Sarma Melngailis is not now vegan and never was vegan: "I never claimed that I was a strict vegan. That wasn't my intention. I definitely don't refer to myself as that now. I also don't even identify as a chef; I was always more a curator." [The source is supposedly an interview given to People Magazine in March of 2024… I have not read the article myself.]
Her peculiar personal history (and catalytic role in the rise and fall of the vegan movement) is now largely explained with reference to her formal diagnosis with autism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QfynMwArKQ This interview contains a substantive discussion of the significance of autism in her life; it contains absolutely zero discussion of the morals or politics of the vegan movement.
She has a degree in economics from Wharton. I will now directly quote the Wikipedia article with her name on it:
Melngailis moved to New York City, working at the investment firm Bear Stearns until 1996, then moving to Bain Capital in Boston, working in private equity investment. She returned to New York City in 1998 and joined a high-yield investment fund at CIBC, but soon left to enroll at New York's French Culinary Institute from which she graduated in 1999.
Does this woman, in fact, have a medically real mental disability? Is there any objectively real (scientifically falsifiable) test that would establish whether or not she has a mental disability?
Sarma Melngailis was not the Bonny Rebecca of her day; she was not the Claire Michelle of her day (both of those women, now, are ex-vegan and openly eat animal products on social media, etc.). The turning point in her career was a sexual relationship with Matthew Kenney —who is still vegan, and is still opening new vegan restaurants, even in Michigan. She is not my type (no, seriously… not my type) but she was commonly considered to be a beautiful woman at the time. Why would a woman who is not now vegan and —by her own reckoning— never was jettison her career in high finance to embark on a money-losing venture in vegan cuisine? If not veganism, what are we supposed to imagine she believed in?
What does it mean to be mentally disabled? What does it mean to be vegan? What does it mean to be morally responsible for your own decisions? Veganism is very centrally about taking responsibility for the decisions you make, down to the details of the difference between two bags of sugar: we have a culture, now, that encourages people to seek out a medical diagnosis that will allow them to proclaim their irresponsibility —because it would be better to be declared medically incapable of taking responsibility for one's own actions than to embrace the title of "the vegan Bernie Madoff" —a title awarded to her by the New York Post.
There was a time when I thought that veganism was a prophecy that could not be discredited by its prophets: I was wrong. Surrealism doesn't exist without surrealists: veganism doesn't exist without vegans —the movement relies on the role of the creative artists "to make it real" to a greater extent than any of its adherents seem to know.
