I was 12-years-old when I looked at my mother’s roast chicken, steaming hot and ready for Sunday dinner, and I saw the scale-like skin on it’s legs. And thought to myself, for the first time, I don’t want to eat that dead bird.
I had already had a conversation with a couple of girls at my new secondary school about their vegetarianism. Being brought up, as I was, in the back of beyond in rural Scotland in the 1980s I had never heard of a vegetarian before. I had been surrounded by farm animals all my life, cows chewed their cud in the fields around my house, and lambs sprung up in all directions early each springtime. I didn’t give them too much thought, beyond thinking they were very sweet and to be careful of the bull as we crossed the fields!
It wasn’t until I went to the ‘big’ school, away from my tiny primary of only 50 pupils, that I really saw what happened to these animals. I suddenly became aware of the lorries moving these beautiful creatures from their lush green pastures to the darkness that awaited them at the slaughterhouse, on the outskirts of my school’s town.
So it was, that one autumn day I came home from school and announced to my mother that I was now a vegetarian. To her credit she didn’t bat an eyelid and just went about her day as normal.
And so things continued. My mum didn’t cook me anything ‘special’. At age 12 I was deemed suitably able to cook anything extra that I needed, my mother having enough to do with working full-time as a teacher and looking after us four kids. So I did. I was given one cookbook, Vegetarian Cooking for Beginners, and off I went. No internet, no YouTube videos, no blog posts to follow. Just me and my cookbook. I wasn’t particularly healthy, being a teenager and all. Neither were the other girls at school who were also vegetarian. So we ate a lot of starches and dairy, with not that many vegetables. Cheese sandwiches and chips were the order of the day. But we were doing our bit for the animals, or so we thought.
Fast forward a decade and I moved to the city. I was meeting a lot of new people through work and my social life. My vegetarian diet came up a lot during polite dinner conversations with these new folks in my life. They would often ask me if I had ever thought of going vegan. Not through any intention of guiding me along that path, far from it! These were ardent meat eaters after all. But just really as something to talk about. Up until this point I hadn’t really thought about veganism or heard anything about it. But as a true cheese lover and dairy addict I couldn’t envision a life without it! I would always reply that veganism was too extreme and not something I would ever do. We would then normally have a joke about eating nuts and seeds, and then continue eating our food.
At this time in my life I didn’t know another single vegetarian, never mind a vegan! My school friends having stayed behind in the countryside, or having reverted to an omnivore diet after adolescence was over.
It was also during this time that I started to suffer from Irritable Bowel Syndrome that over the next decade was eventually to become very debilitating. I travelled down a road of trying to make my diet healthier by adding in more fruit and vegetables. When this didn’t work I sought out medical help. This led me to try a variety of diets and treatments to ease my symptoms. I tried being gluten-free, then lactose free – buying the special milks and cheeses, then I tried goat’s milk, then sheep’s milk. I took medical probiotics and had all sorts of treatments. One doctor even told me it was tomatoes that were the problem and so I tried cutting them out too. Of all the specialists, GPs, and nutritionists I saw they often suggested that I eat more cheese, start eating oily fish, and definitely don’t soya milk and stick to cow’s milk.
Things got so bad that I was struggling at work. I would often have severe cramps and stomach aches and travelling was a nightmare. The final specialist I saw said that he could do nothing to help me, as it was stress that was causing all of my issues. So, I gave up my job as a project manager to focus on less stressful pursuits. And although things improved they were far from perfect.
It was by sheer chance that my sister gave me a cookbook that she was enjoying, Deliciously Ella. I read Ella’s story about treating her auto-immune illness through a plant-based diet and it finally clicked. You could be vegan and healthy! What!!? After decades of being told the exact opposite of this information, it was a real mind shift to realize that I didn’t need to eat dairy or eggs. I went vegan almost overnight and then embarked on an intense period of research; what I found out led to a completely different change of perspective.
As a vegetarian I had always known that dairy was cruel. That calves were shot or kept in horrific conditions for veal. But I thought humans needed dairy to thrive. I had been told this from every teacher, doctor, medical specialist, and adult I had ever known. And although I knew it was a cruel industry, I thought it was a nutritionally necessary one. What I hadn’t appreciated was just how much the cows suffered.
What I discovered was that dairy might well be the cruelest of all of the animal agriculture industries, due to the prolonged suffering of the dairy cows. I saw the suffering of the painful mastitis, the lameness, the infections, not to mention the very real emotional suffering of having their calves taken away. And, perhaps worst of all, the horrific deaths the dairy cows endured when they stop producing enough milk. Many times involving being dragged by chains and forklift trucks to slaughter because they are too injured or weak to walk there.
What I saw made me literally fall to my knees and weep. As a vegetarian, who was supposed to be doing her bit to stop animal suffering, I realized the enormity of the pain and abuse within the dairy industry. Pain and abuse that I had supported every time I had gone to the supermarket for the past 20 years.
Then there were the eggs. My research discovered how unhealthy they were. Full of so much cholesterol and fat that no-one could sanely consider them a health food. I also learned of the ‘humane’ myth that is free-range hens and every other type of ‘happy hen’ labeling that I used to pay an arm-and-a-leg for. These terms are full of so much spin and hype that they are often meaningless to the animals involved. I also realized, what I had always known was the real truth, that no matter what happens to the hens, the production of eggs always results in two things. 1. The mass slaughter of newly hatched male chicks either through gassing them or by macerating them alive. And 2. The early death of the hen, usually in a horrific slaughterhouse.
Once I had completed my initial research process, and knew what I was doing with my new vegan diet, I found not only that I felt a lot better, but that I felt that I was finally aligned emotionally with my physical actions. As a vegetarian, I had always wanted to do the best I could for the animals. What I discovered was that I could actually do my best for the animals as a healthy vegan.
What really made me sad was that I had taken so long to find all of this information out. This led me to support other people to transition to a vegan diet, using all of the information and advice that I had amassed through my journey. All of this knowledge can now be found at Vegan Online Academy, my school for all things vegan.
