I became a vegan in early May 2022. It’s been a long but inevitable journey driven by concerns over food safety, the environment, and animal welfare.
2003 - Gave up red meat
2017 - Stopped all meat, pescatarian
2022 - Stopped Seafood and Dairy
May 2022 Fully Plant-Based
I grew up in the United Kingdom, and my concerns over food safety started with the revelations of what we were feeding cows and other animals to bolster profits in the meat industry. This included meat-and-bone meal, the remains of other animals, which led to the “Mad Cow” (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, and its human version, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, vCJD) disaster.
Over 4 million head of cattle were slaughtered in an effort to contain the outbreak, and 178 people died after contracting vCJD through eating infected beef.
Over time, I researched more into the meat industry and its impact on the environment. Meat accounts for approximately 60% of greenhouse gas emissions from food production, twice that of the production of plant-based foods. But it is not only the greenhouse gases released, the pollution of the land and water around these massive, industrial-scale operations due to the waste slurries has become a major issue. As an avid hiker and runner, I realized as I passed farms that they no longer smelled like animal farms but more like chemical factories.