Chicks Love Vegans

This may be the reason why I am a vegan…what do you think?

When I was a little kid like 5-6yrs old my mom bought me 3 little chicks and I would love them as my pets. One day my mom was cooking eggs and I saw my little chicks and I asked my mom..does chicks come from eggs?..and she didn’t know what to say..I found out that they did and I hated eggs since that day even thou i was forced to eat them. Another thing..my parents loved to buy “barbacoa” which is a combination of cow meat from different parts of its body and one day I saw a vein in my plate and I was so disgusted I threw up. I’ve always eaten chicken before and I liked it but I never ate the part where the veins are..that disgusted me a lot…the other day I was cooking chicken and blood came out and I’ve stopped eating chicken since that day..I’ve never liked milk..how gross to drink milk from a cow’s nipples..eww. Did that influence my new diet? How did u became a vegan?

People become vegetarian or vegan for a number of reasons, and making the connection between the food on your plate and the animals from which it came is and always has been one of them. Frankly, I think that it’s a great reason. Sometimes, all of the moral/intellectual/philosophical/environmental reasons for making this change just don’t get through to people, but making the visual (and visceral) connection does.

Just make certain that you are doing this in a healthy manner. There are at least two books that are great at explaining the nutritional facts and requirements, and how to fill them. Look for “Becoming Vegetarian” and “Becoming Vegan”. Both should be available through your public library, and are probably still in print. You might have to order them if you want to buy them, but any bookstore will take orders.

I am a vegan, and have been for 5 1/2 years now. Systemically, I’ve never felt better. (I have to put it that way, because I have multiple types of arthritis, and between them, they affect just about every part of my body. But being a vegan puts much less dietary stress on my body, and every little bit helps.)

It started when I asked my doctor to refer me to a registered dietician for weight control. She recommended a diet that included a much greater amount of legumes and whole grains, as well as veggies, and cutting back on meat. So, I made these changes gradually.

By the time my neice was born, (she’ll be twelve next month), I had eliminated meat and poultry, and cut down on the amount of cheese that I ate. I never really liked eggs, so cutting them out was no problem. When she was about 6 or seven months old, a co-worker asked me if I was a vegetarian, and I responded by saying no, I still eat fish. But that made me think about why I still ate fish, and I started to cut back on that as well.

When my neice was about 13 months old, we were all at my parent’s place for dinner. My mother had asked me ahead of time if I still ate fish. I said not really, which she took to be yes, and took out of the freezer for me a tuna steak, large enough to feed 4 or 5 people. Well, I’m single, and I live alone, and did then as well. I took the tuna steak out the paper and put in into a baking dish, but I left the wrapping paper on the table for a moment while I seasoned the fish. When a turned around, my neice was sitting on the floor, playing with the wrapping paper. I took it from her gently, and threw it in the garbage, then I scooped her off the floor and carried her down the hall to the washroom. I sat her on the vanity, and washed her hands and face with warm, soapy water. Well, she started screaming and screaming, and my sister (her mother) came racing down the hall to find out what was going on. I told her the story and started apologizing. She simply said that I was doing what I had to do, and her daughter was screaming simply because she didn’t like having her hands and face washed in that manner. My sister forgave me immediately, but I had a hard time forgiving myself for not throwing out the wrapping paper immediately. Suffice it to say that that was the last time that I ate fish. My neice knows the story, and I think she’s actually proud to be a part of it.

Two years later, I had a very stubborn sinus infection, and when I was back at my doctor’s office for it for the third time in as many months, he not only wrote yet another prescription for antibiotics, but also referred me to an allergist and an ENT.

The allergist felt that my history pointed to an allergy to milk. This is not lactose intolerance, which is a problem related to the inability to break down the sugars in milk (lactose), but an allergy to milk protein, casein. He put me on a two-week elimination diet, as a test. Well, the test didn’t work, probably because my only source of probiotics was yoghurt, and because I couldn’t and still can’t drink soymilk that isn’t organic.

A couple of months later, my chiropractor suggested that I should have a different type of test for food intolerances, and I agreed. It’s a non-invasive test, and it showed that among other things, I should be consuming almost no dairy products. So, I cut out liquid milk and almost all cheeses, but I was still eating yoghurt. At one point, we again had a family meal, and my mother had prepared a quiche for me, using yoghurt instead of milk. But I had it for lunch as well as for dinner, and dinner included other cheeses as well. By this point, that was a couple of weeks worth of dairy products in one day. The next day, I felt like crap. And there was only reason for feeling the way that I did.

I have never since consumed dairy products, and since I rarely ate eggs, giving them up as well was no problem. By that point, I figured that I may as well give up honey, too.

Phantom Planet’s Alexander Greenwald is Vegetarian!