veganism

“what lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us” —Emerson

In addition to shocked sounds and amazed faces, I also get a lot of “Why?”s when people find out I’m vegan. I’m tall and active, and people are surprised I not only survived becoming vegan, but continue to successfully function physically. I’m also happy. Most people think that turning vegan requires an enormous sacrifice. And while it does for some people, what I choose to give up as a vegan stands in awe before what I gain.

My parents chose to raise my brother and I as vegetarians from birth. My mom had been a vegetarian for a couple years and my dad had been a vegetarian and then a vegan for some time. While I normally reject any action that threatens my own autonomy, every day I am grateful for this decision that they made regarding my life. I always thought and told others that I would try meat at some point in my life-on my 13th birthday, or maybe my 16th birthday, and then probably my 21st. But by the time I turned twelve, I understood the decision my parents made, and the philosophies behind it, and my desire to try meat completely dissipated. My parents greatly value living things. When we passed animals killed on the highway, my dad would pull the car over, take a shovel from the back of our Volvo station wagon, and remove the animal from the road, pain in his face. Much like Avatar’s Eywa life-spirit force, I believe that living beings have spirits, and we should do our best to respect them.

Eventually, my desire to be like everyone else and try meat evolved into a desire to do the right thing, and to make good decisions for my life that would ultimately make me happy. I realized that the philosophies upon which I had been raised now rested deeply in my heart. I do not want to kill animals to feed myself. I do not support the terrible treatment of animals in factory meat farms and do not want to contribute to it by eating meat. I do not need to eat animals to be healthy or happy.
Because I had never eaten meat and none of my immediate family ate meat, this lifestyle was relatively easy for me. Sure, it has been difficult to eat out, or eat at other people’s homes. Only in the last 5 or so years have vegetarianism and veganism become more widespread, with vegetarian entrees added to most restaurants and soymilk available at almost all coffee shops. I was quite content being a vegetarian for 17 years, enjoying my Gruyere cheese and my Mint ‘N Chip ice cream.

When I became vegan after my freshman year of college at the age of 18, it was the result of a few new philosophies attaching themselves to my preexisting ones. My dad has been a vegan for almost 30 years, and I grew up enjoying the food he cooked for himself (stealing bites as often as I could), but also enjoying the food he chose not to eat. When I was 17, however, I became aware of the harsh treatment and deaths of animals in other sectors of food production, not just meat. I learned about the lives of chickens at egg factories and of cows at dairy farms. It made me upset, and I decided that I wanted to become a vegan. At the time, I was eating dorm food, and thought I wouldn’t be able to do veganism how I wanted. So I put it off, and decided that I would become vegan at the start of my sophomore year. I underestimated myself and I regret this decision. I spent the summer slightly forcing myself to eat some dairy, telling myself that I never would again, planning a dairy-filled feast of a sendoff that never happened because my heart wasn’t in it anymore. My heart had turned vegan before my mouth did.

I was incredibly excited to become a vegan, and the event was not anticlimactic. As soon as I became vegan, I felt as though a significant eating choice no longer restrained me morally. While other eating choices have since bothered me (non-organic, corn, soy), those are stories for another day. I had fulfilled the demands of my heart at that time.
Becoming a vegan was, among so many other things, empowering and fulfilling. I had made a choice which put my physical and consumptive desires secondary to my moralistic demands. I had been troubled by questions: what makes my life more valuable than an animal’s? If I don’t need to kill or hurt animals to survive, or even be healthy, why choose to? Finally a course of action was able to satisfy these, and from within felt right. I believe that the decisions that ultimately lead to the greatest happiness and goodness in life are made by listening to the heart/moral compass/soul. Sometimes we have to listen really hard for what feels right, and other times the answer rings clear from the core.

Every day of my life, I am happy for choosing to be a vegan. I may fail at other things, make many other mistakes every day of my life, but I will never consider my decision to become a vegan as anything negative, as anything other than the best decision of my life so far: for me, for other living things, and for the earth.

❤ ❤ ❤ ❤