Transition Stories
Earthsave members discuss their transition towards a plant-based diet.
If you are a member and would like to submit your own short transition story, visit our contact page and send your story to newsletter.
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Kay Charter
by Nancy Callan
I met Kay at her home last fall. In her small bedroom, you’ll find an exercise bicycle and an up-to-date computer that she uses several times a day, responding to and sending emails. I admit I was impressed. When you meet someone as healthy and as sharp as Kay at age 98, you naturally begin to wonder what her secret is. I initially assumed genetics had to play the biggest role.
But since Kay’s mother passed away at age 61 and her father at 63, I have my doubts. Hmm, well, she has that exercise bike; keeping fit must be the key? But Kay dispels that idea too, telling me she only purchased the bike as a present for herself on her 95th birthday.
Kay hasn’t always enjoyed perfect health. In 1974 she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. For reasons no doctor could explain, she got over it easily, with no chemo and no radiation. Then in 1982, while being operated on to remove a minor lump thought to be benign, her doctor discovered it to be colon cancer. Kay recovered fine.
Maybe it’s a long happy marriage that helped her through it all, I wonder. Turns out Kay divorced in 1972. Hmm. Maybe a glass of red wine each day for heart health has played a role? No, Kay became Mormon in 1970 and hasn’t had alcohol since. A strong proponent of natural supplements, Kay hasn’t taken any commercial pharmaceuticals for over 27 years. Hmm, maybe we are getting somewhere…
Around that time, Kay read John Robbins’ book “May All Be Fed.” Her son, who was staying with her, read it too and they both became vegans. Kay has been eating a healthful, mostly organic diet for decades.
Kay’s son passed away recently. Now, in her current living situation, with her daughter and son-in-law, Kay follows a more Mediterranean diet, including some free range organic eggs and dairy as well as an occasional bit of fish.
My own sense is that keeping an active mind (Kay was at the top of her class in school and you can tell), being open to new things, and following a healthful diet with very few animal products have played a role in Kay’s longevity. We are proud to count her among our Earthsave members.
Tran Tran
Thank goodness I have a very understanding auntie and a whole lot of funny people in my family. “Eat this, yummy, this cow is vegetarian--he eats grass”. Thank goodness I also have a good sense of humor. “Did you join a cult?” my uncle asked (I am notoriously famous for going on retreats). Traditionally, Vietnamese people have a balanced diet consisting of a little bit of everything and lots of veggies, and our animals live in the same house with the farmers. So becoming vegetarian is quite extreme.
The transition was tough at times, as I love fish and so many of our traditional foods are the best – it’s not the same without meat. Giving up meat means giving up part of the culture. For two or three years after the transition, whenever my uncle and aunt came back to Vietnam for a visit, my 80 year old grandmother would spend days and nights preparing my favorite foods to send them over Canada. It was the only way she knew how to show her love and to care for her kids and grandkids. How could you dare to say NO to a love like that? I couldn’t, so I lied.
To us, food is a culture that the old pass on to the young, that people share and celebrate and that connects people. I still remember how I spent many days and nights of my childhood being part of the cooking process with my family. I still remember on special occasions the whole neighborhood gathered together cooking, eating and chatting.
Giving up part of the culture is not easy. Neither is the transition. Until this day, once in a while, I still crave fish and our traditional foods. Luckily for me, I have a vegetarian husband who often reminds me why I became vegetarian in the first place.
Ankit Sharma
I moved to Canada in late 2000 and started spending more time away from home because of work and school. Almost immediately, I became aware of the lack of interest in and availability of vegetarian foods in common places like school and work cafeterias. My mostly non- vegetarian friends and coworkers introduced me to a myriad of meat delicacies and I slowly became a regular meat eater.
There was something inside of me, though, probably reminiscent of my childhood, that reminded me of the profanity of my deeds. I started researching the impacts of a non-vegetarian diet and became aware of its destructiveness on my health, the environment, and animals.
I joined Earthsave to begin what I call a cleansing of my body and soul. Earthsave along with my family are playing an influential role in helping me reduce consumption of animal products. I have phased out all dairy products, red meats, and have significantly reduced consumption of chicken and fish. The fewer animal products I consume, the lesser the negative impact on my health and the environment. Furthermore, I cannot bear the burden of torturing animals to feed myself on my conscience when I know there are other options. I am on my to a vegan diet and a happier, healthier, and stronger me.
Scott Dalgleish
I decided to study the human body in relation to fuelling it for peak athletic performance. In the public library, I decided to look up every single food that I ate and find out how it digests and how the human body handles it. I started with beef, a staple food. Searching the index of every text under the headings medicine, nutrition, biology, health, and fitness, I immediately discovered that when beef is consumed, the fats along with cholesterol go straight into the blood stream. That’s not good for performance; I took meat out of my diet. It was the same for chicken, fish, and all animal flesh; I took those out too. But why does this happen? I found that it is because humans are not able to deal with the fats; humans simply are not designed for consuming animal fats. I took them all out of my diet.
I was at the peak of my training that first week without meat. My performance skyrocketed. It was really amazing. I could sprint faster, and my endurance jumped right up too! I was on the right track; I wanted to learn more.
Over the coming weeks I took out hydrogenated oils, dairy, processed sugar, colour, dyes, preservatives, the list just went on and on of all these performance reducing ingredients. I would replace diary with orange juice. It was a process of elimination, replacement, re-researching, and refinement.
My performance was way up; my recovery was almost non-existent (I could go from a training race straight to playing tennis; prior to this I’d just collapse on the floor at home); my acne disappeared; I felt light and bouncy; it felt like a cloud I never knew existed was lifted from my mind; I needed hardly any sleep; I stopped getting sick and didn’t get sick again until about ten years later when I was dead tired from doing graveyard shift; my eyes changed from a very dark brown to green (I had blue eyes when I was born); it was one positive thing after another, thus I continued to study the subject feverishly for the next decade.
Many other discoveries, changes, and experiences happened over the years as a direct result of this, including stumbling across Earthsave. After many years of being totally alone in my ways, I found a group of like-minded people and this changed my life in more ways than I have space to write. Now I strive toward unprocessed local fresh organic whole foods, and have learnt that my food choices not only affect my performance, but my overall health, the environment, and all other living things.
Severin Olson
Some time after that, I noticed some posters proclaiming outlandish facts regarding the waste and inefficiency involved in animal farming. At first, I attempted to disprove them, but after many visits to the library, I was overwhelmed with information that showed that I had no business consuming animals and expecting to be healthy or easy on the planet.
I think it took about six months to discover enough research to prove to my satisfaction that all animal derived products were also wasteful and not good for me and I began avoiding them as well. Within a month of that, I felt the best I ever have and have enjoyed a state of wellbeing that is hard to describe.
I often remind myself that it is not about achieving perfection, only about reducing harm. Often when I'm installing equipment and the owner offers me some food I simply decline, rather than halt work to explain that the plumber who just replaced their commercial hot-water tank or high-efficiency furnace has been trying to free up resources and reduce the suffering of others for the last sixteen years by not consuming animal products, at least until after I'm done.
My biggest ongoing problem seems to be when I'm ordering a meal and forget to request it vegan. I sometimes forget that a "normal" veggie pizza has cheese, even though mine never do.
Pam Wong
A few years later, hoping to learn more about the negative link between animals and my diet, I did a presentation on vegetarianism. Researching the numerous environmental and health consequences, watching PETA videos and learning about the horrors of factory farms were enough to convince me to cast aside my cravings and put more effort into becoming a vegetarian. Thus began my year of being on and falling off the wagon, as I like to describe it, as I battled my own willpower and surprising hostility from family and some friends.
Finally, during one of the “off the wagon” periods, I was chatting with a classmate who had enjoyed my vegetarian presentation from the previous year. She asked me a seemingly simple question, “Why aren’t you a vegetarian?” As I opened my mouth to spurt out a flurry of excuses, I paused, speechless, realizing that not one was an adequate answer. I shut my mouth and opened it again to reply, “Good question.”
Karl Perrin
In my family, thick steak consumption is associated with manliness. But I was also influenced by the manliness of Gandhi from an early age. At the Detroit Unitarian church I learned about the courage and truth force of non-violent direct action, so when the Civil Rights Movement came along, I knew exactly what M.L. King, Jr. and others were doing. I joined them. When I lived in India in 1969, I learned more about the roots of non- violence or "ahimsa" in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religions. I saw Hinduism, especially vegetarianism, practiced by millions, and developed a taste for Indian food, where meat is unnecessary to have a good time.
Since coming to Vancouver in 1970, I have gradually eaten less meat, primarily for health reasons. In 1993 I read "Earth in the Balance" by Al Gore, and began to look for ways to decrease my ecological footprint. In 1999 I read a World Watch Institute book which convinced me that factory farm meat and dairy production was heavily fossil fuel dependent, and should stop. My meat consumption declined further. Recently I made myself read "The Way We Eat" by Peter Singer and I was horrified by the legalized cruelty involved in the meat industry. I was disgusted by the waste in the food distribution system. I stopped eating cow, but otherwise continued eating meat. A few days ago, my colleague at work had set aside a BBQed pork chop for me. I thought "BBQ = cancer" and "pork chop = dead pig". I told him "I don't eat pig" and got out the 3-bean salad for my protein. He laughed. Can I keep it up? Will my male friends think I'm a wimp? Do I care?
I'm not much of a radical, I like to eat what everyone else is having, so going vegetarian is about as easy as leaving the car and biking up the hill. Not easy. Fortunately, I have Gandhi and many others here in Vancouver, to support me in that struggle. It is definitely a major part of my desire to live simply and locally, stepping lightly on the Earth.
Dale Littlejohn
One morning in 1990, I was eating breakfast (bacon, eggs, etc.) and playing with my two cats. I started to think about what, if any, difference there was between the pig that provided the bacon on my plate, the cow that provided some steak last night and my cats. Do we just eat the ugly animals? That sounds a lot like the justification used by
Nazis to kill Jews – they’re different, so we can kill them.I started cutting down my meat consumption then and there and retooled my cooking skills to the veggie side of things. It was a gradual process of eliminating meat at home, then over several years, not eating meat at family dinners or business functions. I haven’t gone vegan yet, but I know that is the direction that I’m headed and I will get there some day.
Joshua Kesselman
I grew up in a typical New York Jewish
household. We ate lots of varieties of
meat and cheese. A typical Sunday morning
would be bagels and cream cheese covered
in lox (salted salmon) and some
Pastrami on the side. My Grandmother
would make beef brisket and my mother
would boil chickens. This all seemed normal to me until I began
to grow up and acknowledge that these foods came from the suffering
or death of helpless creatures. My mind tried for years not
to fully acknowledge the gravity of the truth. Internally I felt a
very heavy increasing guilt. At times this guilt would surface to
the top and I’d say to myself that I really should become a vegetarian.
Then I’d repress my feelings again and continue eating meat.The first thing I dropped was red meat and dairy products. I did that for a number of reasons but the one that really sticks in my head was Quinn. Quinn was a giant Great Dane who was coloured exactly like a Holstein cow. To this day when I think of red meat I think of Quinn. I loved Quinn dearly and the association between him and cows was just too much for my repressed feelings to handle.
After that, it was a slow but easy process. One by one I cut out a particular animal. The last to go was fish. When I look back at the way I used to be, and the ignorant thoughts I used to have in my head about things like tofu, I feel embarrassed. The support of the veggie community has reinforced my decision to never go back to eating meat again.
Denise Swanson
This was a very easy transition, since the family cook – my mom – was totally supportive. I don’t recall any problem at all over the next 15 years with this diet – not even in Germany eating a steady diet of Spaetzle (cheesy noodles): in those days eggs and dairy were considered vegetarian, and I hadn’t the foggiest what their production entailed.
At age 28 I got married and somehow became convinced that eating meat was necessary to acquire adequate iron. What pitiful misinformation! I spent the next 15 years as a reluctant omnivore.
In August 2003, again it was a magazine article that riveted my attention. Adbusters ran a piece featuring photo-like art depicting human and non-human animals blended so as to accentuate our similarities. Reading the article, I felt I could no longer pay others to kill animals I wouldn’t dream of consciously harming.
That fall I chanced across some information about veganism (I don’t remember whether it was literature or a website initially) and learned of the outrageous cruelty involved in the production of dairy and eggs. That was more than enough to send me vegan ‘overnight,’ though in practice I took a week, deciding not to waste the food already in my fridge, but simply not to buy any more animal products.
I think that, beneath our cultural conditioning, we all know that non-human animals want and deserve to enjoy their full lives just the same as you and me.
Cylia Wong
I began by phasing out the consumption of pork and beef, followed by chicken and then turkey. I have managed to delete most animal products from my life. Being one of the Earthsave Readers' group facilitators has also served to solidify my understanding and knowledge of the consequences my diet has on the planet.
Dennis Nicoll
I had previously rationalized the killing of animals for food, but had never before heard the environmental, cruelty or personal health arguments. How would I justify eating meat now? I looked at the arguments for and against, and it seemed that those arguing ‘for’ were all financially tied to the industry, whereas those against had purer motives. So I became vegetarian.
It was relatively easy for me as I was living alone and was not much of a cook anyway. The hard part was explaining my decision to family and friends who all thought I was going mad. That was over 10 years ago and I have rarely eaten meat since. I don’t miss it.
Ben Milne
My transition to vegetarian, and then to vegan, began in my first year of university and took well over a year of slowing cutting out dairy and then eggs. From then until today, some 7 years later, it has been my father who has been the biggest influence on me to keep up my vegan lifestyle. A couple of months after I went vegetarian, and was thinking of going vegan, he offered to quit eating meat in exchange for me quitting smoking. We both tried going back to our old habits, he at a dinner party with a roast and me in Europe with a Gauloise, and both of us found we preferred being smoke-free and meat-free.
Don Johnson
I was happy with that diet for 28 years, until 1991 when one of my daughters gave me the book "Diet For A New America" by John Robbins. I had not been aware of the negative impact on our environment or the miserable conditions of farm animals including cows and chickens. So I became a vegan at the age of 52. Becoming vegan was a bit more difficult than the transition to vegetarian, because I loved ice cream and cheese. But ultimately there were so many other good foods to eat that I was happy as a vegan, too. Also there were more cookbooks out by then that made it easier to find good vegan recipes.
I remember being at a salmon barbeque where the host kept telling me how great the salmon tasted, like I was giving up something by not eating it and not understanding at all that, by that point, the idea of eating salmon had become repulsive to me.
People just don't understand (or they ignore or rationalize) the real effect of their eating fish, meat, dairy and eggs. It's great that Earthsave is doing such an excellent job in spreading the word about the advantages of a plant-based diet for each individual and for society. We’ve tried to do our part here in Powell River by helping to start vegan potlucks 8 years ago. We also use the Earthsave newsletter articles for information and discussion.
I am now one healthy 69 year old vegan who runs an hour and a half every second or third day, plays and teaches tennis, kayaks, is still in love with his wife and loves life!
Oscar Astete
My parents were never the type to keep junk food around the house and, as a result, I grew up with fairly healthy eating habits. Living in a meat-eating household, however, with my parents cooking up a good many meat laden Chilean dishes, presented a challenging environment in which to keep a vegetarian diet.
To help me along the way, I was lucky enough to have a vegetarian partner! After bearing witness to an unfortunate incident involving an overactive fish and an unfortunately placed knife, she’s been a vegetarian since age 8. Living with her enabled me to transition slowly from a meat eating diet to a plant-based one.
As I learned more about plant-based diets, and healthy eating in general, I came across literature on the use and effects of antibiotics and growth hormones on animals. Both as a health and an animal rights issue, this disturbed me greatly. I began to actively explore these topics, which led me to Earthsave Canada. When I first came to Earthsave, I took on the role of Saturday Office Volunteer, which provided an excellent opportunity to learn more about the issues that I was (and still am) so passionate about. Now, being an employee of Earthsave Canada, I find it a joy to constantly inform, and to be informed by, others who share similar values and ideals.
Having the support of my partner, cultivating a genuine concern for healthy eating, and becoming involved with Earthsave Canada solidified my dedication to transitioning from a meat-based diet to a plant-based one.
Robin Hussen
So, when I went out or visited people, I would get my "meat fix". Then I moved to a rural community for a year where there was nowhere to go out to eat. I went months without eating meat. When I visited family that Christmas, we ate meat every day and my body revolted! Feeling ill for several days caused me to really look at my dietary choices. When I returned home, I stopped eating meat altogether.
I'm currently a lacto-ovo vegetarian (meaning I eat dairy and eggs), although my diet at home is essentially vegan. I'd like to keep moving towards cutting animal products out of my lifestyle, but I find it difficult when I go out since vegetarian at a lot of restaurants seems to mean "dripping in cheese"!
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