Why I became vegetarian

I became vegetarian in the summer of 2000. I had been been exposed to vegetarianism in college, as I was in an alternative program. We used to have weekly potlucks and there was an unwritten rule that you DO NOT bring meat! There were a lot of activist type people in the program, the sort of people that give regular vegetarians a bad name! They would loudly talk about their beliefs to anyone who would listen, and they were extremely descriptive about them. Basically at that time, I thought they were all a bunch of weirdos. I had never been exposed to different types of people, I grew up in the suburbs. Homosexuals, Pagans, fairy believers, activists, you name it, they were all in this program. I wanted some meat at the potlucks and I resented them for us meat eaters not being allowed to indulge. However, making them angry didn't seem worth it, so we all let them have their way.

In the beginning, I thought the food looked gross and weird. There were many colourful salads each week, and I was not an avid vegetable eater. Each week my plate usually had bread, potato chips, cookies and maybe some pasta. However, everything that I heard about eating meat was settling inside my brain somewhere and I started to be conscious about it whenever it was on my plate.

I started to think about that sliced ham I was sticking in my sandwich, and wondering about the pig that once was, who no longer lived, who was about to be part of my lunch. I wondered why lots of small cow bits needed to be in my spaghetti, isn't tomato sauce and vegetables enough?

I never liked meat that had blood in it, rare meat, I think I always found that gross. Seeing veins in my chicken was rather unsettling as well. I was however guilty for the most part of not questioning the meat on my plate for the most part through out my life. My mom cooked supper and I was brainwashed to believe that meat was one of the food groups that I had to eat in order to be healthy.

I became vegetarian when I met my current boyfriend. I was very impressed when he told me he was vegetarian, and I felt horribly guilty about eating meat after that. We were kindred spirits and bonded on a very deep level, and I realised that there was no excuse for me to eat meat.

I'm not a scientist, and I don't have exact figures on the global impact of the meat industry, but here is what little I do know:

• The amount of grain and water it takes to make a pound of beef could feed a LOT of starving people.
• Cows produce methane which is comparable to the exhaust produced from cars. Bad for the environment.
• The waste produced from animals on farms pollutes lakes and rivers.
• Across the planet, forests are being ripped down every day to make room for livestock. They eventually destroy the land making it infertile. Forests cannot grow there again for a while. Forests are like a natural air filter, once they are gone, air quality diminishes.
• Factory farming is how most animals are farmed. This means that they often live in unsanitary, small, diseased spaces and suffer enormous cruelty.
  
• The animals are fed a lot of hormones to ensure they grow as big and fat as possible, which people in turn eat. They are also fed antibiotics as there are a lot of diseases amongst the animals, mostly due to too many animals living in a small space and it not being very sanitary.

I love animals and I believe that they deserve to live happy healthy lives. What happens to these animals is a continuous Holocaust in my opinion. They live in "camps", someone decides when to kill them, they have no dignity, are tortured and eventually murdered. A lot of the meat from their bodies goes in the garbage after it's been in the supermarket for too long, meaning that their death was a complete waste.

A person can be very healthy without eating meat, they just have to educate themselves about healthy eating.