I can remember being a little girl, about nine years old, and watching my mother kill a baby lizard with a broom. It must have made it's way into our house through the front door that had been constantly opened and closed by myself and my brother. We played hard with our friends next door and running inside the house for a quick drink was a constant. As my mother was sweeping up the lizard's dead body, I watched how his fleshy body was limp. I looked down at my left hand and I squeezed the fleshy part beneath my thumb finger. I said to myself "he's fleshy like me, I could never kill a lizard". In the proceeding days my mother was given what looked like a whole torso of a cow and it was sitting in the kitchen on the counter. I returned home from playing at my friend Samantha's house to the smell of raw meat filling the house. Its a very distinctive smell, easy to recognized, especially if you grew up going to the meat market with your mom after a lengthy grocery store shop. I shout in disgust of the sight and smell of what looked like to me to be a huge mount of red meat. My mother came out of her room and asked me what was wrong? I responded by asking what that was on the counter. She said simply, "Meat". I immediately informed her that I would no longer be eating flesh. She laughed in complete amusement. I did not know why she was laughing but I knew that I was serious. She asked me what was I going to eat. I told her that I would go to subway. I followed up with a request for money to go to Checkers Fast food Restaurant that was down the street. She gave me just enough to purchase some apple nuggets which I had that night for dinner.
II. Middle School & PETA
The emergence of AOL had finally reached our home but it wasn't until I reached sixth to seventh grade that I began to really learn computers and how to surf the web. By this time I had long since returned to eating meat. My mother learned not to announce that it was meat or she would often not serve me the meat part of dinner and I would just have the vegetables and whatever type of carbohydrate she made. I loved cooking by then so I was always on a recipe website signing up to receive free cookbooks or to join a cooking club. I believe it was a Betty Crocker cooking site, a PETA pop-up showed on screen. It read " It is wrong to eat animals " and it offer a free monthly newsletter. I of course being very impressionable, signed up for more information. They sent the mail to the house and my mother intercepted it. She came in my bedroom and asked me what it as. I told her that they said that it is wrong to eat animals. My mother always being ahead of the game and quick on her feet she explained to me that yes it is wrong to eat animals, but not the animals that we eat, those were okay. After she explained that to me, I was content and I believed her, There were two classes of animals out there and the ones that we ate were not the animals that PETA was talking about.
III. Realizing That I Was A Vegan
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