Why Did You Go Vegan?

Kim

Being vegan was not a plan but an evolution for me. Now after 33 years, beginning as a vegetarian when it was difficult and very frustrating, I realize that things are better than ever for someone who cares about the planet and the living beings on it and wants to become vegan. Now I have many, many choices and the quality is better than ever.

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I grew up in South America, Southeast Asia and parts of Europe and East Africa as a military brat. These places had the best and worst of food offerings but mostly they had disease. Stomach disorders were a part of the public hygiene but also a latent part of meat eating in those regions. Two of my sisters lived with bacterial infection for more than adozen years and all of us were touched many times by those problems.

In college at the U. of Notre Dame, Indiana, I worked one summer at a slaughter house dressing intestines for sausage packing from 8:00 one morning until 1:00 that afternoon and quit the job and quit eating animal body parts altogether. After ten years of trying to to live on an ovo-lacto diet, I began quite naturally trying to find further alternatives to being without even those crutches and in 1989 I was completely vegan by choice.

That was a long enough transition to learn the entire range of food alternatives, recipes and the realities of travel and business/entertainment eating. As the president of a biobased chemical manufacturing company, I often have the opportunity to enlighten others and teach the subject, as a non-professional nutrition nut that there are lots of choices in a vegan environment to grow, sustain and promote a positive outlook without supporting one ounce of stress or enslavement of the animal kingdom. Today, I practice making very small foot prints on the landscape of life, choosing to be less than having more.

I'm pretty certain that is how we are meant to live this life. We all have choices, no one is forced to eat poorly, or to waste their lives by supporting commercialized nutrition.

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