The Year of the Snake

This little dragon queen is ready for 2025.

Want to inspire more climate action? Click the ♡ at the top of this email. Mille grazie!

In Chinese mythology, snakes are symbols of femininity and darkness, as well as good luck, royalty, and rebirth. Art created with ethical AI from Adobe Firefly.

In December 2018, a few international friends celebrated the American New Year with me in sunny, sixty-degree Los Angeles. The next morning, over homemade raspberry oatmeal with coconut cream and crushed almonds, I asked each lady about their family’s traditions.

“In China, we clean the house for a month, then on New Year’s, we have fish,” explained my friend Jung, stirring her hearty, steel-cut grains. “Eat all the meat, not the bones. Don’t take with you what you don’t need.”

How ironic that, out of a whole breakfast of stories, all this animal lover remembers is one brutal metaphor: Extract that pound of flesh and leave your skeletons behind.

Jung’s story struck me because it is so visceral and embodied, engaging all five senses—perhaps even a sixth.

By resurrecting this newsletter, I, too, hope to engage your body, mind, and spirit to help you shed 2024 so we may all start the new year with a clean plate.

Up-Up-Update

Forgive my fermata. Late this summer, an opportunity presented itself to step away from entertainment and freelancing to take a full-time position as a program manager with the American Cancer Society. As scary as the transition was, I found myself with a “real” job and “real” insurance for the first time in my adult life. And… I enjoyed it.

Denny and I dissolved our five-year relationship shortly thereafter, partially resulting from the chronic health issues that force me to live like a five-year-old (“Okay, Gia. It’s eight o’clock. Time to go nigh-nights!”). Thankfully, I’m feeling better, our friendship feels more appropriate given our individual needs, and I’m happy with my quiet little life.

At ACS, we’ve been working hard to help patients affected by the horrific fires that decimated swaths of our beautiful yet climate-fragile city (donate to the ACS Fire Fund LA). We’re also preparing for whatever lies ahead with a new presidential administration and the continuing evolution of AI, and I can’t wait to continue using my science communication skills to help save lives.

Now that life is settling down, I wanted to write during these final days of Veganuary to share a message you won’t often hear from others entrenched in my camp.

You Don’t Have to Be Perfect to Be Part of the Solution

What we eat matters, of course. The World Resources Institute notes that animal agriculture, the leading cause of deforestation, is responsible for between 11% and 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions and over 30% of total methane emissions. This is why meat and dairy, in particular, contribute heartily to climate change.

But if Americans traded 50% of animal-based foods for plant-based foods, according to the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, we’d enjoy the equivalent of removing over 47 million combustion engine cars from the road. Talk about putting your climate action where your mouth is.

Lowering our meat, dairy, and egg consumption would also reduce the 82 billion—that’s billion with a capital B—land animals killed each year for food. (Fish aren’t counted as individual animals but instead are calculated by tonnage.) Literal food for thought.

Next time you’re shopping at the grocery store or ordering out, consider the wise words of author and historian Edward Everett Hale:

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”

How do you plan to reduce your animal-product consumption?

Take Some Action

If your New Year’s resolutions included trying out a flexitarian diet, committing to sustainable seafood, or giving more compassionate living a whirl, pick up a copy of philosophy professor Matthew C. Halteman’s new book, “Hungry Beautiful Animals.”

You’ll enjoy his joyful case for going vegan, which he defines as the “healing of our inner selves and outer relationships, as our oft-conflicted physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and moral lives are harmonized through daily practices custom-fitted to our dazzling diverse ways and wiles.”

To Halteman, veganism doesn’t just belong to people in PETA merch and expensive sneakers. I agree—that’s far too exclusive a club. (And who hasn’t met a vegan that even the most pacifistic of us hasn’t wanted to smack the smugness out of?)

Instead, Halteman argues for a new practice of veganism that welcomes everyone, from a person trying a plant-based recipe for the first time to hardcore old-school vegans like me. We’re all seeking liberation from the customs constraining us while recognizing that we live inside the systems we fight against.

Because Halteman’s joyful veganism is an ongoing practice—like yoga, with the idea that the underlying philosophy guides you—you can practice it some days… and not on others. Pretty “dazzling and diverse” reinvention of a usually judgy and exclusive code of ethics, huh?

I loved the book because Halteman’s arguments are practical, and the writing is accessible to anyone who loves food or animals. I’m thrilled to be interviewing him soon and will keep you posted on where it will be published.

And in Other News…

On January 31st, I’ll be attending (and featured in) a screening of Jen Sparkman’s upcoming documentary about Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, “Exhausted Existence: An EDS Story” at the Hollywood International Diversity Film Festival.

Until then, this little dragon will be on her throne (a.k.a bed), where I’ll be cultivating all kinds of moon goddess-high priestess energy from my Sicilian relatives.

Wishing you the best of last year as we sidewind together through 2025.

Ciao, for now,