This is the vegetarianism and veganism page (obviously). Here, you will learn what it’s like being a vegan and vegetarian, tips for being conscious, several vegan recipes (sorry, not a lot, but I’m working on it), and facts about vegetarianism and veganism you “anti-veggies” should hear.

Wow... Vegetarians and vegans are finally making their place in the world. Now that the green movement has started, it’s been a trend to head in the earth-friendly-diet direction. Sure, a lot of people have been along that path successfully, but unfortunately, the majority of people have not. Currently, I am reading this really good book, called The Kind Diet, which my grandma got me (thanks, Grandma!!!). It tells you all about why meat and animal products are nasty, both for you and the animal it come from.

Here, I’ll give you some of the statistics:

• Animals that are frightened right before slaughter produce a lot of adrenaline and cortisol, which makes us stressed from eating their meat.
• Animal products contribute to cancer and heart disease, and not just red meat; grilled chicken has 17 times more cancer-causing chemicals than grilled steak.
• Meat contributes to osteoporosis, the formation of kidney stones, and a bunch of other nasty stuff.
• Meat takes 72 hours to pass through us, a statistic by which people argue that we weren’t meant to eat meat; a carnivore’s intestines are only 6 ft long, ours are about 20 ft. While the meat sits in your guts for 3 days, in 98.6°F, it’s like leaving meat outside in the sun for three days straight.
• In addition, the production of animal products uses waay more resources than it would take to farm plants for human consumption. Plus, cows create a lot of methane, a gas way worse for the environment than CO2, and they trample the plants when they are out roaming, which leads to desertification.
• In milk is casamorphins, a hormone that makes you feel happy(as in morphine). It is especially concentrated in cheese, and makes you feel relaxed when you consume it. Why is this in mammals’ milk? To make the baby feel comforted by its mother. Those are only a bare minimum about the nasty things about meat and other animal products.

So, milk is nasty, and pretty bad for you. Now, you’re probably thinking, “What? How could it be bad for me when all those people tell me it’s good?” So, don’t be close-minded about this, because it’s important for you to know the truth. Well, milk is, in nature, only intended for babies. We aren’t meant to drink milk as adults. Think about this for a second:

Babies drink their mother’s milk only for the first couple years of their life.

We wouldn’t drink our mother’s milk as a teenager or an adult, right? So why are we drinking from a foreign source, which is even worse? In addition, we are the only species that drinks another species’ milk. (Another point made in The Kind Life, and a great one at that) Think about it like this: a cat doesn’t drink a giraffe’s milk, and a pig doesn’t drink a primate’s milk. I know, gross, right? Yet we are doing that exact thing when we are drinking cow’s milk. Can you imagine a human suckling a cow? (Well, we aren’t doing that, but we are still drinking the milk, which is the same.) –Shudders- Gross! Think about that the next time you pick up a carton of milk from the refrigerated section of the grocery store or from your fridge.

When we consume milk products, our stomachs need a base of the body to digest it. Can you guess what that may be? Calcium. The body takes calcium from the body to digest milk, rather than inputting any. So, in turn, milk actually causes osteoporosis.

In addition, we are not only drinking that milk, but the machines that milk the cows in, in fact, pop infections that form on the cows’ udders. The infections are formed by the very unsanitary conditions of the factory; the feces they have to lay in every day and the negligent handlers that work as factory workers: get as much done as you can, in whatever way you can. Whether it be abuse the animals to get the job done, so be it; they don’t care. This is even worse and more apparent in slaughterhouses. Anyways, back on subject: when those boils and infections are popped, they release pus (we all know what that is), which goes directly into the milk. Again, gross! Slaughterhouses are also a major cause of global warming.

Just remind yourself: you can change this if you want to. I’m not trying to force you to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet; that’s your choice. I just want to inform you of what could happen to a non-veg. I do encourage you to buy the book The Kind Diet, however, and get a deeper understanding of meat and animal product consumption.

There are also many historical figures that were and are vegetarian: (one of my idols) Pythagoras, Leonardo Da Vinci, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, a lot of professional athletes, Alicia Silverstone (who wrote The Kind Diet and starred in the movie Clueless), and tons of others, including celebs.

Now on to the debate other than the medical facts: animals are dying in slaughterhouses. Yes, that’s an obvious statement when you look at the general context. But look further, and actually try to understand what that means.

Of course, all of us have lost something before, whether it be a close family member, a dear pet, a friend, or a relative that you haven’t known your entire life. Sad, isn’t it? It’s even sad for people we don’t know; thousands die every day from a serious disease, old age. We all fear death to some extent. We don’t want to die in pain because it is the last thing we feel in life (depending on your belief: last thing we feel before we go to heaven, before we simply do not live any longer, before we move on to a new life, etc.). We all fear it, aside from whatever we believe may happen to us afterwards. We are also hypocrites, whether you deny it or not, to some extent.

The problem is, in slaughterhouses, both of these things. What people do not realize is that animals have the same emotions as us. They feel fear before they are slaughtered, they feel happiness, they feel sadness when their young is taken away from them by us. They feel, just like us. We kill millions of them a day. Try putting yourself in their position: cows are lined up for the entire day to go into the slaughterhouse. Their not stupid; they can hear the desperate, scared cries from inside as each cow is usually held up by one of their hind legs from a chain from the ceiling and stabbed at by a human until it dies; first its heart and then everywhere else until it dies a slow, very painful ending as scarlet blood runs down its face and it bleeds to death. They can sense their death approaching. (The torture methods are different in each slaughterhouse, but still just as bad.) Put yourself in their position. You’d be able to tell too. You’d be scared. We are all scared of death.

So why are we making other animals suffer our common fear? Why are we making them die, which is our harshest punishment, when they haven’t done anything wrong? Why are we ending their chance of living so we can fulfill our selfish desires? We are putting them through a painful death that ends their life so we can have something that we don’t need and should live without anyway. That doesn’t make any sense, does it? Putting living things through our worst fear to eat them, though we will be hurt by eating it. That is major hypocrisy. And, whether you agree or not, all animals are equal in the sense they shouldn’t be killed. I’m going to guess at least one person out there disagrees and says that his domestic pet is not included in the category of “all animals”, and that cows and other animals “meant” for food should be killed, here’s the real question: what is the difference between your dog or cat and a cow? Sure, there’s that “love” part that people always say: they love their pet and it’s reciprocal. So you love your pet and it loves you, but does that mean you don’t care if everyone and everything else you don’t love can die? (rhetorical question)

Well, past the cold, hard truth, vegetarianism and veganism are the solutions to all this suffering and disconnections we all have to everything else. Here’s my story:

In second grade, my teachers would give us each a small booklet, only about six pages long, every week, so we could practice our reading skills. We got topics about all kinds of things, of which I cannot remember any more than the one that changed my life. I was about seven years old. One week, we got a topic about the rainforest and what was happening to it. At the time, I hadn’t heard anything about the depletion of the rainforest, or even about the Amazon Rainforest. One of the articles was about McDonalds, who cut down the rainforest for its cattle for human consumption. It was then, at that moment that my life was changed forever, not that I knew it at the time. After then, I became more aware of the environment, and I learned I could be vegetarian to help the environment. It also, a little while later, occurred to me that the animals were alive and just like us, and I didn’t want them to die because of our selfishness. However, I hadn’t really turned vegetarian until about a year later, when I was eight.

During the late summer, when I was still seven, I was at my house, celebrating one of my cousin’s birthdays. My family and I were all eating outside; my dad grilled hotdogs. I took a chair right by the edge of our pool, the adults sat at the table on our patio, and I was more anti-social when I was younger; away from my siblings and the rest of my family; while my siblings sat at the other end of the pool eating. I took a first bite; warm and juicy and salty, it all of a sudden tasted like blood, and like death. I realized and pictured what it was in my head; a dead animal, that I was eating. I gagged, once, twice, three times, then I spit it out onto my plate. I could not eat this thing. I got up and told my parents I felt sick and couldn’t eat it. They became so angry at me. I later told my parents I wanted to be a vegetarian and didn’t want to eat meat anymore.

My mom would get really mad at me when I refused to eat meat and protested. She would make me sit at the dinner table until I ate it. After an hour or two, she would tell me to go to my room. So many times I didn’t eat. There was something in my gut that turned me off from meat. I felt like I physically couldn’t eat it; I knew that I wasn’t going to eat it. I don’t know how to explain it, I just knew that eating it would be far worse for me than not eating it. Not like I chose not to, (though I did) it felt like something was in between me and eating that dead animal, like an invisible shield. Sorry, that’s like the only way I can explain it. If that has ever happened to you, then you know what I’m talking about; indescribable, just something that you will never forget.

After all that time of refusing to eat meat, I finally went vegetarian around the age of eight, and loved what I won. My parents were mostly frustrated at me, but I guess that’s because they didn’t know what to do? That’s what my mom tells me, but I still don’t understand it. And, now I’m even vegan. My parents are now even proud of me. Go figure.

Moral of the story: For parents who are reading this: If you have kids that are young, or teenagers, or any age and they are still living in your rules, and they want to be vegetarian or vegan, let them, and be proud of them. I had to earn it from my parents just by being stubborn, but it was still a tough ride. My parents aren’t bad parents, they were just confused. So, let them do what they are inspired to do (unless it’s dangerous). It’s probably for a good reason. Support them as much as you can. My mom hired a dietician to speak to us when I turned vegan. It was really supportive of her, and I was glad for her to show me that she was ready to support me and my diet.

I will have questions and answers and recipes up about two weeks from now (woo hoo spring break!).