Kevin And Harley Quinn Smith Keep Veganism All In The Family

Harley Quinn Smith has recently launched her new podcast “Vegan Abattoir” with her father,

Kevin Smith. The August podcast focuses on people’s journeys through

Veganism.

When filmmaker Kevin Smith nearly died from a massive heart attack, his only daughter, Harley Quinn, convinced him to try a plant-based diet for 2 months. Two years later and still not dead, the Dad asked his daughter to join forces so the two can provide plant-based answers to the Vegan-curious questions they get from a meat-eating and dairy-drinking audience.

Twenty-one year-old actress Harley Quinn Smith is a budding star in Hollywood. She was recently seen opposite Brad Pitt, Lena Dunham and Dakota Fanning as “Froggie”, a member of the Manson family, in Quentin Tarantino’s box-office blow-out Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. The film started its awards season off with a 2019 People’s Choice Award nomination for The Best Drama Movie of 2019. She then held a leading role as ‘Milly” in the comedy Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, which hit theaters worldwide this October. Now, Smith has just finished filming her series-regular role as ‘Mallory’ in the pilot for the Jessica Biel produced show for Freeform Cruel Summer. Harley Quinn grew up in the film business with her father, filmmaker Kevin Smith and mother, actress Jennifer Schwalbach Smith. She starred with her best friend, Lily Rose Depp, in the 2016 Sundance Film Festival favorite Yoga Hosers. The film was released September 2016 and also starred Johnny Depp, Natasha Lyonne and Justin Long;, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (at the age of 1), Jersey Girl, Clerks II and Tusk. Outside of acting and music, the Vegan thespian has a passion for giving back. While named after the infamous comic supervillain “Harley Quinn,” HQS is nothing short of a hero when it comes to using her platform to generate change for both people and animals. Harley Quinn has spoken out against bullying and works with The Humane Society of the United States, among several other animal rescue organizations. In May 2018 she used her voice alongside Maggie Q and Katie Cleary and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine to lobby congress for the Cruelty Free Cosmetics Act at the capitol in Sacramento. After getting the 27+ votes it takes to pass a Bill in the Senate, the Bill passed and is on its way to a vote with the Assembly, which requires 54 votes.

We had the privilege of speaking with the dynamic father-daughter duo about their involvement with the Vegan community.

How is it being vegan on a movie set? Do you have to make any special requests?

HARLEY: It’s something that I ask ahead of time. I request that they use cruelty free, and preferably vegan, products. Cruelty-free is something that is very important to me. There are circumstances where this doesn’t work out, but usually I’m able to make sure that the makeup and hair products are cruelty-free. In terms of food, there have been a few difficulties. Most of the time people are accommodating and look out for me; other times not so much.

I shot an indie movie in Georgia and we were in the middle of nowhere and it was difficult to find food for myself. I ate Taco Bell for two weeks straight just because I knew it was vegan [Thank you bean and potato burritos]! Other times it’s more difficult, but there’s always a way to make it work.

KEVIN: For me, the last flick we shot I was full-blown vegan. Every day they carried Beyond Burgers and that’s Then Jay and Harley picked up on it. It wasn’t something you could enforce on the entire cast and crew. You couldn’t be like “no meat on this production”. A lot of people are not vegan. If you take their meat away they’re not going to work well that day. I’m sure it was a budgetary concern.

As much as I would like to say “Everyone eat green” that would be a little more expensive for the catering department. Also, I wasn’t quite there yet to be able to enforce my tastes on everyone. I would have hated it in the past if I would have shown up on a set and they said “only vegan options”.

I found along the way the less you push the lifestyle on people and the more you live the lifestyle, that sets a better example and creates more curiosity. It doesn’t create an instant divide or put up a wall with people. I’ve been vegan now for over two years and if the word vegan comes up or if you talk about being plant-based, instantly you get a bunch of people reacting with saying things like “I’m going to pretty much what I had at lunchtime.

eat 3x the amount of meat now” as if you being vegan has anything to do with them!

So, it’s definitely tricky, you don’t want to turn people off. People are already politicized. At the end of the day, I am trying to save my own life. I had a heart attack a few years ago so this lifestyle is me trying to take care of myself. Some people don’t understand or even refuse to understand.

It’s easy to disarm people by using the fact that I had a heart attack. They’ll be like “oh you’re trying to be “woke”” and I’m like well, no, I am just trying to save my life because I literally almost died, and they back down. So, I’ll use that until the end of time. But it’s true, it’s why I went vegan in the first place. Harley was the one that was like “do it, go vegan”. She tried to convince me prior to my heart attack.

She was a little vegan astronaut that went out there finding all the things I could eat and places I could go. She also knew my taste, so it wasn’t like I had to go from 0-60 or go from an omnivorous lifestyle to only greens. That’s what could be daunting and turn people off. No one wants to feel like they’re giving up something. Harley took me places where I didn’t feel like I was giving up anything, where ter. She introduced me to alternatives, and so that I try to pay it forward with everybody else that I meet. I don’t cram veggies down their throat, and when people tell me I look great and ask how I look so great I just tell them I went vegan. I found I had more energy. Truly, the health benefits are off the charts.

You can’t sell health to people. Everyone thinks they want health but then when you tell them what they have to do to achieve health, they no lonthe food was just as tasty if not bet-

ger want any part of it. It seems to me that being there and showing a new version of your body raises the question of “How’d you do it” and I just tell them I simply went vegan. Then they say that they can’t go vegan because it’s difficult. So, I tell them the different easy options that ARE vegan like peanut butter, beans, and rice, and hummus. Show them the things that they already consume in their diet.

Harley, what was the catapult that led you to be vegan? For me, what made me decide to start my way to veganism was that I adopted a rabbit named Cinnamon Bun about 6 years ago. For years, my mom would take me to the bus stop and I would ask every day if I could get a rabbit. She’d say no every time. Then, one Christmas my parents told me I could get a rabbit. I was excited! But, all the shelters were closed on Christmas. I looked at pictures of adoptable rabbits online.

The next day I went to the shelter and I found this rabbit who I saw online. It looked like a completely different rabbit in the photo. They listed her color as tan, but that was because she was covered in pee. She had a ripped ear and a bunch of metal stitches that were unattended. She was nothing like the picture I saw but I was eager to adopt her because I thought no one else would because of the terrible condition she was in. So, I brought her home and she was so scared of me and everybody. Prior to being surrendered to the shelter, she was in a house of hoarders and the shelter said there were about 100 other rabbits there. She was really scared of everything and everyone. But, after showing her for a few months that I wanted to love her and provide her with a safe home, she started to open up to me. Seeing how human compassion changed her into this completely different being made me realize that it was super critical for me to change my diet and my lifestyle because I saw what human compassion could do to an animal.

After that, I went vegetarian and a year after that I went vegan. Caring for Cinnamon Bun was my catapult to going vegan.

Q. How did you start to get your dad on a vegan diet?

HARLEY: After my dad had his heart attack, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It was the scariest day of my life and I just knew something drastic had to happen. He couldn’t keep living the way he was living. I didn’t really give him an option. I told him he had to try veganism out for

a little, at least try, because clearly, the way he was living wasn’t working for him. I didn’t think he would be vegan for a long time, but now I believe he will be vegan forever.

KEVIN: I’ve been vegan since a day after the heart attack in 2018 and I never miss any of the old things I used to have. I don’t slip up or cheat, I was terrified for my health, which is what made me make the switch.

It’s not like I’m eating Brussel sprouts all of the time either, there’s a lot of Beyond Burger but it’s all plant-based. The key is finding the cracks you can exist in. For me turning vegan was all about my health and will continue to be predicated around my health. I know cheating on veganism wouldn’t benefit me because before I was vegan, I ate a ton of animal products, which led me to an operating table in the first place. Now I’m living clean, more or less.

Kevin - Do you find yourself more connected to the ethical side of veganism now?

Absolutely, but that was never an issue for me, I have always been extremely compassionate towards animals, except to the point that I’d also eat them. I never was allowed any pets as a kid, so I naturally loved dogs and cats, then eventually I started getting cats and dogs. I love animals of all sizes and stripes but there was a disconnect even as a kid. I’d question if we love animals then why are we eating them? Then I’d be told “Because that’s what God told us to do”, so there was a lot of that rhetoric that I was raised on and it made it okay to turn off your feelings about eating a living being, and really cute ones at that, so it wasn’t until going completely vegan that I could tie the compassion to the health.

Harley has taken us to Fox Sanctuary and we currently donate monthly to the organization Mercy For Animals. This is a big Pro-Animal household, but even though I didn’t approach veganism from a compassionate

IT WOULD BE VERY HYPOCRITICAL TO CONTINUE LIVING MY LIFE IN A WAY THAT CONTRIBUTED TO ANIMAL CRUELTY WHEN I SAW FIRSTHAND WHAT HUMAN COMPASSION CAN DO TO AN ANIMAL.

place, it’s now completely in my ethics and DNA.

Once you’re in veganism, you don’t want to think about factory farming and meat killing machines. It’s disgusting. What you put in your body is what you get out of life, so eating toxic death is what you’ll get out of it and I saw that in my life, I almost died from the diet I was eating. This isn’t to blame my parents on anything either because they never questioned their parents on what and why they ate the way they did. It took my own kid to have me question my ethics and change the way I was eating in a different way as well as animals. So now my ethics match my emotions.

Kevin, since it was your own child who is the next generation that pointed you in the direction of veganism, not an older adult, do you feel like the next generation will lead us to a better and compassionate life?

Certainly. It is always the hope that the next generation will get it done and improve things from where we were. I would say that veganism is catching on now more than ever.

Vegan folks were always marginalized and hipsters, this is a movement that bounced back to food restaurants, it’s no longer a movement, it’s a way of life. That came from the younger generation that believed there was a future in this and they held the people accountable and told them that having tasty options available to those who aren’t fond of eating dead animals could definitely work and people would live longer. By suggesting ‘Meatless Mondays’, a lot of people are accidentally vegan and not realizing it!

Bringing them over to the other side isn’t about politics, it’s about keeping Americans alive and healthy. Our nation is very unhealthy because we believe that more is better and that includes food and a lot of the foods are predicated around junk and death. This isn’t something we do in our home. We do not have to consume death in order for us to be fed.

Harley, we heard that you’re in the process of getting a bill passed with the Humane Society of America for cruelty-free cosmetics. Can you share the next steps for passing this the bill?

It was a couple of years back that I was going to Sacramento to lobby for the Cruelty-free Cosmetics Act that I was part of with social justice and legislation. A bunch of other activists were there with me like Maggie Q and Katie Cleary. It was the first time I had ever done anything like that, It was an eye-opening experience.

I remember being there and seeing the other side of people who were against this bill. Johnson & Johnson had people from the company trying to fight against the bill because they wanted to continue their cruel practices. It was crazy to see people fighting for cruelty and surreal to see these people in real life. That issue is near and dear to my heart because I have a rabbit and rabbits are usually one of the animals that are being tested on.

This is really important to me and it’s one of the most common issues vegans and non-vegans can agree upon. Most people don’t spite you when you say you’re advocating for cruelty-free cosmetics because it’s a pretty archaic way of doing things and there are so many amazing alternatives to animal testing that it makes

no sense that not all cosmetics aren’t cruelty-free. It’s a practice that a lot of people don’t even know truly still exists. I’ve had people tell me that they didn’t even know that the products they were using had been tested on animals, which I used to not know either.

If you just inform people, a lot of the time they no longer want to use the products that were tested on animals. I find that it’s a lot more agreeable than giving up meat or giving up animal products, because people will rebut that argument with many statements like not getting enough protein. But with cruelty-free products, there is hardly a rebuttal or argument and a lot of people are more open to that because it is such an old practice that doesn’t need to be around anymore.

It’s a harsh reality that these lab animals are facing and it’s sadly not only rabbits; it’s beagles, rats, mice and even monkeys. It’s such a huge issue that still exists mostly because if you want to sell your cosmetics in China, by law it has to be tested on animals. It’s like these companies are having to either put money over ethics or ethics over money and that’s the decision that companies have to make and it’s up to them to make the right decision.

How do you both come together from each of your generations on your podcast? How has that been, and what has been the biggest take away since you started this podcast together?

KEVIN: For me the biggest takeaway is not so much of what I learned but because of the fact that I can spend more time with my kid. It’s under the guises of “work”, but it never feels like work when you’re talking with your kid. Harley is 21 now. She has a life of her own and as time goes on she’ll be out there by herself living her own life and I know that as I got older I spent less time with my parents, so it’s nice to spend time with my daughter and get stuff done.

HARLEY: For me, it’s incredible to do this with my dad and it’s a special point of our relationship to be able to work together. We’ve made films together and he has so much experience in podcasts, so having him to be able to guide me through this journey has been really special.

I’m also grateful because it provides two different perspectives to listeners. I don’t really pay attention to the health aspect of veganism, I’m not really a healthy vegan and it’s never really been a huge point to me but I’m grateful that our listeners can have veganism from the aspect of health and ethics. I’m glad we are able to give those two sides to it because a lot of people don’t go vegan for the animals, they’ll go vegan for their health or the environment. So, there are a bunch of reasons why someone would be interested in veganism. I don’t know a lot about the health aspect so it’s good that my dad can provide that point of view from his own experiences.

What has the feedback from your podcast listeners been like?

KEVIN: I met some of our audience when I went back to Jersey. It’s crazy because I’d be walking behind someone and they’d see me and say “OMG I’m listening to you and your daughter right now”. So, it’s nice finding a listener out in the wild, but it seems like the show is working and connecting from the feedback I’ve gotten. Then you get the cats that are curious that listen as well, so the more that you can let them hear how normal the average vegan sounds and that it’s not some kind of cult, there’s a better chance that they’ll end up trying it out for themselves.

Any goals for the podcast other than reaching the masses and sharing your feedback and helping others? Is there anything else you want to elevate it to?

KEVIN: It would be amazing if we could turn it into a TV show one day or make a YouTube show, which is actually a possibility. Something we should be exploring because there is not a lot out there for us vegans. I have been podcasting for 13 years now. So I look at it like we will start out as audio for a while then grow into something else. I always turn my podcast into live shows, so hopefully, Harley and I will be on a stage doing a vegan live show soon!

Anything else we should keep our eyes open for or that you’re working on?

KEVIN: Harley is coming to Dallas and she’s staying for half a year to shoot her TV show Cool Summer. We actually may be coming to Texas, oddly enough the home of all BBQ, for our very first vegan live show!

HARLEY: We’re going to have a lot of fun guests coming up and I can’t wait to talk to more vegans in the community. It’s also given me the opportunity to have more in-depth conversations with people who I admire who I haven’t gotten the opportunity to speak to before.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Courtney Garza is a passionate vegan who brings her love for journalism, creativity, helping local businesses, and animals together with her compassionate social media agency, Sprinkles Creative, which she co-founded with her business partner Christina Bluford to aid businesses with their branding strategy. Courtney also owns and operates VEGWORLD Magazine, an international vegan lifestyle publication, as the Editor-in-Chief to curate and promote plant-based stories about vegan products, services, and individuals from all walks of life.