For the Animals – My Journey to Veganism

I usually just laugh off these reactions – after all, if you’re used to eating meat several times a week and have never had Shabbat without it, it is understandable that the concept of a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle would be foreign. But I do try to push back against the view of vegetarianism and veganism as a form of deprivation. No, I don’t miss meat. No, I don’t lack protein. No, I don’t feel like I’m losing out, and please, please don’t ever try to tell me the PETA joke because I’ve heard it a thousand times and it wasn’t funny the first time. (For the uninitiated, it’s “I’m a member of PETA – People Eating Tasty Animals, ha ha ha!”)

I became a vegetarian at age 11 for animal welfare reasons. As a tween and teen, I may have been slightly militant – I remember referring to meat as “carcasses”. I read Richard Schwartz’s book Judaism and Vegetarianism multiple times and even used the book as the basis for a Dvar Torah I had signed up to give on a school field trip. Unfortunately, no one had informed me in advance that I would be speaking during dinner at a BBQ/grill restaurant, so yes, I did stand up and preach about vegetarianism while everyone else was chowing down on burgers and steaks. I was pretty awkward as a teen, but that is a highlight for sure. 

I taught myself how to cook, since my mother didn’t know what to feed me (“It’s so easy to just throw the chicken in the oven!”) and my father passed away when I was 12. This was the early 2000s, when casual household use of the Internet was just taking off. I created an account on Allrecipes.com to browse user-submitted recipes and submit my own. I also signed up for several email newsletters from food sites, including blogs, which were in their infancy. The more I read, the more I wanted to practice creating meals from scratch. I took responsibility for cooking Shabbat meals and struggled to get my family to agree to come together for weekday dinners as well. My mother railed against the “fancy” cooking that made a mess in her kitchen, while my little brother relentlessly mocked the “food tour” I would give once the meal was ready.

Over the years, I’ve mellowed out somewhat. When I visit home, I understand that my mother values a clean kitchen more than she values gourmet meals. (I’m the opposite – don’t look in my kitchen!) I don’t judge others for eating meat, since I don’t want them to judge me for the opposite. But I haven’t lost sight of my ideals. I remain convinced that minimizing or ideally eliminating the consumption of animals and 

animal by-products is a valuable goal for many reasons. Yes, it’s healthier; yes, it’s better for the environment; but above all, it’s the most humane choice. 

[Warning: slightly graphic content in this paragraph] When engaging in a conversation about animal cruelty, most kosher-keeping meat-eaters will point out that the complex laws of shechita are designed to produce a quick, painless slaughter – and that’s true, but as Richard Schwartz points out, we can’t only consider the final moments of an animal’s life. It seems incredibly disingenuous that we can sanction packing chickens shoulder-to-shoulder (err, wing to wing) in tiny crates where they can barely move, where their beaks must be clipped so they don’t peck each other to death in their distress, where they don’t see sunshine until they’re led to slaughter, and then we pat ourselves on the back because the knife was sharpened so their throats could be slit quickly? By the way, this is to say nothing of how newborn male chicks (useless to farms, because they won’t grow up to produce eggs) are thrown alive into grinders without anesthetic – which in addition to being inhumane is a violation of Baal Tashchit, the injunction against senseless damage or waste. There are similar uncomfortable realities inherent in the production of kosher beef, lamb, fish, and yes, dairy and eggs.

For a long time, I chose to ignore the dairy and egg industries. I was vegetarian, which meant I was doing more than most people. I did know that dairy and eggs were produced using methods I didn’t approve of, but I felt that I wasn’t capable of giving up eggs and certainly not cheese. Plus, many vegan convenience products on the market do not have a hechsher. I could be vegan, I always said, if I weren’t also kosher. This was a nice rhetorical security blanket, since I knew I wasn’t going to give up keeping kosher.

I didn’t change until everything changed. With the arrival of Covid-19, I found myself at first working from home and then in June 2020, just as my kids’ preschool reopened (with temperature checks and other “safety measures” we now take for granted), I was laid off. Like many people, I had a lot of opportunities for self-reflection while I was figuring out my next career move. Ultimately, I decided that it was time to put aside the thought that I “could never be vegan” since the pandemic had already upended so many of my core assumptions. Around