User Profile

So, I’m 23, I’m a graphic designer and social media specialist with a company I co-own called The Social Lites, and I’m a vegan. Obviously. Being a vegan and living in Kansas City, or really anywhere in the heart of the Midwest, is… well, it’s damn difficult. You ask for things without meat and people give you the eyebrow. You ask for things without meat, eggs, cheese, or milk ingredients, and people just out-and-out cannot handle it. There are a handful of vegan-friendly restaurants in town, most of them ethnic, but here the scene is dominated by steakhouses and barbeque pits.

I haven’t always been a vegan, but I have always been an animal lover, an environmentalist, and a humanitarian. Naturally, once I looked at my consumer choices and how they fit in with my belief system, it became clear to me that I needed to make the change to veganism. My journey was neither quick nor easy, however.

The first time I tried going vegetarian was in elementary school. At my house, growing up, meat was the building block around which all of our meals were constructed. Meatloaf with mashed potatoes and broccoli, Polish sausage with steamed cabbage and new potatoes, pork chops with a baked potato, chicken with potatoes au gratin, and hamburgers with fries. Seeing the pattern? We were a classic American Meat-and-Potatoes family, and every meal was served with a tall glass of milk. To make my transition even more difficult, the school menu at the time was essentially the same, with a meat entrees being served at every meal and no vegetarian options. For a kid, that’s a hard environment in which to make a drastic life change. My first attempt lasted less than a week.

Fast-forward several years to high school. I was at a movie with my boyfriend one night, sitting in the bathroom stall, doing my bathroom thing, when I noticed a “Fur is Dead” sticker on the toilet paper dispenser, along with a web address. I made a mental note to see what it was when I got home. It turned out to be a site run by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an organization for which I have very mixed feelings. However, after viewing the site, I was disgusted with the fur industry, and began looking at other sites run by PeTA, particularly their site about circuses. I was very involved in debate and forensics, and my two forensic speeches that year were on fur farms and animal abuse within the circus. From the research I did, I was also introduced to PeTA’s Meet Your Meat video, which shows graphic footage of the way animals are treated by the farming industry. Thus began my second attempt at vegetarianism.

During the three-year period in which I gave up meat, I got a job working for a local animal shelter, and became more involved in companion animal welfare work and began volunteering with local groups to protest animal cruelty in its many forms.

Toward the end of that vegetarian period, I went on a very restrictive diet in an attempt to lose weight. I didn’t closely monitor my iron intake, and as a consequence I began to develop anemia and had trouble at work, where I lost consciousness on more than one occasion.

I began eating meat in small portions, starting with fish and working my way up to eating red meats again. Although my iron deficiency resolved itself, I was left feeling sluggish, and extremely guilty.

Earlier this year, I decided to go vegetarian again, this time making a commitment to my health and being much more diligent about my iron intake. Then, while at a convention in Atlanta this summer, I met Linda Blair, whose book, Going Vegan!, proved to be the final push I needed to make the change over to a fully vegan lifestyle.

Now, if you’ve ever been to a health food store and checked the prices on a lot of mock meats, cheese alternatives, and other vegan-friendly foods and products, you know that living vegan can cost you an arm and a leg. I am by no means a wealthy person, and I wanted to prove to myself and to everyone else out there that you can go vegan without breaking the bank.

Hence the blog, as my good friend Jenn would say.

So, I hope you enjoy VotC as much as I enjoy writing it, and I hope it provides useful information and inspires those of you considering the vegan lifestyle to make the leap. Because, as I aim to prove, it’s really not so hard. :)

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