That’s me on my mother’s lap

How did I get here? I am 63 years old, have been vegetarian nearly 27 years, vegan for more than two. There isn’t much in my past that would suggest I’d kick the meat habit.

I was born in Los Angeles but moved with my family to Upper Michigan when I was four.   I grew up there, in the upper midwest, among the hunters and fishers and in a family that thought of Porterhouse steaks and Prime Rib as the ultimate food. Because my mother had spent some time in California, she had a fondness for salads and she believed in cooking vegetables quickly (thereby retaining flavor and nutrients). She had a particular love for avocados, which were not available often in those parts. But the meat was always at the center of the meal.

Like most midwesterners we had the usual trio for dinner – meat, potato or rice, vegetable or salad. To save money we sometimes had macaroni and cheese, rum-tum-ditty (a curious mixture of tomato soup and egg whites served over toast), eggs goldenrod. Ours was a large family and one of my dreams was to live alone and be able to have a steak all to myself.

When I moved to Los Angeles at the age of 20 I was able to realize that dream. It wasn’t such a great thing, sitting in my little kitchen, eating my little steak by myself.  But I was nowhere near thinking about that steak as having any relation to a live animal. I thought the steak wasn’t a very good cut, but at no time did I think about the animal who died so I could have it.

I always liked animals. We had dogs and a cat when I was a child. I think the dogs were my closest friends. We had birds for a while, and fish. And a hamster. The usual childhood animals. When I moved to California I had a cat with me. Others came along soon after, until I had become a cat lady, with kittens arriving and the population growing. Perhaps it was my childhood experience with dogs and a cat that reached out to me later. These animals always accepted me, clean or dirty, thin or fat, sociable or not.

For I was a fat kid. I was fat and messy and tall, something of a monster in my own mind. Other kids made fun of me and I had few friends, usually friends of convenience, friends to play jacks with who lived across the street. I was smart and teachers loved me – although they were forever trying to get across to me the value of washing my hands – but my classmates did not. I learned to live on the fringe. Dogs don’t care where you are on that social ladder, and neither do cats.

It may be that a challenging childhood does make us stronger in some ways. Certainly it made me stand alone and think for myself. I would not have known a fashion trend if it bit me, and because I was not part of a childhood social group I had to work things out for myself. There wasn’t anyone there to impart wisdom or myth or general knowledge.

In Italy at age 28

In college I managed eventually to lose weight and I got used to taking regular showers.  I also made friends and felt at home. That is probably why I stayed in school so long, not graduating until I was 29. I suspect it was on graduation day that I made my first baby, with the help of the first real boyfriend I’d ever had. Elaine was born in March of the following year, when I was 30.

While I was pregnant I started reading about children and birth and chose to have a natural childbirth, in a hospital. The baby’s father did not believe in natural childbirth classes so I ended up having my teacher as coach on the big day. He changed his mind after seeing that I was far less distressed than his ex-wife had been when in labor. And she had drugs. Knowledge is power. I must have absorbed that from my mother years before. I think all of my sisters and brothers, however screwed up we were in other ways, believe in knowledge, believe in learning.

Two years later, dissatisfied with some aspects of Elaine’s birth at the hospital, I looked into home births. I engaged two midwives who held classes once a week and who later did parallel examinations of me (they recommended that we establish a relationship with a doctor in a hospital in case the home birth does not turn out to be feasible). The midwives were vegetarians and one of them made efforts to convert me. She would say things like “you know, what I miss about chicken is the seasoning. I can have that seasoning on something else and be satisfied.” I never got the point. I never seriously entertained the idea of cutting out meat.

Four years later and some months, I had two children, two years apart, and Elaine came home from school one day and said she didn’t care what her sister Mary or I ate but she did not want to eat any more animals. At the Montessori school that she attended the leaders happened to be vegetarians. Clearly they offered gentle messages to the children about how meat is made, and in some cases the messages got through. Certainly so with my older daughter.

I had been having digestion problems with some meats, particularly ground meat, so I said I’m in, I’ll go veg with you, but let’s eat chicken and fish, and we all agreed. After many visits to Colonel Sanders we cut out chicken, and finally we cut out fish as well.  I think we made these decisions after I had done some reading and we had talked about it.

It’s hard to believe that back in the 1980s I would be able to learn so much about meat production. But I did. I read books and magazines and subscribed to various organizations. My way in was Vegetarian Times and later Animals’ Voice magazine. These magazines had articles about meat production and reviews of books. I found Diet for a New America by John Robbins. I read Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. I learned about animal testing, about factory farming, about puppy mills, about seal slaughter. It wasn’t long before I was a vegetarian for ethical rather than health reasons. I started to attend fur protests and to write letters or postcards about seals.

Over the next several years I sometimes tried going vegan but the effort did not last long. I was aware of the cruelties of egg and milk production yet somehow that awareness did not mean I made that knowledge part of me. I relied on knowing that making eggs and producing milk did not kill the animal.

I was a bottle-fed baby in a family that thought milk was “nature’s most perfect food”. Although my stepmother (father’s second wife) said “milk is for babies” I just laughed at her. I didn’t examine my own food prejudices. I was able to cut out the meat but I justified the milk and eggs.

As I became more active in animal issues and was exposed to more and more about dairy and egg production I ate fewer and fewer eggs and less and less dairy. I finally came to a point, sometime in the summer of 2007, when I said no, I’m going vegan. At first it was a bit of a sloppy veganism, where I slid into having a milk shake from time to time or a muffin. But gradually such forays were less easy to make. I would think about how that animal suffered and how that kind of food did me no good.  I have to admit that the real kick came from The China Study, a book that emphasizes the effect of animal proteins, especially milk proteins, on our health. I had already gone vegan by the time I read that book but it certainly made it easier for me to stay that way.

Since then I have acquired many new vegan cookbooks and have enthusiastically embraced this far healthier and more ethical way of life. It only gets easier. When people tell me “I tried going vegan once but it was too hard” I try to empathize but always point out that it is getting easier all the time. I don’t want them to hide behind that curtain. I was there for a long time myself, of course, so I can hardly set myself up as a kind of paragon of virtue.

My story is long and boring but for me it was important to include what details I have. I have wanted to search inside myself for the reasons. Why me? How did I get here? I think a childhood where I was an outcast and where knowledge was highly valued combined to make me inquisitive and open to new ideas, not beholden to any social set or any standards of behavior or thinking.  A concern for my health got me started but it was my willingness to keep learning that sent me all the way.  At this point I have to admit that I am prejudiced in favor of animals and it’s a prejudice I don’t see giving up, ever.

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