Vegan Life

I’m not vegan. I’m vegetarian. And I have been my whole life.

Today on library walk, (the pathway in front of the main library, Geisel, at UCSD), there was a group of people who paid $1 to each person who volunteered to watch a 4 minute video. I figured, sure why not. I didn’t know what the video was about before I watched it, but it wasn’t a very fun video. It was about animal cruelty and the choice we all have to become vegan.

While watching the video, I kept thinking to myself: thank god I’m vegetarian. I’m not contributing to this. Until the part of the video mentioned that eating eggs would be contributing to the issue as well – but cage free was a little better. Uh oh.

So I walked up to one of the representatives and asked him what exactly cage free bird eggs entailed. He explained it to me and we had an interesting conversation. He asked me how long I had been vegetarian and I told him all my life. He was so impressed and told me how lucky I was to lead such a proud life like that and how much he wished he had switched to be vegetarian a while ago.

But I told him what I’ve always felt for a long time. There’s a certain pride that comes with a choice to lead your life a particular way as opposed to living it the way you were told you. I was raised vegetarian, so for the first part of my life, it’s not that I didn’t have a choice but rather that I was guided a particular way. However, now as an adult, I am consciously choosing to be vegetarian, and it feels so much better to say that than the fact that I’m doing it for someone else. I think that he should be proud of making a choice to lead his life, and that it’s such a fulfilling and rewarding thing! 🙂 He was so happy that I had showed him a new way to look at this – made him feel less guilty about the rest of his life.

I signed to check out a new club that might for on campus about promoting being vegan and preventing animal cruelty, because why not? Always down to check something out! 🙂 It’s been a pretty good sunny day I’d say.