I feel very humbled by the fact that just 4 years ago I was absolutely clueless about veganism, factory farms, and the torture to animals. It just never fully penetrated my consciousness. I had friends who were vegetarian, but I don’t think they ever tried to talk about it with me, or I wasn’t listening. I loved animals but didn’t really speculate too much on “how the sausage was made”.
Once I opened my eyes, it was like seeing the world in a completely different light. This reminds me of the Navajo proverb, “You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep”. I couldn’t believe all the atrocities I had ignored for my whole life. I started reading the articles, connecting the dots. Factory farming was causing cruelty, drought, climate change, antibiotic overuse, rainforest destruction, species extinction, heart disease, cancer, and on and on and on. And the only reason on the other side behind all of this tragedy was: “MMM, BACON”.
Yes, meat tasted good to me before I knew what I now knew. But, once I aligned my diet with the compassion that I actually felt in my heart, and which most people do, I did not miss it. My taste buds changed, and now I love vegetables and fruit and plant-based foods. Then I realized how lacking the choices were… how can people pick a veggie option when they are not even on the menu, or represented poorly?
But, the point of this post is to say that I am trying to make up for a lot of lost time. My children have been vegetarian for awhile, and won’t have the decades of eating animals behind them that I do. I didn’t make them vegetarian, they naturally went to this concept even before I did and I just never tried to talk them out of it. My husband and I are dedicating our livelihood to environmental causes and this is where my heart lies. I do need to talk about these issues just in case there are people out there like me, who needed to be reached at the right moment, who are ready to wake up.