June 18, 2010
Today we’re posting another entry for our Not Just a Phase series, started a couple weeks back and explained in a little too much detail here. Our friend, Natalie, took the time to pass on her story of feline intervention. …sorry. I couldn’t help it.
It happened one night in the year 2000. I was sitting in my kitchen in Pittsburgh, holding a piece of chicken from the Bloomfield Foodland in my hand. I was about to take a bite when my cat (lovingly pictured below) jumped up on the table and started milling around in front of me. Watching my beloved feline (okay, okay, I know it’s weird that I let my cat on the table—she’s spoiled, what can I say?) pace back and forth, I took a bite out of the chicken and suddenly became conscious of the fact that, like a ravenous zombie or a starving castaway, I was eating an honest to goodness bona fide leg. I was disturbed. I was repulsed. And, that right there was the beginning of the end. Soon after, I went vegan, because, once I honestly and truly realized that meat, milk, and eggs came from animals, just like my naughty table-jumping cat, those grey, stretchy things in my drumsticks suddenly transformed into veins; milk started to taste a lot like cows (or at least the way I remembered them smelling on the dairy farm I grew up next door to); and, maybe grossest of all, those little red specks in the egg yolk revealed themselves for what they were – bits of blood.
Yep, it was all pretty much a gag reflex—a gut reaction, if you will, rather than some big spiritual awakening or epiphany resulting from consultation with Buddhist monks, a chance encounter with Donovan, or even an afternoon spent smoking cloves and sitting in a dark room in Poughkeepsie with “Meat is Murder” on a loop. It was just that, once the realization that I was actually EATING ANIMALS fired through the synapses of my brain and started going all crazy up in there, I couldn’t go back. I could never again gnaw on someone else’s leg.
Natalie Bowman, Grossed out vegan & maker of the world’s best vegan bunny cake (pictured below)
And, because I think vegan sweets ARE the answer to all the world’s problems, here’s a favorite link of mine.
And, because I think vegan sweets ARE the answer to all the world’s problems, here’s a favorite link of mine.
