The short story is I made the decision to stop eating meat in August of 1987 and went vegan in February of 2012. It wasn't always an easy journey. The longer story with more details is below.

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When I decided to stop eating meat, I didn't know what tofu, tempeh or seitan were, I had never heard the term "veggie burger," and I definitely had never heard the word "vegan.” I also had never been in a health food store, I didn't know anyone who was a vegetarian and I didn't know a thing about factory farming. All I knew was that I didn't want to eat dead animals anymore. 

It was the Summer of 1987 and I was a student in high school. I lived in Long Island, New York and worked at a local chain donut shop. I always felt I loved animals, but I never quite made the connection between them and what was on my plate. Not really. One time my younger brother and I refused to eat the duck my mom had prepared for dinner because we loved feeding the ducks at the nearby duck pond and we made the connection. And frankly, cooked duck looks and smells awful. I remember my mom threatening us with some sort of punishment if we didn't eat, but it didn’t work. My dad came home and sided with us, Mom sullenly gave in, and Dad got out the number to the local pizza place.

Why some and not others?

Somehow chicken, turkey and lamb chops seemed perfectly fine to eat, even though they contain the animal’s name, like duck. Things like hamburgers and bacon never even hit the radar. I hadn't made that connection yet, although I do remember one evening when I was very young, maybe around six years old, watching my mom “clean” a chicken and being horrified by the entire process. I grimaced and gagged and announced that I would never cook a chicken like that when I was older. Mom looked over at me and said quietly, "Yes, you will."

Wait, I'm eating what?

I was at work behind the counter of the donut shop when I fully made the connection between animals and food. Someone at work had been talking about how hot dogs are made (it was pretty gross), and I'd been listening to the song "Meat is Murder” by the Smiths. (Yes, Morrissey.) I'd been mulling over both in my head and wondering why I'd never really thought about it before. And then it all just clicked. What I remember about that day is a feeling coming over me like a revelation or a wave and a voice in my head that said, clear as day, "You will never eat meat ever again," and I never did. I hope that's not too woo-woo, and I don't know why it happened that way, but it did. I wondered why it took so long for me to think about this. I never for a moment regretted or second guessed my decision after that. It was a happy, peaceful decision and in hindsight, it was a long time coming. 

I don't think I had ever said the word, "vegetarian" out loud, but just like that, I was a vegetarian.

But...

There was one issue, however, and that was how I was going to tell my friends and family about this. Today it is pretty common for someone to stop eating this or that for whatever reason, but in 1987 Long Island, it wasn’t. There was no Meetup, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube or any of the places people go today for support. I decided not to tell anyone and for a few days it was my happy, little secret. The secret did not last long. My mom quickly worked out what I was doing and was anything but pleased. I recall her yelling that she was not going to cook "ten dinners every night" and I quickly responded that I would eat everything except the meat. My brain was working fast to answer her, but the bottom line was, back then it was considered odd to not have some form of dead animal on your plate at every meal. Maybe in some places it wasn't, but in my world, it was. People sometimes ask me if I was raised in a vegetarian family and I always chuckle because obviously, no, I wasn't. Every night there was meat. Some kind of meat. If I wasn't going to eat any of this, WHAT was I going to eat?? my mom wanted to know. 

The truth is, I wasn't sure. I really had no idea what I was doing. Meat seemed to be all around me. But I was steadfast and I figured it out. For a while I existed on pasta, lettuce and tomato sandwiches, eggs and toast, Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable soup, mozzarella sticks at the diner. I realised that the sides at a meal could be the main dishes; you just eat more of the sides and leave out the meat. This was actually easy. I wasn't fancy, but I never looked back or felt any remorse at what I had "given up."

My close girlfriends at the time were none too happy about this sudden turn of events either. They did not understand nor did they try and I didn't bother attempting to over-explain. This was important enough to me that I just didn't care what anyone else thought. Every morning my friend, Debbie, drove a few of us to school and we would go through the Burger King drive-thru for breakfast. I always got a bagel with ham and egg (I was never a big fan of cheese), and it was when I started asking for the sandwich without the ham that my secret was revealed. "You want me to order a bagel with just an egg??" I remember Debbie asking incredulously, rolling her eyes at me from the front seat of the car.

Talk about being unprepared...

I was challenged a lot that year. I was asked a lot about protein and nutrition, topics I'd never thought about, and the truth was, didn't know anything about either. I really heard everything. I was told what I was doing was a fad. I was told I would grow out of it. I was asked who “told” me to do this. I was told my skin would turn colours. I was told you needed meat to survive. (Did you? I had started to notice I felt calmer and a lot happier without it.) I fielded a lot of questions about Thanksgiving (why is that always the biggest issue?) and I was told over and over that I was going to get very sick. I was told I was going to starve. On Thanksgiving, a well meaning older neighbor spent the entire evening attempting to put bits of turkey on my plate telling me, "Just take a bite, just try it, just have a little. Taste it! Just try a little! You'll see, you'll see." Even my parents, who were still nowhere near okay with this, finally told her to leave me alone. Also, it seemed everyone around me had all of a sudden become a nutritionist specializing in protein. That happens, doesn’t it?

The only people who didn't have much to say were my grandmothers. But grandmothers are like that, aren't they. I didn't exactly get support, but I didn't get an argument either. My mom's mom, not a big eater herself, sort of shrugged her shoulders and said, "Let her eat what she wants." My dad's mom, worried that I might not have *enough* to eat, started cooking me little vegetable cutlets made with chopped veggies, egg and breadcrumbs. My grandmother did the books for my dad's business, and if he would stop by her apartment in the evening, she would send him home with gently wrapped packages from her kitchen for me. Those little cutlets warmed my heart and looking back, were probably the first bit of open support I got as a vegetarian. 

We had the same story...

It wasn't until I got to college that I met anyone who ate the way I did. My friend Beth was one of the first people I met in my dorm and she was a vegetarian. And she told me her father didn't approve and they’d argued about it! Okay, this was huge. We had the same story. Beth and I were instant best friends and spent a lot of time together, eating our pepperoni-less pizza, and lettuce and tomato sandwiches - an LTS as we dubbed it, a nod to the BLT. We shared a dorm room second semester and painted a huge peace sign with the words "Meat is Murder" above it on our window. After feeling queasy from lunch one day, I found out the "vegetarian" soups in the food hall contained chicken stock. I pitched a small fit and had a chat with the manager of campus food services. She listened to my complaint, then apologised to me and promised that from then on, food labeled vegetarian would indeed be vegetarian. My friend, Ellen, who worked in the cafeteria told me that the manager was running around looking for new ways to make soup in order to keep this promise, and I walked around campus a little taller that Spring. I also learned that just because something is labeled a certain way does not mean it is and you should always check and ask for the ingredients if you are not sure.

 

The 1990s - Things get easier

My second year of college I met a girl named Erica who had been a vegetarian, but wasn't anymore. When she met Beth and me, she decided she wanted to be veg again and we became friends. She was from Queens, not too far from where I lived in Long Island, so we would drive back and forth to school in upstate New York together and also hang out when we were home. Erica had been a vegetarian before and knew lots about this apparent lifestyle that I did not. When she offered to cook me a veggie burger for lunch at her house one day, I had no idea what she was talking about. A veggie burger? Are you sure? I asked over and over. She showed me the Morningstar Farms box and popped a few patties into the microwave. When she served me the burger on a bun, I sat and stared at it. You have to understand, this was long before every diner and restaurant had artisan black bean-lentil-quinoa-kale burgers on their menu. I poked and sniffed at the plate until Erica's mom came in and asked if I was going to take a bite or what. I still wasn’t sure, but Erica seemed to know what she was talking about, so I took a bite and it was delicious. It didn't taste quite like meat, but it was very tasty. When I told my parents I'd eaten a burger that wasn't meat they asked what it was made of. What *was* it made of? Textured vegetable protein? What was that? I didn’t really know. And it didn’t really matter. It was exciting. It was something else to eat. And it was pretty cool that a burger could be made of something that wasn’t a slab of animal flesh.

This is not so strange after all...

Erica also took me to my first health food store which was probably the Queens Health Emporium just off the Long Island Expressway. I'd never been in a health food store and I didn't know of any where I lived. I guess I always thought a health food store would be all sprouts and weird things no one would want to eat, but wow, was I wrong. I clearly remember the feeling of community and euphoria I had wandering the aisles for the first time. There were all different kinds of veggie burgers (!!), ready made ones and ones you could fix yourself from a mix. I wanted to try them all. If I missed anything I used to eat, there were veggie hot dogs, veggie bacon, and veggie chicken patties. And it was all made out of stuff that wasn’t dead animals. I walked up and down the aisles wide-eyed. There was hummus and falafel and a sandwich meat product called Phoney Bologna that we used to buy just because we thought it was so funny. (I’ve looked for it, but I don’t think it’s made anymore.) I learned that Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable Soup was *not* the only vegetarian soup on the planet. Far from it. What a thrill! There were beauty products and breads and most of the brands I’d never even heard of. And the store smelled so good! That's one thing I remember clearly, that wonderful smell and that peaceful feeling these places seemed to possess. Was it my imagination? I didn't care. The health food store showed me that there was more to this way of living than side orders, pizza, and scrambled eggs, and more importantly, that I was far from alone in this new journey of mine. I was definitely not alone.

To this day I love walking into a health food store and taking in the smell, and the energy, and seeing who else is shopping there. And I love looking at all the products, reading ingredients, and picking out new things.

Around this time I discovered a magazine called Vegetarian Times and promptly ordered a subscription. It was a whole magazine about this way of eating! It had recipes and ads for the products I saw at the health food store and it was just so exciting. I would carry the latest issue around like a bible, read every word, and that’s probably where I first heard the term vegan.

It's the name of the place!

Erica and I had been looking in the Village Voice (a local NYC paper) and saw an ad for a Chinese restaurant in the city called House of Vegetarian. A vegetarian restaurant? Well, this was news to both of us. We decided to check it out and wandered through Chinatown one weekend day until we found it. It was a tiny, simple, little place that you would walk right by if you weren't looking for it. We went in and were given a menu that was like a book with pages and pages of choices. All of this was vegetarian? We sat across the table from one another, looking at the menus and looking at each other. All the faux meat dishes were made from things like wheat gluten, yams, and soy. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but what a treat to be able to order and not have to explain anything to the server. When the food arrived we weren't quite convinced (this time both of us poked at the plate) until the grumpy waitress reminded us that "vegetarian" was in the title of the restaurant. (Oh yeah.) We were a bit trepidatious taking the first bite of wonton, but House of Vegetarian soon became one of our favorite hangouts and was still one of mine when it closed for good in 2016.

There's always more to learn...

My first year of college I was taking a business course and one of the assignments was to speak in front of the class about a topic that was important to us. Of course I chose vegetarianism, but not having anything besides veggie burgers and health food stores to speak about, I went to the library to see if I could find anything on the topic. I ended up with a book called Old McDonald's Factory Farm (C. David Coats, 1989) which as the title suggests, went into great detail about the horrors of factory farming (now known as animal agriculture) and how the meat industry is vastly different from the images of serene, gentle farms and the happy, free, grazing farm animals we are shown as children. I was not ready for this and I can remember my tears hitting the pages while reading this book and if I wasn't a vegetarian already, I would have become one then. (I'm not going to talk about all of that here - if you don't know and you wish to, the information is easily found today.) I wasn't thrilled about getting up in front of a class, but as soon as I stood up to speak, the funny feeling went away and I felt nothing but passion for what I was talking about. The class, however, was not impressed. They listened with cold stares, arms folded, as I went on about where beef and bacon “come from.” When I was finished, the teacher quietly said, "Thank you, Lisa,” and made a face. I didn't care. I think I got a C for a grade which made me feel a little misunderstood, but I was glad I had picked that topic because reading Old McDonald's Factory Farm only confirmed in my mind that I had made the right choice to take meat off my plate. That was the only book about factory farming that I've ever read.

The following year I was required to give a speech for a health and wellness class. Undaunted by my first ill received presentation, I dug out my notes and gave mostly the same report, perhaps a little more developed this time. Thanks to my shopping discoveries in the health food store and Vegetarian Times, I had since learned about the testing that goes on in the beauty and cosmetics industries. Erica had provided me with a copy of the PETA list, so I added that into my talk along with a bit about which companies test and which don't. I don't know if it was because it was a year later or because this was a health class, but the response was very different. This time everyone listened with interest, no attitude, and when I was done, I got a round of applause (!) and people started to raise their hands with questions and comments. The professor smiled and gave me an A which did slightly eclipse the memory of the stoic faces at the end of my business class report.

We are all vegan spies...

One of the things I learned early on about being a vegetarian was that if you want to do this right, you have to read labels and you have to ask questions. A product called "vegetable soup" might contain beef stock; a canister of stuffing mix might contain chicken fat, and even Oreo cookies at the time listed lard as one of the ingredients. (Oreos are now vegan, I am happy to report.) Going to the store became an investigative affair and that's part where the name of this web site comes from. If you watch a vegan go food shopping, we may as well sport a detective hat and a magnifying glass :)

Of course this meant I got even more arguments from the unsupportive people around me: “Aren’t you taking this to extremes?” “Can’t you just pretend it’s not in there?” “Just eat it, you can’t taste it!”

These were the sort of comments I got, and of course, the one about protein. I really didn’t care what anyone said to me, though. Not eating meat was one of the best decisions I'd ever made for myself.

Being a vegetarian in the 90s was fun. Once I figured out that there was plenty to eat, plenty of places to eat it, and plenty of other people to eat it with, it became somewhat of an adventure rather than a lonely secret. People have often wanted to know if I missed anything or was tempted to eat meat when it was offered or around and the answer has always been no.

The 2000s

And then there was the concept of veganism. Erica and I had discussed it and agreed it was something that wouldn't work for us. Once or twice I bought a box of egg replacer and attempted to give up eggs, but it never lasted long. I was never a big fan of cheese or milk, but milk (or milk powder, whatever that was) seemed to be in everything. Being a vegan appeared to be a real challenge and I wasn't completely aware of the nightmare that is the dairy and egg industry; not really - I'd heard a bit, but I didn't know enough and my effort just wasn’t there. I’d pretty much become what I’d call a complacent vegetarian.

My first attempt

In 2005 I met a girl named Aimee who was my first ever vegan friend. Aimee was a passionate, outspoken vegan who gave me unapologetic grief for being "just a vegetarian," and I did not handle that criticism well. I honestly didn't know how. This was new territory for sure. By now I was used to all the annoying comments about protein and eating differently, but I was not prepared for this. I remember the two of us eating dinner together at a Thai restaurant in Union Square one night. I had ordered my veggie Pad Thai with egg and Aimee sat across the table giving me the same looks Debbie had given me in the car all those years ago. Only this time instead of feeling peaceful, I felt uncomfortable. Aimee and I soon parted ways, but her words stayed with me and in my heart I knew she was right. The dairy and egg industries are just as horrific as the meat industry and I knew I couldn’t support them any longer. It was a no brainer and an easy choice. Mostly. I was in a health food store in midtown on a rainy Monday afternoon in 2006 and I decided to go vegan for one week. One week. I could do that, right? I could do anything for one week. So I picked up some soy butter and some vegan sandwich spread all just to prove to myself that I could do it. And I did - for 6 months. That's right, my first attempt at veganism lasted only 6 months. Anyone who goes from a carnivorous way of eating to a vegan one overnight has my utmost admiration. I was in Stansted Airport in England on my way to Germany with my friends. I'd had a late night flight to the UK from New York and not much time in between. It was very early in the morning. I had barely slept, I was jet lagged, and I was very hungry. The vegan choices at the airport shops were slim to none and I was unprepared. The pre-packaged egg and watercress sandwiches were right in front of me and my rumbling stomach got the best of me.

Twp green smoothies in fact...

I was back and forth with veganism (and raw veganism even) until the Winter of 2012 when I went vegan for good. Again, if you did it overnight, I raise an organic green smoothie to you ;)

When I finally went vegan for good a lot changed. Like I said, I’d become somewhat of a complacent vegetarian, but suddenly it became very important to find other vegans and community and people who subscribed to this lifestyle. And it really is a lifestyle. When I hear veganism called a “diet” I cringe a little because diet implies restricting or lack and that is the complete opposite of what living this way is. Living this way is peaceful and loving and without supporting vicious, cruel, inhumane industries. I felt more peaceful and calm and my connection to animals deepened in a way I can’t explain.

So much has changed since I decided to be a vegetarian. I'm happy to report that today my family supports me completely, I have lots of vegan friends, and there is so much vegan food and support all over the place. There are social media pages, meetup groups, Facebook groups, restaurants, pop-up markets, and countless web sites. There are vegan options in restaurants, cafes, juice bars, diners, and even Starbucks. The non-dairy “cheese” stretches and melts, and there are veggie burgers that look and taste so much like meat some vegans refuse to try them. There's vegan butter that is so tasty my mom buys it even when I'm not visiting. There’s a new egg product made completely from plants and stores can’t keep it on the shelves. Waitstaff don’t give me funny looks anymore, and my non-vegan friends are usually the ones to suggest vegan restaurants! If you had told me in 1987 that this level of support would one day be available I probably wouldn't have believed you. 

It’s definitely been up and down being on this path all these years. It’s still cool discovering something new and wonderful to eat, and finding people to share food and ideas with. I still get the protein question every now and again, but not as much as in the beginning. Now I have a better answer than I did then! But that’s a whole other topic.

Thank you for being here. And may all beings everywhere be happy and free. <3

Lisa

New York City, May 2019

Me, at nine months, sharing my breakfast with the dog. The writing was on the wall?