PETA Prime’s Newest Blogger: The Vegan Grandmother

Hello, and welcome to my world. While we’ll probably have a lot in common, we might not always agree. But I can assure you that it will be lively and fun around here!

Let’s introduce ourselves. I’ll go first, but I hope that you will follow suit very soon, because I love making new friends. I’ll skip the easy stuff and talk about where I am now in my journey, and I hope that you will be inspired to share your own story. And hey, if there’s something that we happen to disagree on, well, there’s nothing better than a good old-fashioned debate to keep us young and …  you thought I was going to say “spry,” didn’t you? Have you ever noticed how nobody ever uses that word, “spry,” unless they are talking about an old person? So if I ever tell you that you’re spry, well, consider it a backhanded compliment.

“Vegan Grandmom” is not just a cool title that I came up with. I really am vegan and a grandmother. I went vegetarian back in 1987. It happened this way: I had just returned from a circus demonstration in West Palm Beach. There were quite a few of us who were trying to get people to stop taking their kids to see the “abusement” of circus animals. I was feeling pretty darn proud of myself and maybe a little superior when I came home and told my husband (of two months) how good it felt to speak up for animals and how I was down there with my “peeps” and weren’t we just the coolest posse in the world! As I was talking, I used the hand that I wasn’t using to pat myself on the back to reach in the fridge and pull out a couple steaks. I was spicing the meat and talking a blue streak when my husband cleared his throat and gave me a look that stopped me mid-sentence. “What?” I asked him. His face was disapproving, and he had that smug look that lawyers get when they just stumped a witness. He’s a lawyer, so I get that look a lot. “Well,” he said, “I just think it’s a little hypocritical for you to go out and stand on the street corner screaming about the abuse of stallions and then come home and throw parts of a cow on the grill.”

Wow. Nice. Well, that got my attention. I saw his logic, of course, and I gave up red meat on the spot. A month or so later, I was eating a piece of a chicken when it occurred to me that the same argument could be made for them as well. And suddenly, the morsel in my mouth tasted like a “dead” thing. I got physically sick thinking about it. Fish was the next to go. It was several years later that I began the process of becoming vegan. It was not an easy process for me, and there were a couple false starts, but I finally found my way. Back then, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we didn’t have the “transition foods”-soy burgers, soy milk, soy butter, seitan, and other delightful offerings that vegans enjoy today-so it was a little bit more challenging. It’s much easier today to incorporate a vegan diet.

When asked if it is hard being vegan, I rely on a quote that I once read that says something like, “If you are faced with something difficult, you should do it. You will find out that either it wasn’t as hard as you thought or that it was plenty hard, but you had the ’stuff’ to do it.”

So my journey has brought me here to you. And whether you are a veteran ARA (animal-rights activist), a newbie, or just looking for ways to live a more humane, healthy life, there will be something for you here. I will be writing about my own experiences as a vegan grandmom-from how to cope with family members and friends who “don’t get it” to ideas about how our generation can get out there and help animals. Write to me with questions and ideas, and keep coming back to learn how to “deal” with the various little issues that we PETA Primers face every day.

Welcome. I hope that you’ll stay a while.