Ellen Adler

I took a gradual but steady path toward understanding how wrong it was, for me, to eat animals. I suppose the seed was planted when I was a very young child, perhaps four or even younger, when my mother read Charlotte’s Web to me.  In some profound way the world never looked the same to me and to this day when I see a spider I think of Charlotte, and of course Wilbur and the amazing world that EB White created. Flash forward to discovering and learning to cook curried vegetables and brown rice as a young teenager… and then to a cross-country trip as an older teenager and having my first ever avocado in northern California, on a sandwich on whole grain bread with sprouts and tomatoes – heaven!!  Many years later a visit to an industrial chicken farm in Israel – supposedly a state-of-the-art factory – brought me face to face with the inhumanity of our food system. No more schnitzel after that!  And then an amazing article by the journalist Tom Philpott in Mother Jones about pink slime (I don’t want to be the one to tell you if you don’t know what that is …) sealed the deal for me. My daughter also helped (and still helps) show me the way.  Health and the appreciation of fresh vegetables and ethical and environmental considerations have always been intertwined for me.  But at some point it just became so obvious that I could not ever eat an animal again. It’s been a long time now and my only regret is that I didn’t stop eating meat sooner. My thought now is, I want no part of it!  And also, who do we think we are?