Chris: I've been vegetarian since my freshman year in high school. I had been thinking about giving up meat early on in the school year, and then around Thanksgiving I finally stopped altogether. It's not that eating meat is wrong, but it became wrong for me to keep eating meat as I was learning about the conditions on factory farms here in the United States. It just felt horrible to partake in such cruelty. I told my parents, and I think they were a little surprised, but they are open-minded, so we talked about it, and they have been supportive of me the whole time. The cafeteria at school wasn't so great when I first went veggie. The only vegetarian options were sloppy peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Luckily, I have always had beautiful friends around me, and somehow most of them are vegetarian, too. It's much easier to persuade the caterer to produce more vegetarian options when there's more than one starving teenager complaining to management. We all learned early on that it was best to bring our own food. Even when they started serving more veggie foods sophomore year, the food wasn't tremendously nutritious. I've learned that I must be very smart about what I'm putting into my body, because it's the gas for my car. And I don't want my car to break down any time soon.
By senior year, I had stopped eating dairy and there was virtually nothing for me to eat at school. Fortunately, we were allowed to leave campus that year, and I went to the Whole Earth in Princeton every day for lunch. But I've been lucky to have such open-minded people around me. And it probably helps that I'm not some belligerent extremist shouting at everyone, saying, "Why are you eating meat? You're such a terrible person." Because I don't think that's the truth. I think people deserve respect in how they live their lives, so I try not to preach to anyone. Just because I see it one way doesn't mean every other way of seeing it is wrong.
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