How To Go Vegan When You're Melanated Young and Broke
Issue No. 6: Food, Nutrition, and Access in Our Communities
Words - Melania Luisa Marte
Illustration - Jeremie Rose Wimbrow
I try to be nice to my body. To accept that it needs more than rest and sleep to fend off disease.
I am constantly thinking about my grandmother, who beat two types of cancers and lived to tell me that sugar is the devil. I've read enough to know that white things have a tendency to be evil to Brown and Black bodies. So I am training myself to side-eye the fuck out of anything coated in that sweet white stuff.
In the dead of night, when the sugar rush crystallizes into my blood and my eyes balloon out of my sockets… I summon the common sense to accept that all this anxiety after eating a box of powdered donuts cannot be normal. Perhaps my Brown body has never been normal. Cannot digest the things this country has been feeding me. What I have allowed myself to nibble on. Why this bread stiffens like cardboard or like body parts shoved into boxes. What of the fruit my body is shaped like? How each vegetable mirrors an organ. What of the organs that need more than just water to flush out the death?
I peddle through Google searches for answers on why my body is not responding kindly to the 325 artificial ingredients in this frozen TV dinner. Instead of microwaving what's left of my brain cells and gut, I make a trip to the grocery store. I attempt to buy my health back with less than 20 bucks. Leave the systemic food droughts in my city and bring my feeble body. Perhaps anemic or depressed or gluten intolerant. The headache that won't go away. The ADHD. The insomnia. The back acne. The face acne. The body acne. The dry skin. The oily skin. The fatigue. The muffin top. The bloat. The hormonal imbalance. The period. A blood clotting gift that just keeps on giving. Heavy is the head of the Black and Brown woman forced to wear this plastic and tired crown. Where is her fruit basket like she asked? Like her blood begs. Like you promised her. Question the diet and forgive the hungry flesh. Forgive the human being taught to be a robot. Forgive the food being taught to be poison. Forgive the sovereignty.
After all, I am only human. Only mortal, only prone to error and malice. Only flesh and blood pretending to play God. I am only a partially shallow being wishing for the glamour in every part of my existence. When the rainbow sprinkles aren't enough to make me pretty on the inside, I choose an alternate reality for this body. I toast to the struggle that is being broke when my body has expensive taste. I accept that this is difficult but not impossible. I rebuke the notion. I do my research and I do it well. And I grab a bag of black beans for iron and strength.
Broccoli and spinach, the protein of Amazon women. Chickpeas and brown rice for good fiber and carbs. Avocados because…avocados. Lastly, whatever tropical fruit I can find because pineapples and guava are always in season but not always accessible. And mangoes because some things in life are too juicy to pass up. And I ascend out of the food mart with three gold bags and the strength of 10,000 thick and healthy women. Food for the saints. Food for my altar. For the body that becomes an altar. An offering for all that is thick and lovely and loving and healthy and alive and refusing to go down without a fight. Without proving Audre Lorde right. Without preaching what bell hooks’s essays taught me. After all, ain’t I a young, melanated woman? Resourceful and self-sufficient. Beaming with all the seasoning people search for in every culture aisle. I plan to wash this food over me tonight. Thank the nutrition gods and goddesses for reminding my body to feed, to work, to revive. I will rinse myself of all of yesterday's mistakes and I will rise... And whatever I have left of this body is mine. And I'm taking it back.
