What If Mary Shelley Wrote Her Classic in the Age of Chia Pudding and Molecular Foam?
by Andrei Jebeleanu
Somewhere between oat milk activism and avocado enlightenment, I had a thought I can no longer unthink:
If Mary Shelley were writing Frankenstein today, the monster would be vegan. Obviously.
He would no longer be assembled from bits of corpse, tombstones, and male guilt, but from organic tofu, kale stems, and trauma processed in cold-pressed juice bars. He would be Frankenstein’s Conscious Living Creature™, engineered not in a thunderstorm, but in a Scandinavian co-living lab powered by solar panels and gentle jazz.
🌱 A New Kind of Monster: Ethically Lab-Grown and Compostable
Dr. Frankenstein — rebranded, of course, as Dr. Victor Wellness — no longer raids graveyards. Instead, he sources ingredients from a local CSA. His creature is crafted from:
- Tofu blocks (fermented in biodynamic silence)
- Heirloom carrots (harvested only during Mercury retrograde)
- Flaxseed skin (stitched with love using non-GMO twine)
- And a spleen made from jackfruit (because meat alternatives, duh)
The brain? A chia pudding. Suspended in activated almond milk. Enhanced with lion’s mane extract. Microdosed, of course.
🧪 Molecular Gastronomy? More Like Emotional Alchemy
Lightning? That’s so 19th century.
In this reboot, the creature is animated using:
- High-frequency tuning forks
- Sound baths administered by a wellness DJ
- And a whisper of matcha-infused breath from a Level 4 Reiki chef
No need for lightning when you have kombucha-scoby consciousness.
No need for horror when you have oat milk calm.
🍄 He Walks Among Us — and Orders Brunch
The modern creature doesn’t lurch. He floats — in barefoot shoes, with a reusable tote bag slung over one shoulder, full of ethically foraged mushrooms and resentment.
He does not grunt. He curates silence.
He doesn’t yell “I am alone!” but rather:
“I don’t vibe with the emotional availability of this space.”
Instead of terrorizing villages, he writes Substack essays on intergenerational trauma and the politics of protein powder.
“I am not unnatural,” he says.
“I am unprocessed.”
🥑 His Demands Are Simple (and Sustainably Packaged)
All he wants is to be seen, understood, and fed:
- Locally sourced seitan
- Adaptogenic mushroom broth
- A smoothie named after a feeling (e.g. “Clarity”)
And if he lashes out? It’s not rage. It’s burnout.
Don’t cancel him — offer him a turmeric latte and a listening circle.
⚠️ Closing Warning for Future Generations
Let this be a message to all literary purists and paleo-holdouts:
The Monster is already among us.
He has a podcast.
He teaches breathwork in Berlin.
He’s ghostwriting cookbooks for your favorite mindfulness influencer.
And yes — he’s biodegradable.
So yes — if Mary Shelley were writing Frankenstein today, she wouldn’t call it a horror novel. She’d call it “an embodied exploration of synthetically awakened potential through plant-based integration.”
And it would win a sustainability grant.
👻 Andrei Jebeleanu is a writer, lecturer, and suspected oat-milk heretic. He believes tofu is not evil — just misused. You can find him in cafés that still serve cow’s milk and in stories that never quite forgive the Enlightenment.
Andrei Jebeleanu 