Why I decided to go Vegetarian.

I knew friends in college that were vegetarian. I thought that was cool and that I could never do it. In my third year of marriage I was definitely doing all the cooking by then. I wanted to start having a vegetarian day once a week. My favorite website became vegweb.com. I know that site really caters more to vegans but I like the way the site was set up. I also used recipes from allrecipes.com and those were good too. Some time later sitting in Sunday school we were discussing Section 89 of the Doctrine & Covenants. Someone pointed out that in verse 3 - it says that this principle was adapted to the weak and the weakest of all the Saints. We had really been discussing other things like the amount of sugar most of us consume. I've struggled to reduce my sugar intake over the years - and have tried to give it up all together but have backed out on that one as you can read from previous posts. Well, I really thought about that verse a lot over time. Then in January 2007 I wanted to have a new year's goal - to give up meat. I was talking to my vegetarian friend about this on the phone and my husband was listening in - he said he'd do it with me. That really suprised me because I figured I'd still have to cook meat for him every night. So we started in February 2007. For the entire month we didn't eat any meat. We still ate eggs, milk, cheese (not Mark though - he'd never ate cheese) but by the end of the month - and I had tried some pretty strange recipes. Mark said he'd had enough of it. So we went back on meat. And I didn't really have a problem with that because some of those vegetarian meatball recipes I'd tried were pretty gross - I can admit to that. I continued to cook mainly with ground beef. Chicken still grossed me out. It didn't always gross me out. I remember liking it at one time. I remember in high school when I got to help cook dinner - I didn't really mind pulling off that fat and stuff from chicken breasts. But over time this started to really gross me out. I hated when you could see blood and veins in the chicken. That was really gross to me. And I remember one Thanksgiving my brother slaughtered the turkey himself - and my sister made a wise crack about how she could see feathers - and I just couldn't eat after that. So you see these little things added up. Well then in the summer of 2007 we went to the U.S. for vacation. We planned a family camp out - and I went with my mom to that big outlet grocery place - Costco. I saw all those rows of freezers stacked with hamburger patties. My mom was loading up the cart with hot dogs and hamburger patties. I felt pretty bad about all the animals that had to die for our summer bbqs. Also, in D&C 89 it says we are supposed to eat meat sparingly - only in winter - and here it was summer and this hamburger meat was the main course. Luckily this one night my sister was in charge of cooking and she was the only one who did a vegetarian meal - burritos. They were delicious, too. Anyways, after that summer vacation - I put on about 20 pounds in 3 weeks. I felt so hefty and fat and big and disgusted with myself. I was eating ice cream at about every meal though. So some of that's my fault. When we got home from the vacation I some how stumbled upon the LDSlinkup message boards. I got really hooked on them. I was on there all the time. I met this one guy on there that was vegan. He wasn't always vegan. He was once pretty over weight. But he became vegan and lost a lot of weight. I think it was a message board on weightloss. Anyways, he recommended this book which you can read online. "Health is a blessing" by Steven H. Horne. I read it online. I showed it to Mark -we both read it - and from then on we gave up meat. We didn't look back. We got some smart remarks from people - especially from parents and family. But we stuck with it. We have now been vegetarian for about 1 year. In the last couple of weeks I've really been looking into veganism. It's funny because when Mark and I went vegetarian we thought - we can do this. It's good for our health, for the environment - and for the animals. But we never thought we could give up cow's milk. Well, over time as I've come across other resources - like the compassion over killing website and others - and as I've become a mother myself - I've started thinking more and more about cow's milk. For one - when I was breastfeeding Kailea - I realized - I only could produce milk because I got pregnant and had to feed her. It made me realize that cows only produce milk for the same reason. And when you read about how they steal the calf away from the mother so we can drink milk - it just doesn't seem right. Especially after having gone to the temple. We learn again in the temple that animals are supposed to have joy, too. So I just can't see how I can keep drinking stolen milk. We've been off to the health food store and discovered that not all soy-milks are the same. Some taste chalky. We've found a brand that we like though. It's a bit more money - but we are gonna go for it. We will even talk to the store about getting a discount if we order in bulk. We want to have at least 60 liters in our food storage afterall. So, here we are August 2008 one year after going vegetarian and now we want to take the plunge into veganism. It's been fun. We enjoy it and we love the new foods we get to try. And I'm much better and steering away from odd sounding ingredients and weird recipes. I now really only try the 5 star rated recipes. I even like my egg-less pancakes. They taste awesome with some soy-margarine and real maple syrup. I can really get use to this lifestyle. I love it.

Luckily our favorite restaurant Eazies in downtown Eindhoven has tofu as and option you can eat it over rice or rice noodles.

And once a month at church when we have our "soup sunday" social - we've now made sure that at least one of those soups is vegetarian. I'm going to make the next vegetarian soup in September. I'm thinking Yellow Pepper soup. That stuff is awesome. Of course, I'm gonna have to encourage the others who make the soup the rest of the year to look for vegan recipes. I love that tomato lentil soup Isabelle makes. I've got to get that recipe. :-)