La Belle Nuage

I’ve been a vegan since I was 15. None of my family was. In fact, my dad was a butcher’s son. He grew up eating lamb chop for breakfast. But unlike most kids in LA, I had pet chickens. When I first adopted them I immediately made the connection that my pets were also other people’s dinner. I couldn’t live with myself knowing that my diet was killing animals that I called pets so I stopped eating chicken. A few years later I went vegetarian. It wasn’t until I saw “Meet Your Meat” in a workshop class in high school that I finally went vegan. You’d think more people would have supported my decision not to partake in the slaughter of 50 billion animals for human consumption annually, but it wasn’t like that… 

My parent’s supported me. They even went vegetarian. Yup. My dad, the butcher’s son, will not eat meat anymore. I don’t know what I would have done growing up without their support because I was harassed and bullied all throughout high school for being a vegan. Kids would slip me notes in class with pictures of dead animals. I would get prank calls from other kids threatening to kill my pets. There are a lot of cruel people out there who attacked me because my lifestyle is somehow a threat to them.