So yes, bottom line, everything is out the window. Im eating eggs, real butter, yogurt, pork, fish, (no beef or chicken yet) but I am not opposed to it. why? you might ask. well, lets dig into where everything comes from.
There is a little site called http://www.meat.org/ where you will find an introduction by a guy named Paul McCartney about where your meat comes from. This is 99.9% of meat that is consumed on a daily basis (yes I made that figure up but the fact is all meat, unless specified, comes from this type of system.. ALL MEAT be it cow, chicken, pork, turkey). This is one of the videos that made me turn vegan in the first place. And this brings me to my first point. Turning vegan just means that you are opting NOT to buy into a certain commerce of product. In this case, you’re not going to be buying meat, cheese, milk etc… Good for you. Your life now becomes a challenge as to find out what to eat and how to live. You grab onto the “label” of being vegan and different. I did it for 5 years I know all about this. What I also knew was that MY decision was NEVER going to change the factory farming industry. I was NEVER going to make McDonalds come up with an ethically produced hamburger or even a soy-burger. MY choice was just a tiny tiny ripple in the ocean that is the meat industry. Even if you were to get all of your friends and family to become vegan, you would NEVER change anything.

This is where my revelation came to light (P.S. I do not claim to have birthed this idea, actually, several people and articles came around the internet at this time and things just clicked for me). How do we go about ACTUALLY changing the meat industry. Well, I had been passionately talking vegan talk to people, I would also add on to the end that free-range and pastured animals were a completely different story. They were treated and “produced” the “right” way (I use quotes because if you are vegan because you do not want /any/ animal to die for your food then you will never take on this belief and I commend you for that, but you might as well stop reading here). These animals live on a farm, in the grass just “being” all of their lives until it is time for slaughter. So like I said before, this is night and day to factory farming. This is something that should be supported. This is something that I would like to see the meat industry DOING in the future. Well, the only way that this will happen is if these farms are supported by customers. Do you know what happens if farms don’t sell their product? They DIE! You might /like/ the idea of free-range but unless you are buying it, you are putting them out of business!

So I am jumping in and putting much money towards supporting local, pasturing farms so that they will BE around. To recap: Being vegan takes you out of the situation, being an “ethicstarian” puts you right in the middle of the fight and supports the real life little farms that love their animals and are not just out for the mighty dollar.

Thank you for reading this. I hope it makes sense.
Please ask questions or comment with anything you have to say.

God gave man dominion over the animals. Animals are one of God’s creatures that we are to love and respect. I do not want to support an industry that tortures and mistreats animals.

There, that’s pretty much a light summary of what I believe. Of course this is usually followed up by one or two notorious questions:

“So if you don’t eat meat, how do you get protein?”

and

“So I can understand not wanting to kill an animal, but what about cheese and eggs? Nothing dies for those.”

This is good reinforcement for you as to why you believe in being vegan and also can be used as a chance to spark conversation with people who would never think to consider where their food comes from. Also, for new vegans, this might serve as something to hold on to so that when confronted, you have something to say that will, hopefully, knock their socks off.

So here is my question for you guys:

What is /your/ vegan elevator speech? and what are the most common follow up questions?