Why Did You Go Vegan?

Mary

I wanted to go vegan as a kid, before I had heard the word, after my granny told me why she didn't eat meat or drink milk.

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Her first baby died the day he was born. When she took him home to her parents' farm she was heart broken, as you can imagine. She was holding him for the last time before he was put into his coffin, when she heard the cows outside lowing. Their babies had just been taken to market. For the first time she understood what that noise meant. It was as though she had never heard them before, although she had heard them all her life. She was standing there with a dead baby in her arms, full of milk that she would never be able to feed him, and they were crying for their babies, soon to be slaughtered.

After that she never drank milk or ate meat again, and she gave up eggs and fish when she was pregnant with her next child, again for compassionate reasons.

When I finally followed in her footsteps I told her, very proud of myself, that I was vegan.

"Ah God, Mary, don't be doing that," she said. "You don't want to be following some strange religion." It turned out that she had never heard the word in her life - at this point she had been vegan for nearly fifty years! My cousin, also a vegan, finally brought her a tub of ice cream the year she died. She scoffed the lot, and let us know that our generation has it easy!

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