Oh the places you'll go

When I started this challenge a few weeks ago, I was nearly 93% sure I was only going to do it for a month. Now, more than halfway through this journey, I'm not even 7% sure I could go back to eating meat or dairy.

Research is a bittersweet thing. It's awesome to learn new things and expand what you thought were your limits of knowledge and understanding. But, on the flip side, you also learn the dirty, undesirable, and sometimes painful truth.

I took it upon myself to do more research into the dairy industry. I nearly cried, threw up, or wanted to pass out with every website, article, and documentary I watched. Hundreds of images, thousands of words, a pain we can't comprehend, simply for food that we'll taste for five minutes. A life lost for a meal. It just doesn't seem fair, and it angers me. I'm at that stage of being a vegan that I understand this isn't just a fad diet; it's a lifestyle of compassion, honesty, and love. No animal deserves to be forcefully impregnated so she can produce milk that she can't even give her calf because the babe is being taken away from her the second it's born to be taken to a slaughterhouse, and she goes to have her milk sucked out to be bottled for you to pour on cereal. After years of generating offspring that she never gets to mother, the spent cow is sent to be turned into cheap meat or pet food. I can't even fathom this... How did it get to be this disgusting industry?

I can hardly buy anything at the grocery store because everything has milk or cheese in it. Shelves and displays are packed with hundreds of dead and/or abused animals. You might not think that's a lot, but let's put it into perspective; you have a local grocery store. Within a 10 mile radius (assuming you live in a normal sized city) you have another 10-15 store options. Expand that to the whole US, and there you have it... Our meat and dairy industry. It's not even farming anymore! It's manipulation, lies, and DISGUSTING.

You can eat local and organically, but no animal ever wants to die. They say "you are what you eat." Well, I'm choosing to not eat fear. I'm choosing to not eat captivity. I'm choosing to give some animal, somewhere, freedom from a life it had no choice in having.

I'll write more later... My heart is just so heavy thinking about it...