Part 1 of this story was published last week, read it here if you missed it.

We were vegetarians for about 5 years.  It opened our minds to ethnic foods and spices and tastes we had never before tried and that foundation has stuck with us to this day.  We love a good bean curry, refried beans, mushroom tacos, bean and rice burritos and Thai red curry with tofu.  We tried both Thai food and Indian food for the first time together in New York back in 2000 and were blown away by the flavours and affordability of the food.

Unfortunately, as vegetarians we gained so much weight from all the PIZZA, cheese, ice cream, milkshakes, butter and fries consumed that I had strongly believed that being ‘restrictive’ was something I would NEVER, EVER do again.  Like many other vegans before me, I had actually uttered the words, ‘I will never go vegan.’  Like never, never, never.  I was a hard no.  I didn’t understand veganism, yet I felt with great certainty it wasn’t for me.

I thought people who wanted to go vegan were making a huge mistake and I even had a friend confide in me she wanted to go vegan probably once a year for 10 or so years and multiple times I would rant about why she shouldn’t and how being restrictive was such a mistake for me. I wrote about that in a prior post here. It is fascinating to me that the story I told myself was my weight gain was due to the restrictive nature of being a vegetarian.

In fact, my weight gain was a direct result of me living off of high fat animal foods and a poorly planned diet in general.  While I do believe in the power of plants, I think people can be both healthy and unhealthy on ANY diet: vegan or non-vegan.

That said, let’s pick on dairy from a health perspective. Did you know that cheese has about 33 grams of fat per cup, most of which is saturated fat?  Gross. While a cup of cheese sounds like a lot to consume for one person, I would regularly consume an entire medium pizza to myself and start off my meal with garlic toast with cheese and might even have ice cream or cheesecake for dessert.  Cheese on cheese on cheese.  Whatever I was having, add cheese and actually, add extra cheese please!

My standing order at Boston Pizza was their four cheese pizza (feta, cheddar, mozza and parmesan).  When cheese was involved, I always got my fair share.  Like a true addict, one taste only gave way to the desire to eat more.  One slice, one bite was never enough.  I needed to eat it all and it was still never enough.  When I eventually became ‘sober’ from pizza, I dreamt about eating pizza and would awake in a panic concerned I had relapsed.  I cannot overstate my insatiable desire to eat more pizza, even sober and in my dreams.

Speaking of parmesan cheese, did you know it is made using rennet? Rennet is an enzyme used to set the cheese which comes from the stomach of calves, goats or lambs. It is not possible to extract rennet without harming the animal.

Most people who consume animals would never eat a baby calf (including my old self) and yet bull calves are useless to the dairy industry and they are either killed shortly after birth or raised for veal -both are unnatural and cruel. As a non vegan, I never would have supported the veal industry and yet the veal industry exists because of the dairy industry.

As a vegetarian I did occasionally consume pepperoni, but I never shared that with Paul. Also why wouldn’t I consume pepperoni? I never made the ethical connection as to WHY animals weren’t mine to eat, to use, to exploit so why not cheat once in awhile right?! What difference did it make anyways? Except it makes all the difference to the one cow, the one calf who suffered for my taste pleasure.

This is why it’s easy for me to be vegan, it’s not about reducing suffering, it’s about making the connection that animals are not ours to exploit. Period. Once you can get your mind wrapped around that, you can make anything work. It was about an eight month process for me to transition to vegan and everyone is different, but if you no longer want to contribute to the exploitation of animals, you can learn to make different choices and work through any obstacles preventing you from changing. You do not stay in the learning phase forever. Eventually you work through all of your obstacles (mine were mostly mental) and then you arrive, knowing how to cook, living in a world with your new normal, your new set of eyes, skills, habits and way of living.

People have said to me that I won’t make a difference as one individual, that it doesn’t matter, until the government steps in, until this, until that, blah, blah blah. Well it matters to ME. I refuse to take part in this exploitation. I unknowingly and regrettably took part in it long enough. I will never wait for government or religion to assign me values, nor will I blindly follow the values the majority of society seems content with. I will follow my heart and every cell in my entire being KNOWS what we are doing to animals is both unnecessary and wrong. Most of us have freedom of choice, yeah? Well not the animals, they are not so lucky. I choose to live in alignment with my values even though everyone around me is content with the status quo and even though I am reminded every second of every single day that people are asleep, that they don’t care, that they do not plan to ever change and yet, people are waking up, they are changing. They are my people. I see you. Thank you for waking up in a world that is systemically designed to keep you asleep. For this reason, I have hope and with hope, we can take action.

Back to my pepperoni cheating days as a vegetarian. Paul calls me one day at the office and said he was going to stop by my place for something.  I panicked.  I told him to please not open the fridge.  I didn’t want him to find out that there was leftover pepperoni pizza in the fridge.  Naturally, he peeked in the fridge, but he had the decency to not shame me for it.

The circumstances pigs live in break my heart.  I am shattered whenever I think of them. As a pizza addict however, I never gave pigs a second thought.  I mean, with a name like pepperoni, I’m not sure I even consciously was aware I was consuming pigs.  Here I was, self-proclaimed vegetarian, wearing my ‘I don’t have any spare ribs’ t shirt with a cute pig on it, protesting to my friends ‘friends not food’ all while I’m consuming pepperoni on my pizza which is really a baby pig as we kill them at a mere 6 months old.  Most animals we consume are just babies.  They may not look like babies because we have bred them to get fat and fast, so they look older than they are. If you think about it we are consuming obese baby animals. How the animal agriculture industry ever convinced us this is healthy is beyond me. I’m sure every chicken we eat has heart disease due to their explosive growth rate from birth to slaughter at 42 days old.

Writing about my past stint with being a vegetarian sounds so contradictive and ludicrous to me, but this brings me to education and a strong why.  We read an article as our young, 20 year old selves and it WAS enough to get through to us to START to make a change, BUT we never explored our own personal ‘why’ for eating this way, we didn’t learn about the industry standard practices in animal agriculture, we didn’t learn about the health benefits to ourselves and the planet.  I think back with some sadness that I was on the path to vegan at 20.  I could have been two decades into my vegan journey, but I am thankful I have at least finally arrived.

Fast forward to 2006, the tail end of my imperfect vegetarian stint.  My husband and I were 26 years old.  My parents had both passed away and we were going on a trip to Mexico to visit my cousin.  My cousin wanted to take us for TACOS to experience her hometown, her country, their food – all of it.  We decided this made good sense and heck; I was ‘craving’ a steak anyways so we decided to start eating meat again.  Just.  Like.  That.  So, in preparation for our trip to Mexico so we could eat carne asada (aka cow flesh), street tacos and other local fare, we went to the Keg and had a steak dinner and never looked back for the next 15 years. 

Admittedly, I had some vegan friends (like the new me) who would share footage, petitions, images, thoughts and yes, probably like most of you, I scrolled on.  I always had the initial panic of not wanting to see or hear or receive any of this information that made me so sad.  I was done with being sad.  I wanted to feel good and not knowing what animals endured, made me feel good as that allowed me to re-introduce animal flesh back into my diet and eat all the things with no regrets.

My dad passed away on St. Patrick’s Day like a true alcoholic.  I know he would have worn this as a badge of honor.  We do not know the exact cause of his death because they do not perform autopsies unless the death is considered suspicious.  The family could have paid for an autopsy, but no one did.  My assumption is he died in his bed after a night of drinking from a heart attack as often the first sign of a heart attack, IS the heart attack and many do not survive it.

My mother passed away from Breast Cancer, which ultimately spread to her lymphatic system and bones which was horrifically painful in the end.  My sweet mother had such a hard life, she had many days of depression and her mental health suffered greatly.  Despite her depression, she fought the cancer with all her might.

My mom was determined to fight the cancer from all angles.  She purchased mindfulness books by Deepak Chopra and Jack Kornfield – names and books my yoga instructors reference.  I have a deep appreciation for Jack Kornfield’s work and it wasn’t until over a decade after my mom’s passing that I re-discovered her books on my shelf.  How on earth she found those books in 2006 is beyond me.  She was a funny little trailblazer in her own way. 

She started making green smoothies which she drank daily.  She went to a Chinese herbalist and purchased a ceramic pot to heat up her special herbs and she’d drink the awful concoction.  She attended radiation and chemo, lost all of her hair and had a double mastectomy.  Her body was put through the wringer and after a year of fighting, we lost her.

My dad passed away March 17, 2006, and my mother less than three weeks later on April 7, 2006.  My husband and I were planning to get married that year, so we had our engagement party in between their deaths on April 1, 2006.  We got married in August 2006 and I left empty seats in the front row for each of them as a symbol of their attendance in our ceremony.  It was a hard year.

So, I am passionate about understanding the connection between lifestyle related diseases and nutrition.  This is not to shame anyone, but to empower people.  We are not our genes and we have so much control over our destiny.  Just as a seatbelt reduces your risk from harm in the event of a car crash, what we eat can also reduce our risk of developing fatal diseases and yet infuriatingly, our medical system doesn’t talk about this.

We tell you what body part we can chop off and what drug to take, but we do not tell you that studies show that woman diagnosed with breast cancer are those who consume the most American, cheddar and cream cheeses and had a 54% higher risk of breast cancer!!!   This is one example, and I could go on.  We don’t talk about the protective benefits of soy, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and fruits maybe because there is no profit in a carrot like there is in a chemo drug.  Dr. Kristi Funk and the Physician’s Committee for Responsible (PCRM) medicine are both fabulous resources for more on this topic.

So, while my mom passed away on April 7, 2006, we had previously already had tickets to leave for Mexico on April 9, 2006.  I had a discussion with my mom before she passed away if she was ok with us travelling to Mexico.  She wanted us to go. She said she wished she had gone to visit our family in Mexico and to know in my heart that she would be with me.  So with my mom’s permission days before passing and my brother’s permission, we made the decision to delay the funeral to the day after we returned from Mexico.

While irrelevant to veganism, I will briefly touch on the drama that ensued. In an odd way, I think dealing with this at a young age and having to defend my choices, was a seed to prepare me to defend my choices as a vegan. While my choices might seem strange to some, based on everything that had happened in such a short period of time, it was what I needed at the time.

I invited my maternal grandmother and mom’s sister to come to my house on April 8, 2006, to help me plan the funeral.  I applied for a loan to pay for the funeral costs and had to make all of the arrangements before I left so we could have my mom’s sendoff upon my return without further delay.  I needed help with family names and spelling and writing the obituary and I invited them over on the condition they would help plan the funeral and not try and convince me to delay my trip.

I was 26 years old, was planning a wedding, had just lost both parents, had to pack up my mom’s house, move my younger brother into my house and we had to put down my mom’s dog who was our family dog growing up.  I wasn’t interested in drama, but drama with my mom’s family is what I got.

To sum it up, my mom’s family called the funeral home to ask that the body be released to them.  They said if I left, they would have the funeral without me.  When I became hysterical at this suggestion, my aunt offered me a valium, which I declined.

They tried to convince my brother who was 18 and lost his parents and his home to disown me.  My grandma told my neighbor what a horrible human I was and stole family photo albums from my house.  My neighbor disagreed with my grandma about my character to her face and then informed me of the photo albums my grandma was loading into her car.  My aunt called her ex-husband, my uncle Rudy and asked him to tell me we weren’t welcome to stay at his house.  He must have agreed to talk to me and as she smugly passed me the phone, he told me I was welcome at his house tomorrow and anytime and he would be happy to have us.  He said they had a great trip planned and he was looking forward to seeing us.

My mom’s family and I screamed at each other for hours.  My friends Farrah and Rebecca came over to mediate.  One of them is still traumatized to this day.  Perhaps both are. I had to call a lawyer and the funeral home to ensure the funeral would not happen without me and that my mom’s body would not be released.  My mom had only been deceased for less than 12 hours.  After the drama, I planned the funeral.  I unfortunately messed up most of the families’ names in the obituary without their help.  I didn’t speak to most of that side of the family again after the funeral and I hopped on a plane to Mexico as planned two days after my mom passed away and had a wonderful trip.  My mom showed up everywhere in the form of music.  It was unbelievable how many of her favorite songs were playing everywhere I went.  This turned out to be the best trip of my life.

When in Mexico, we ate ALL the things BUT a comment on culture.  Culture isn’t about eating animals.  Culture changes.  Culture can be honoured in other ways.  We still honour all of the flavours we learnt about on that trip, but instead of seasoning a dead cow that was fattened up in a feedlot, we season tofu, beans and veggies.  All the things we used to eat, we still make – same flavours, different ingredients.  Trust me, it can be done, and it is a joyous exploration of discovering new ways to cook.

When I eat cantaloupe, I think of both of my parents.  My dad would regularly slice up a cantaloupe for dessert after dinner and my mom would often chop up the leftover bits and we would add them to our cereal the next day.  My dad grew the most amazing, juicy red tomatoes. He babied them and we had tomatoes in abundance and my friends, and I would sometimes pick them off the vine and throw them at cars in the street.  Can you imagine?! 

My Oma always had fresh strawberries for me, and she had an AMAZING garden where she’d pay me $0.25 cents for each potato bug I was able to pick off as a child. We would sit on the porch together and shell fresh peas for dinner while sneaking in some for ourselves.  My Oma had a paring knife and would slice off pieces of a fresh garden kohlrabi.  I can still enjoy these things and focus on the memory of those I’ve lost.

While I so wish my young self-had progressed towards veganism instead of backwards, I don’t blame myself – much like I don’ t blame you, the reader. Our entire society is built on the normalization of animal exploitation, it takes time to wake up.  When I was a vegetarian, it was pre-internet era or at least the early stages of the internet, which I distinctly recall was strictly for entering contests as every product had a website where you could go to enter to win a prize.  I clearly didn’t understand the internet in the beginning. I don’t blame my young self for not knowing truly WHY giving up animals was the best thing FOR the animals, my own health and for the planet.  Now I know.  Once you know better, you can do better but even when you know better, sometimes addictions (read here for my cheese bun story) get in the way so you just keep trying, keep progressing and doing the best you can. 

Peace, love & plants,

Michelle 🙂

p.s. That was alot. Go hug a dear family member or friend. Let’s appreciate who we have with us. Tell them you love them and please consider learning about what the animals go through to end up on your plate. They have families too and feel pain and joy just like us. The animals desperately need our help. Their exploitation is so widely accepted in our society we don’t even view them as victims.