04:00 A drawing of friends sitting at a picnic table in a green clearing next to the ocean, sharing a delicious vegan meal.
The beginning of an illustrated essay. Author writes: “For most of my life, I’ve fielded questions about why I’m vegan. Although I write about factory farming for a living, I don’t really invite these conversations. A casual dinner party or happy hour doesn’t feel like the best time to get into specifics. I want to share how deeply rewarding veganism can be, but I don’t want to sound judgmental or sanctimonious.” Comments are illustrated: “What do you cook?” and “That must be so hard!”Author writes: “Mainstream narratives about vegetarians and vegans tend to treat us as a punchline — as deprived, joyless, or extreme... It’s unsurprising that the idea of ditching meat provokes such strong reactions. And for many people, a future without meat is one not worth living in. But what if we flipped the script on assumptions about plant-based life as something that just subtracts things from our lives?” Text appears alongside a TV scene, people cooking over a grill, a picnic.An illustration of the author and friend on a white background, followed by text that says: “I totally understand why people feel weird about cutting out meat and dairy. Food connects us to each other.” And then, a lush field with text superimposed: “But let me tell you a secret: My world has never felt so full of joy and purpose.”A farm illustration. Text reads: “In his book Dedicated, author Pete Davis argues that having an infinite array of options might look like freedom, but this is ultimately a superficial notion of what makes a happy, connected life. “We yearn for the purpose, community, and depth that can only come from making deep commitments,” he writes. This is the role that veganism has come to play in my life. It’s my ethical North Star — the spiritual anchor that makes everything else make sense.”Text reads: “I didn’t always live this way. When I was 4, I immigrated with my mom and my grandparents to the US from the former Soviet Union, and I grew up eating lots of meat- and dairy-heavy cuisine: meat dumplings slathered in sour cream, beef kabobs by way of the Caucasus and Central Asia, pancakes thickened with cottage cheese.” Below the text, the foods are illustrated against pastel plates.Text reads: “As a preteen, I decided I wanted to stop eating animals. For a long time, though, I wasn’t a consistent vegetarian. No one in my family or school friends was interested in vegetarianism, and without a community, transforming your diet can feel virtually impossible. Things started to change in high school. I learned that veganism isn’t just about taking animal-based foods off your plate. It’s about adding new ingredients altogether.” Illustration of a haggard teen reading “Meat Inc.”Text reads: “When meat is the centerpiece of a dish, all the other ingredients serve to highlight and complement its fatty, savory flavors. But plants make entirely different tastes the star of the show — no meat imitation required. Foods like coconuts, cashews, beans, and even oats can add their own delightful creaminess, while braised cabbages, fried tofu, crisped chickpeas, and chewy seitan provide body and texture.” Illustration of author cooking, followed by chana masala.Text reads: “I baked every type of decadent cupcake imaginable — mint chocolate, matcha, dulce sin leche — from the book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and brought them to school to share.” Illustration of friends saying “These are so good!” and “Yum!” Text continues: “After a while, my definition of food started to change. Far from making me feel deprived, these experiences opened up a limitless world of plant-based foods — foods that many Americans never get to experience.”Text reads: “I also gained an appreciation for how many plant-based gems already exist in Russian cuisine. Like vinegret, a tart purple salad of minced beets, dill pickles, and other vegetables. Shchi is an herb soup of hardy plants like cabbage and potato. (It’s sometimes made with meat broth, but that’s easily omitted.) Others, like salat olivye, a dill-heavy, mayonnaise-based salad, are easier to veganize than you might think with chickpeas and egg-free mayo.” Meals are illustrated.An illustration of the author and her mom in front of the stove, tending to a large pot. Text reads: “My mom is still ambivalent about veganism, but she admires how important it is to me and often says she wants to try it. She uses Impossible Meat to veganize kotleti (meat patties) and golubtsi (cabbage rolls). These are best eaten on a bed of buckwheat — the nutty, nutrient-dense whole grain of choice in former Soviet countries.” Speech bubbles from various writers. The author’s text reads: “21st-century people who eat meat-rich diets can sometimes essentialize animal products as a central part of culture, but the foundations of cuisines around the world have long been plant-based.” Then two condensed quotes from journalist Marianna Giusti and chef Hannah Che appear alongside potatoes, eggplants, and garlic.Text reads: “Even in the lands we call the United States, Indigenous peoples for centuries cultivated the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash — a protein-rich trio still savored today. We can look to these traditions to build a more sustainable future.” These words are superimposed on an illustration of the Three Sisters growing in a field against a soft yellow sky.Text reads: “Veganism isn’t just a diet or a way to lower carbon emissions. It’s a philosophy of nonviolence toward nonhuman animals.” Rows of factory farming sheds are illustrated, as well as pollution. Text continues: “Factory farming has literally remade life on Earth. It has replaced wild animals with billions of farmed animals, both victims of and unwitting contributors to our planetary crisis, that live and die in conditions of bottomless cruelty.”Illustration of cows in close confines. Text reads: “For many people, confronting the violence behind something so intimate as the food we eat makes them want to shut down rather than take action. But I’ve come to see joy and grief as two inextricable sides of the same coin. Committing to veganism has allowed me to mourn animal agriculture’s impact on the planet while being able to build something new, something better, something consistent with my deepest values and with a livable future.”Text reads: “It has also connected me with others and expanded my sense of home. The Midwest, where I live, has some of the densest concentrations of factory farms on Earth. By some measures, animals farmed for food now make up the bulk of the Earth’s creatures. Animals like cows, pigs, and chickens are ignored in conversations about biodiversity, but my vision of connecting with life on Earth puts them at the center.”Text reads: “My husband and I volunteer at a Wisconsin farm sanctuary about an hour from our home. There, animals rescued from the region’s factory farms are given a space to live out their lives.” Followed by an illustration of farm animals next to the author. Next, the text reads: “One of them, an enormous pig named Wemberly, had been found as a piglet. At 21 days old, she had spent the first few weeks of her life in a tiny cage before being shipped off for fattening and slaughter.”Illustration of a small pig in a cage, and then being held. Text reads: “To the factory farm industry, Wemberly was a margin of error. To the farm worker who took mercy on her and called the sanctuary for help, she contained a universe of experience — a life worth living. I often think about an idea I learned growing up in an Orthodox Jewish school, where I first had the idea to become vegetarian. In Judaism, we sometimes say that saving a life is equivalent to saving the entire world.”An illustration of friends at a picnic, and then two people sharing a plate of food between each other. Text reads: “Even after so many years, being vegan in a non-vegan world is not always easy — logistically, socially, and emotionally. Human connection makes it easier. We share vegan foods and an unspoken understanding of how hard it is to go through life carrying such a heavy burden. What else can we do in this unjust world if not help each other live according to our values?”

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Marina Bolotnikova is a deputy editor for Vox’s Future Perfect section. Before joining Vox, she reported on factory farming for national outlets including the Guardian, the Intercept, and elsewhere.

Christine Mi is a cartoonist, writer, and game designer focused on telling stories in and around nature. Some examples of topics she’s explored in her work have been eels (where do they come from?), gingko trees, and finding ways to experience small joys during the pandemic. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Rumpus, and more.

Sources

Tips and resources for going plant-based

Further reading on factory farming, our food system, and the climate 

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Part of the Escape Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

Last fall, I spent an afternoon in the fields of a nearby farm, planting garlic in neat rows. That garlic grew quietly underground through the New England winter. Right as their first shoots pushed out of the soil in March, my world — everyone’s world — suddenly got a lot smaller.March. I spend the first weeks of lockdown in my apartment playing video games. I download Animal Crossing and decorate my island with bamboo. I give my friends flowers in cyberspace. Animal Crossing sells more digital copies in a month than any console game in history. It feels nice to know that millions of us are finding solace in catching virtual butterflies. We trade friend codes with strangers online, and briefly forget the distance between us all.April. The weather gets warmer. My boyfriend and I bike across empty city roads to buy seedlings, pots, big bags of soil. We stack them tall on our bikes and pedal home unsteadily. We plant the seedlings in pots and shove them in the sunniest corner of the balcony. “Now grow big and strong so we can eat your children!” “HA HA!”May-ish. One day, I go out for a walk. A stranger spots me from a distance and calls me over. “Look at this tree! Look how beautiful!” And he’s right — the leaves are fluorescent, almost neon. We stare in awe for a while.Later, I wonder if this interaction might have happened in our previous lives. Between commutes, coffee runs, deadlines, would we have paid as much attention to the million leaves unfurling above our heads, as they do every year? And even if we did, would we have felt compelled to share that moment with someone, anyone at all?June, I think? The days grow long. Trees only measure time with sunlight and warmth, and I’m starting to think their way makes more sense than ours.The abundance of time makes me feel equal parts grateful and sheepish ... But the heady days of summer elide dark uncertainties ... and when the light fades, I often find myself retreating into fears old and new. Can we save each other from sickness? Can we save each other from hatred? Can we save each other, while also saving this earth we live on? We can’t answer these questions, but we can promise to remember why these things are worth saving...The poet Mary Oliver once shared a great secret. “Instructions for living a life:/ Pay attention./ Be astonished.’ Tell about it.” My cat already knows these secrets. Now I’m learning them, too.High summer (I’ve given up on months). Our balcony garden is thriving. Plants are alchemists! They have transmuted air, water, earth, and time into tomatoes and peppers. We harvest and eat them at lunch.The farm where I planted garlic last fall opens for volunteers again, and I end up back on that same bed of garlic, pulling fat bulbs out of the earth. “Look how much you’ve grown!” Despite how strange and uncertain our lives have become recently, we can always find escape and comfort in the continuity of every other living thing.On a sweltering summer evening, Jake and I search the sky with binoculars. There! Almost a straight line below the ladle of the Big Dipper: a perfect comet, its tail splayed out behind it like a catbird’s. Comet Neowise is 70 million miles away from Earth. It’s moving 144,000 miles per hour, but to us, it looks perfectly suspended in the sky.The next time neowise will be visible from our planet is in 6.800 years, a number that feels absurd. Who, in the year 8820, will remember 2020? It feels good to surrender before the immensity of cosmic time. Looking at that small speck of rock, the world briefly feels very, very big again.

Christine Mi is a cartoonist and writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Nib, and more. She draws a webcomic called Sad Girl POP.

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]]> Christine Mi <![CDATA[Consider the vulture]]> https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/12/19/21028315/vulture-vultures-tibetan-sky-funeral 2024-08-02T09:52:25-04:00 2019-12-27T15:30:00-05:00
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]]> Christine Mi <![CDATA[Consider the ginkgo]]> https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/29/20932379/ginkgo-tree-atomic-bomb-hiroshima-bombing 2024-08-02T09:47:43-04:00 2019-11-05T09:30:00-05:00
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Christine Mi is a cartoonist and writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Brooklyn Rail, the Nib, and more. She also draws a pink webcomic called Sad Girl Pop.

]]> Christine Mi <![CDATA[Consider the eel]]> https://www.vox.com/2019/9/30/20885718/eel-spawn-birth 2024-08-02T09:44:40-04:00 2019-10-07T09:15:00-04:00
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A comic series from The Highlight about the world’s most mysterious species.

Christine Mi is a cartoonist and writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Brooklyn Rail, the Nib, and more. She also draws a pink webcomic called Sad Girl Pop.

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