I got a job at Pizza Hut when I was 15 years old.  The year my dad moved out and my parents were getting a divorce was really hard for my mom.  Looking back she had no support.  My dad’s family had cut her off due to my alcoholic father’s lies about my mother.  My mom’s family was never in her life in any sort of meaningful way.  She moved out of her family home the day she turned 18 and ended up married to my dad and pregnant with me at 19 years young.

My mom thought of my dad’s parents like her own so when she was given the silent treatment after my dad left, that was really hard on her.  My Oma and Opa were wonderful people, but sadly they could not see the truth of the situation or they simply chose not to.

I’m sure my mom felt so alone.  She did the best she could with what she had, but she was simply unable to make the mortgage payments.  She had been in arrears and had somehow come up with the money to pay, bless her heart, but sadly the bank said it wasn’t enough.  They would foreclose on our house unless she paid their legal fees – I guess they had already drawn up the foreclosure documents.  So at 15 my mom shared this with me.  She didn’t feel she had anyone else who could help.

I went to work that night and shared this story with one of the waiters there, Andrew.  Andrew asked how much I needed, and I think it was $1,000.  Andrew told me I was in luck.  That every time someone tipped him a $5 bill he saved it.  He said the jar was full and he figured he had about $1,000 in it that he would lend me, a 15-year-old he barely knew, the money.

I graciously accepted the jar of $5 bills and vowed to pay him back, which I did, in full.  We took the $5 bills to the bank and were able to keep the house.  I was so terrified of losing the secure roof I had over my head, this one moment sent me into a lifetime of pursuing one goal which was to own my own home and be free and clear of a mortgage as my safety net in case anything happened.

Pizza Hut was a lifesaver for me.  My mom had started getting food from the food bank and Pizza Hut allowed me to have one $5 meal per shift.  I would always have a personal pizza and garlic bread with cheese which came to $5.50.  I was able to eat a big meal for only $0.50 cents.  Oddly, I remember at the time feeling like that was so much food and I felt overfull each time I ate it all.  This is an interesting thing to remember, because as my addiction grew, I graduated to a small pizza with garlic toast, then a medium and ultimately the lunch buffet which was something like $8.99 and was ALL YOU COULD EAT.  This was the jackpot, the motherload.  I lived for this buffet.

I used to work the lunch buffet as a server and at that time I could call out the kinds of pizza I wanted.  We weren’t supposed to eat the leftovers, but we always did.  I felt so guilty that I got to eat all this food and my mom and brother weren’t so lucky that I would bring home pizza for them whenever there was a mistake or leftovers in some capacity so I could feed them too.

Perhaps I felt that pizza saved us.  That place was certainly a lifeline for me.  It brought in enough money that I could buy extra food for our house, gifts at Christmas and even my first car.  I worked so much that my high school work suffered.  I remember I had a teacher who threatened to call Pizza Hut to demand I work less shifts so I could focus on school.  I so appreciate that teacher who was looking out for me.  Pizza Hut paid me $4.50/hour because at that time the minimum wage was $5.00 and unfortunately, companies were able to pay students less.

I worked at Pizza Hut from the age of 15 to 19 and spent the next two plus decades being a customer at the exact Pizza Hut location I used to work at. I used to take my Opa with me and he absolutely loved it.  Part of me wonders if introducing my Opa to pizza was the cause of his angina and eventual heart attack.  While I’ll never know that answer, I do know that before me, my Opa didn’t eat pizza.  However, this video from Dr. Greger shares that ‘by age ten, the arteries of nearly all kids raised on the Standard American Diet already have fatty streaks’ – the first stage of heart disease so this video oddly makes me feel better that I was not the cause of my Opa’s eventual heart attack.  The video also shows that a plant based diet can start to reverse the damage we already have, which gives me so much hope.

Aside from my Opa, I would take anyone and everyone to the Pizza Hut lunch buffet; my husband, brother, cousin, friends, colleagues and my brother’s girlfriends.  Anyone and everyone.  The lunch buffet was only Monday to Friday so I would have to book a day off work to eat there, which I did regularly.  Here I am a working professional, and I am legitimately booking days off to intentionally overstuff my face with pizza which means mass amounts of cheese and mass amounts of suffering for the poor dairy cows.

I didn’t think about the cows.  I only thought about the pizza.  I didn’t know that cows had to become pregnant and give birth to produce milk.  We are so far removed from the process we do not even consider what the cows go through for that cheese to end up on our plates. Like all mammals who produce milk, they do so for the babies, after giving birth.

Let me give you a quick run down.

The cows are forcibly impregnated.  They give birth, their calves are taken away from them because we can’t have the cows drinking their mother’s milk, there is no profit in that.  Since male calves (or bull calves as industry calls them) do not produce milk, they are useless and are killed shortly after birth OR they are sent to a hutch to be chained up so they cannot move so we can sell their tiny bodies as tender veal.

Before I carry on, can we please reflect on this a moment. A LIFE is born into this world and we take that newborn BEING away from his mother and chain him into a hutch, ALONE. This is so heartbreaking and unnatural. I have attended ag days where their dairy farmer adds ‘but the bull calves can SEE other calves.’ As though that is a selling feature that makes it all better. How sad we support this industry and we do not think for one second about the individual experience of the cows.

The females don’t fare much better, living in a small hutch, alone for the first two months of their lives.  Unable to be with the comfort of their mom, unable to suckle on their mom’s teat, often enduring the harsh Canadian winters, alone.  Once they are old enough, they too will enter the cycle of forced impregnation and babies being taken away. A life dwindled down to a product, a milk making machine. What a devastating existence.

Once the dairy cow is spent and her milk production declines, she is rewarded by being sent to slaughter on a transport truck without air cooling or heating.  She will suffer greatly in those final hours on her drive to slaughter. She lost all her babies, gave all her milk to humans and then was slaughtered and turned into cheap ground beef.

Trust me, I get it.  When you are addicted to foods, used to a certain way of life, you don’t want to let this information IN to your consciousness.  The easier path is avoidance, sticking our head in the sand, pretending this udder pain and suffering doesn’t exist (pun intended).  Telling ourselves that since we didn’t pull the trigger, we are not to blame.  Out of sight and out of mind washes us of any responsibility, but I’m sorry to tell you that is not true.  These animals continue to be bred into existence because we purchase them.  We have direct power to change things for the animals.

Don’t we all want autonomy over our own bodies?  Animals deserve better.  Farmers will tell you the cows willingly walk up to the machines to be milked, but did they tell you that these dairy cows have been selectively bred to produce 10 times what their udders would naturally hold?  We have so greatly changed their structure that it would be damaging to their udders to allow the calves to suckle.  We have created the most unnatural breed of cow, the most unnatural and inhumane conditions and it breaks my heart that we have all collectively turned a blind eye to this great injustice to these gentle creatures.  Animals deserve autonomy over their bodies. They deserve to raise their babies, they do not deserve what we have done to them.

I highly recommend checking out this write up from We Animals Media with images from the dairy industry. Their site has this powerful quote “we are the only species that consumes the milk of another species, and continue to drink milk into adulthood.” Let’s change that.

Peace, love & plants,

Michelle 🙂

p.s. If this Pizza Addict can give up dairy, anyone can. Start somewhere. I started with giving up melted cheese and progressed from there. While vegan alternatives exist, there is nutritional yeast to give that ‘cheesy’ flavour but there is also skipping dairy altogether. Dairy is not a necessary. We are not eating dairy for survival or because we have to. There is nothing we get from dairy that we can’t get from plants. As Natalie Fulton says, what is more important: someone’s taste pleasure or someone’s life?