Becoming A Mother Made Me A Vegan
I know I should have known this earlier, and I'm a little bit embarrassed that it took a personal experience to take me from vegetarian to vegan. For five years, I worked in the food industry, in marketing. I worked with restaurants and meal delivery services, and saw the way that meat was treated like nothing, so disposable, so wasted, it made me sick. I started to realize where it was all coming from, saw the chain of supply, and went vegetarian. I decided I needed to get out of the industry, my conscience just couldn't take that my entire job was to get people to do more of this.
So I didn't eat meat anymore, I stopped eating fish, buying eggs, but I still ate dairy. Nobody is dying, I thought, so that's fine right? And then I had a baby, and I breastfed that baby.
If you were to ask me what the utmost hell looked like, it would be carrying and birthing my child, having that child taken from me, and then the milk that was meant for her extracted for consumption. I truly would rather be dead.
It hit me like a truck, that this is the fate of dairy cows over and over again. I would walk through the dairy aisle at the grocery store and think of all of the babies that had been stolen so that their mothers' milk could be packaged in plastic and sold to us as healthy. How their suffering lasted for years. I watched videos of them crying out for their babies and thought of my baby.
Now it's hard for me to look at any of it, to know what I participated in, to know that it's still happening.
I don't know what the point of this post was, I just felt like I needed to get it off my chest, and to thank all of the activists here who I learned from, who made sure the information was out there, who refused to be silenced.
Thank you,
From a newish vegan, and newish mother.