Vegan, Almost

If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be eating a mostly vegan diet, I’d have laughed in your face. My childhood was spent on a farm where we raised our own beef, chickens, eggs, and milk, and these foods were thought the most healthy. We ate beef several times a week and summer barbecues were orgies of carnivory.

But we change.

Having grown up surrounded by fields of happily grazing bovines, I’d assumed that all farm animals lived their lives thus. It’s the image on the butter carton, the yogurt cup, the coffee creamer. Happy milk. Happy cows. Little red hens, tucking downy chicks under their wings. No need to writhe in guilt about cutting their lives just a little bit shorter. They existed because of us and for us. They were ours.

Then truth cast its shadow on the collective Western consciousness, and mine with it. We aren’t so far from the brutality of our ancestors, however enlightened we prefer to imagine ourselves. The truth is this: that animals are intelligent beings, that they experience joy and grief and contentment, and that we deny them both life and happiness in order that they may nourish us. Animals suffer greatly at our hands, from birth to brutal death. Anyone who visited the same horrors on members of our own species would be named a monster.