MY Road TO Vegan
We all traverse different paths throughout life’s adventures, be it our careers, relationships or life goals. Some folks seem to meander effortlessly with grace (or so it seems), while for others, reaching what they want is akin to swimming through thick mud, in a winter parka, with boots on. Well, kick back, get comfortable, maybe grab a warm beverage or some fresh lemonade, and I’ll start by sharing how I became vegan, and how I arrived right here: writing a book dedicated to you.
I never really thought about the importance of good food growing up. I just ate whatever my mother made and served to our small family. There were no Twinkies or Wonder Bread in the cupboards, no colas or orange pop in the fridge, and with the exception of one memorable occasion, never a TV dinner in the freezer. I was lucky in that sense. All meals were cooked from scratch and with great care, and until I became a teenager, I truly enjoyed them.
My mother was British and a master of traditional English fare: Yorkshire pudding, Shepherd’s pie, roasted meats, creamy sauces, and other European recipes passed down through the generations. My Croatian father had an outsized sweet tooth, second only to my own. He was a ship captain during WWII and, since meat and fresh greens were limited at sea, he developed a preference for light-colored foods such as breads, potatoes, halibut, eggs, and pasta with butter. My mother always took this into account when cooking, and so although our meals were always tasty, they generally looked like food you’d find in a British Pub: heavy, with ribbons of brown and white.
As a child, my mother’s comfort food was more than fine with me. I grew up in the small coastal town of Pacific Grove, California, where we were socked in with fog for most of the year. Locals are known for joking “I never knew a winter as cold as a summer in Pacific Grove,” so any food that was warm and filling fit the ticket. Then one chilly evening our little West Highland terrier nudged my leg under the table hoping to coax me into tossing him a bit of meat from my dinner plate. This sneaky maneuver was nothing new; Angus knew he’d get a treat from me. But for some reason, this nudge was different; it triggered my mind to spin unlike ever before. I began to think, “How can it be OK to pet our dog under the table, while stabbing my fork into a cow atop it?” Why was I feeding a dog, while eating cow? How was this fair? Who made this rule? And most important, why did I follow it blindly?
And remember that one and only occasion when my mother bought a supply of TV dinners? A few days later I ate one and bit into a piece of chicken, and there it was: a bright purple-blue stringy vein. My teeth had snapped it and left a piece hanging on the bone. It hit me; this food called “chicken” was actually a real chicken, a once-living, breathing, with-a-heart-that-beat chicken. It was then that my thirteen-year-old brain also realized that liverwurst was actually made from someone’s liver and that Thanksgiving dinner was celebrated around a dead bird. So many things my mother fed us had once been alive; I had just never fully processed it. Until then, I simply hadn’t made the connection.
And so it was 1977, I was thirteen years old, and I didn’t want to eat animals anymore. I didn’t have any vegetarian friends or family, nor did I know of any vegetarian celebrities, athletes, or politicians, but it didn’t matter; my mind was made up. I just ate the “sides” that were served with our family meals, and slowly but surely, realizing this wasn’t just a phase, my mother made more meatless meals for me to eat. She knew not to use the meat spoon to stir anything I was eating, and baking my meal alongside or within a meat dish was a big no-no, too. I wasn’t about to pick out my vegetables from a beef stew. And somehow a British meat-eating mother, a ship captain father who had a penchant for plain white meals and pastries, and their budding vegetarian daughter all managed to share in dinner together at the table every evening.
Our Westie’s nudge also led me to question the status quo at school. My mother made me a lunch each day, so meals were never a problem, but in my freshman science class we studied genetics by raising our own little batch of fruit flies. We kept them in tiny baby food jars in the back of the classroom where we painstakingly documented the ratio of red eyes to white. On the last day of the experiment, my teacher instructed us to grab our jars and said he was going to pass around a rag wet with ether for us to place tightly over the opening of each jar. I didn’t understand the purpose, so I asked him to explain, and he replied, “This is how we kill the flies; we’re done with them.” As I watched my fellow students take turns following his instructions, I became increasingly nervous as the rag made its way to my corner of the room. I decided to let my teacher know that I was going to let my fruit flies go outside instead. He told me, sternly, that if I did that, I’d be releasing my scientific experiment into the world, and I’d be responsible for adversely affecting our entire environment by letting them escape and that I did not have permission to leave the classroom. I returned to my desk for a few minutes while my classmates looked on. I was visibly upset and they were wondering what I was going to do. I, however, knew exactly what I was going to do. I waited patiently until no one was looking, and I snuck outside to set them all free, and I’m pretty sure the world isn’t any worse off for it. A pattern of questioning those more powerful, while following my own moral compass, was starting to take shape.
Then it was off to UC Berkeley, where I would study the History of Science with more like-minded folks and where vegetarian food wasn’t a novelty; it was a staple. There were none of the vegan bakeries and vegan specialty stores so abundant today, but there were more than enough vegetarian restaurants and food trucks to make me happy. During an elective for the California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG), I even created a pamphlet of all the healthy food sources in the city so that other students could easily find them.
Looking back, one would think I’d become vegan in Berkeley, but I didn’t. At twenty-three, I moved to Los Angeles and became a substitute teacher. This choice gave me the freedom to make my own schedule while I tried to figure out which career I wanted to pursue. It also freed up my time and allowed me to participate in a few peaceful protests throughout the city, which led me to my second, and most fortuitous, enlightenment. A demonstration I attended at UCLA was winding down, and a girl who was visiting from Canada asked me if I wouldn’t mind giving her a ride to her friend’s house. I don’t normally give strangers a lift home, but she seemed nice enough and had just spent the entire day marching and chanting to free cats from brain experiments, so I took my chances and obliged.
We hopped in my tiny ‘76 Honda Civic and I started to drive, making casual chitchat along the way. We talked about why we love animals so much and why we don’t eat them, and then she asked me something no one had ever asked me before: “Do you drink milk?” I had no idea where she was heading with the question, but I answered truthfully, “Yes. Don’t you?” She then proceeded to tell me that by drinking milk, I was actually harming the animals just as much as by eating a burger, as the male dairy calves are sold to the veal industry where they spend their short, miserable lives in small metal crates, and the dairy mothers are ultimately killed after they can no longer give milk.
This friendly stranger continued to tell me about each animal product, and why she didn’t eat any of them. She even told me she didn’t eat honey. What could possibly be wrong with eating honey, I thought. She explained that her uncle had a bee farm in Canada and she saw firsthand how the bees were squished each time they put the giant lids back on the hives and that there was no avoiding it. By eating honey, she reasoned, we’re killing bees, and we don’t need to. “And that’s why I’m vegan,” she said. And by the time I dropped her off thirty minutes later, I was vegan, too. I said good-bye to the only vegan I had ever met or knew of, and I never saw her again. As my tiny car door closed, a new world opened.
From that point forward, I wanted to learn all that I could about the link between animals and our diet. I bought books, wrote to animal rights organizations for pamphlets, and went to libraries to do research. In the late ‘80s, like most folks, I didn’t have Internet at home, so I’d use the Medline Database at medical school libraries to read journal abstracts. They were dense with medical terms, but I muddled through them. And the more I learned, the more I realized that my diet and lifestyle impacted so much more than my personal health and the animals. It also affected the environment, the economy, and social justice issues, too. I knew, and still believe, that by becoming vegan, I was helping everyone. It was the butterfly effect and I was more than ready to help it flutter onward.
After a brief time teaching high school history in East Los Angeles, I realized that although I enjoyed studying history in college, teaching it was another matter. If someone was facing an early death because they ate poorly, or consumed toxic water thanks to factory farms, historical facts in textbooks would be of little significance. I became convinced that understanding how to take care of oneself and the surrounding world should be the foundation of education. Once these basics were mastered, students could learn whatever they want. First and foremost, however, was to learn to be well.
Fueled by a newfound desire to become a high school health teacher, I went to the Los Angeles County Board of Education and studied their health books, took an exam, and earned a teaching credential in health sciences. Ironically, I was in the midst of a breakup and had stopped eating. Far from a role model of good health, and at only seventy-eight pounds, I was certain I’d never score a position as a health teacher, but my will was strong, and my mission great, and somehow I beat out the competition and landed a job at a local high school. Most of the students lived in poverty, either in nearby projects or were bused in as overflow from inner-city schools, and needless to say, the school had its share of chaos. My list of unhappy moments include having to run for help when I saw someone step out of a car on campus with a gun (and a baby in the backseat), and putting my hand in feces on my classroom doorknob. If there was ever a school that needed a few extra seeds of respect and compassion, it was there.
I started each day by writing the word RESPECT on the chalkboard and reminded students that health was about respecting your bodies, inside and out. It wasn’t just important to eat well and exercise, but to also respect the natural environment and people surrounding them as well. I covered up all the drab surplus gray-green paint with purple, replaced the old food pyramid charts with plant-based posters, and decorated my podium with over a dozen inspirational bumper stickers, with “Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes” front and center. I was determined to have my classroom be a center of freedom of thought and creativity, where one could become inspired to make the world a better place.
I tried to illuminate the really fun aspects of being vegan, too. I took my students on a field trip to The Gentle Barn, an animal sanctuary where they could meet, pet, and hug the kind of animals that adults had told them to eat. I bought a wok for the classroom so when I talked about a new vegan food item, such as tofu or kale, we’d whip up samples and enjoy them. And we even planned and held a vegan Earth Day Health Festival in the spring for the entire campus and community.
My work on food policy garnered local, national, and international interest, and I soon found myself traveling across the state and country to attend conferences and to share my thoughts on healthy living, always trying to encourage folks to consider going vegan along the way. Even when I received the national Healthy School Hero Award in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Dairy Council, I took the one thousand dollar award and gave it to the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine’s campaign to get dairy milk out of public schools. (Thanks for the dough, Big Ag!)
Shortly thereafter, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals asked if I would lead their education department, and I accepted. I packed the car with my cats and a few belongings and drove from Los Angeles to Norfolk, Virginia. I soon found myself absorbed in animal rights more than ever before. From begging a school board to rescue a pig at the county fair in Miami to speaking on the evening news on behalf of fish in Malibu, I was determined to be a voice for the voiceless and change the world.
Unfortunately, my father died the day I arrived in Norfolk, and within a few weeks, I received a call from my significant other of five years that he was no longer following me to Virginia. Yep, by phone. My life turned upside down, and only got worse—much worse—after that. I decided to head back to California, where I was surrounded by familiar faces, but my life was at its lowest low, somber fodder for another book, another day. I was completely lost and was forced to restructure my life entirely. I immersed myself in law school, started writing My Vegan Journal, and began a Facebook page where I could inspire and help people transition to becoming vegan across the world. Just as when I entered that interview at seventy-eight pounds, I was determined to get my life back on track, and help others while doing so.
My life has had its ups and downs, but I’ve never doubted my decision to become vegan. In fact, I’m not even sure I can call it a decision anymore. I’m vegan because I’ve evolved. Just like Cro-Magnons evolved into Homo sapiens. It’s just who you are; it’s who I am. I’m vegan and I can’t imagine knowingly hurting an animal ever again. But I do know what it’s like to face those hard situations, where you feel like you’re all alone, and no one understands what being vegan is all about. I’ve had to tell my doctor on more than one occasion what a vegan diet entails. I’ve been the only vegan at celebrations. I’ve fallen in love with someone who ate meat (and married him!). And I’ve had to sit down at dinner and see those disappointed faces when I let my in-laws know I wouldn’t eat the meal they worked so hard to “veganize” because although they used dairy-free butter, it still contained oil from fish.
Uncomfortable situations? No doubt. But would I change a thing? No way. Feeling alone or misunderstood is a small price to pay in order to help reduce the horrific suffering in the world. I can’t complain. I’m happy, healthy, energetic, and so gladdened to see that veganism is more visible than ever before. But most important, I am ready to inspire you to take the plunge yourself! It’s not a challenge; it’s an adventure. So, let’s go!
There are about 795 million people in the world who are hungry. That’s 1 in 9 people … more than the entire population of the United States, Canada, and the European Union combined. The grain we feed to animals could feed nearly 350 billion people. If we stop raising animals for meat, and give people the grain instead, everyone would have plenty of food. ‘Tis true. People can feast or famish; it’s up to me, and you.