- I constantly feel like I'm either too vegan for people
or not vegan enough.
(light music)
I get a lot of people asking me why I decided to go vegan
and this is gonna be my attempt at explaining
that to you all.
Honestly, if you were to ask me five years ago
if I would ever be vegan, I would of said hell no.
Growing up I was a huge meat lover, huge meat eater.
My mother was always a vegetarian,
but she sort of let me eat whatever I wanted.
I would always go to my grandmother
and grandfather's house to get my meat fix, if you will.
Bacon, chicken, especially fried chicken.
Steak, the fat was my favorite part.
Hot dogs.
There was one summer
that every morning I had hot dogs for breakfast
which probably shaved a few years off my life.
This being said, I also had every pet you can imagine.
Growing up I had dogs, I had cats, I had hamsters,
I had guinea pigs.
We had chickens, I had a horse.
Oh, I had tarantula at one point.
My mom is a licensed wildlife rehabilitator
So, I saw wildlife all the time as well.
We rescued a possum one time, I named him Clarke.
There were animals everywhere in my life growing up.
Then after college I got my first job at Buzzfeed.
Yay, you know Buzzfeed
and through that I ended up working at Tasty.
It wasn't until I was making content
that millions and millions of people
were viewing and sharing and making
that I actually started thinking about what I was eating.
I remember learning that it takes
like 2,000 gallons of water
to produce one pound of beef and being like,
"Okay, so if I'm using one pound of beef in my video
"and one million people share it
"and 50 million people view it,
"even 2,000 people make it?"
that's a lot of water and I feel responsible for it.
I started getting really paranoid about it
and one weekend I decided
to watch the documentary "Cowspiracy".
The major takeaway from this documentary was
that factory farming contributes heavily to climate change
and that scares the living (beep) out of me.
I am so afraid of climate change
that I have had several mental breakdowns about it
and I think we're all probably a little guilty
of getting to the point we're like,
"Okay, we're already this far down the rabbit hole."
Like, what can we actually do?
It feels very overwhelming and suffocating,
but then I learn things like factory farming contributes
to climate change more
than all forms of transportation combined
and is also responsible for deforestation, pollution,
and carbon admissions and I have to think if I can control
what I eat in an indirect way,
I'm sort of helping.
I'm not saying I'm saving the world,
but there is power in that choice.
I'm getting really excited, I'm feeling really powerful.
I'm like, okay, I can make a positive change.
I'm gonna go vegetarian, I'm just gonna do it.
I'm all excited, I'm telling everyone at work
and they're pretending to be happy for me
and I get one week in, seven days,
no meat after eating meat with every meal pretty much.
I get home from work
and there's this massive 50-pound cooler
of meat that my grandfather sent to me
very sweetly as a nice gesture of like
this is your first job,
you don't have any money yet and I was like (beep).
What the (beep) am I supposed to do now?
I'm talking steak, sausage, chicken, salmon, clams,
like every kind of meat.
I don't even know how they fit it into this cooler.
Yes, I could of given it to my roommate,
but I ate it because it was meat.
I thought of it as like a goodbye package to me
and two months later, cooler was finished,
and then I never ate meat again.
My work was doing well, I was really proud of myself,
and I was enjoying being a vegetarian.
It didn't feel too bad, but I'll be honest,
I was housing cheese like the best of them.
I probably doubled up on a diary as a replacement for meat.
While I was shooting my Tasty videos,
I would eat an entire bowl of mozzarella cheese sometimes.
That's another thing and I agree
with people when they say it.
Just because you're going vegan
and vegetarian doesn't necessarily mean you're healthier.
You have to be aware and really research what you're eating
so you can still have a balanced diet.
That being said, just because you're eating meat
doesn't mean you're healthy either.
No matter what your diet is, do your research.
Okay, so but why did you go vegan?
Let's get to the point here.
I was in Montreal walking through the old port
and that's when I see the Cube of Truth.
The Cube of Truth is coordinated
by a street action group called Anonymous for the Voiceless.
They're all standing in a cube-like formation
wearing all black and wearing Guy Fawkes masks
and they're screening factory farm footage
and they don't speak.
They just hold it there and they stand like that.
We know what this footage looks like.
It's kind of like the ASPCA commercials, right?
You hear Sarah McLachlan's voice
and automatically your mind goes to those shivering dogs.
Nobody wants to watch it.
It makes you sad and you don't feel good.
I knew I had purposely avoided watching footage like this,
but I could not look away and after a little while,
I was approached by a member.
They were unmasked and he just came up to me
very unaggressively and was just like,
"Do you have any questions about what you're watching?"
I told him that I was vegetarian almost
in like a braggadocios way.
Like, I may as well have winked at this man
and been like, "Don't worry, I'm one of you."
I expected like a pat on the back or something
and then he smiled and very gently asked,
"Have you ever considered going vegan?"
In my mind I'm like, "I don't eat meat,
"so I'm not part of the problem here, right?"
Wrong.
He very politely said,
"You know, the footage that you're watching right now
"is from a dairy farm."
And I'm like, "Oh god, please don't take the cheese.
"The cheese is all I have left."
But I decided to hear him out.
He said, "These cows are repeatedly impregnated
"and then they give birth
"and then their babies are taken away
"and they're either slaughtered or they're raised as veal.
"They're impregnated repeatedly
"for as many years as they can give birth
"until they're too weak and then they're slaughtered."
It almost felt like all of the good work
I thought I had done leading up to that point meant nothing
'cause I felt like I had been eating more cheese then ever
which is a totally unhealthy way to think
because we're all doing our best here.
So then I just asked him, what about eggs?
Like, I love eggs.
Laying hens are okay, right?
Nope.
The man very kindly and patiently pointed
at a screen and he showed me this thing
that's called chick calling
where thousands of male chicks
are tossed into this giant grinder.
It's kind of like a wood chipper.
We raised chickens for one specific purpose.
We have laying hens that are raised
to just pump out 100s of eggs over time
and then we have broiler chickens
and broiler chickens are bred to grow
to this humongous size basically within one month of living.
All of this to say that the male chicks of layer hens,
there's really nowhere for them to fit into this
because they're too small to be broiler chickens
and they can't lay eggs,
so they're basically useless to these formers
and that's why they're all killed.
Now I was actually angry because I was like,
"How did I possibly miss this?"
'Cause I was kind of like,
"How do I not know this?
"Like, why don't I have this information available to me?"
And he was like,
"Listen, I know it can feel really overwhelming
"and if you feel like you wanna try
"the 22-day vegan challenge that we offer, here's our card."
And so I took the card.
I didn't look at the man anymore and I stomped off.
That's where the first little spark
of inspiration to be vegan started.
I figured why not just attempt being vegan?
At least that way I can say I tried
and if it doesn't work out, I can feel good about myself.
And like as an added inspiration,
I decided to document the entire journey
'cause I wanted to be held accountable
for actually doing this.
So, every single day I would document exactly
what I ate for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner.
Obviously not everybody has time to cook
and prepare every meal that they're gonna eat.
It's a matter of just doing as well as you can.
I will say it challenged me a lot as a cook
because I feel like before I would always just add cheese
to things so that it would taste good.
I also found that if I had a really bad hankering
for something, I could usually find
a vegan substitute for it.
I know, vegan substitutes
are never gonna be exactly the same.
Some are better than others,
but if there's like a day
where you really want a sausage
or something that reminds you of a sausage,
you can find vegan Prezzo that's gonna scratch that itch.
At least, for me.
Within the first two weeks I started
to feel really, really good.
I could feel myself having a lot more energy
and I just felt lighter.
So, after 22 days of doing the vegan challenge,
I decided I wanted to stick with it.
I felt so good that I was like why not?
Why not just actually give this a shot?
The most difficult thing about begin vegan, honestly, for me
is the extreme culture that surrounds it.
I constantly feel like I'm either too vegan for people
or not vegan enough.
When I first started being vegan I would say I'm vegan.
I would tell people about it,
but now I just like to only really explain it
when I have to or if people ask me questions
and I'd prefer to say I practice veganism
or I eat more plant-based
because vegan is what I eat but it's not who I am.
I also hate that there's all this pressure
to never slip up.
It feels like if you slip up, you're out of the club.
I slip up, I've slipped up multiple times
and sometimes if I'm at a wedding
and there's no vegan option
and all I have that I can eat are vegetables,
maybe those vegetables were cooked in butter.
I need something in my stomach
because I'm gonna be there for eight hours
and I'm gonna drink wine.
If that means I'm not in the club,
then I don't wanna be in the club.
I think the real passion for me
is to try to stop supporting factory farming.
For instance, sometimes when I'm back home,
I'm from a very small town.
My neighbor has rescue chickens
that have been pulled from factory farms
and those chickens, naturally, lay eggs,
and sometimes I eat those eggs
and if that means I'm not vegan 100%, I'm fine with that.
Cue the comment why I'm vegan, I'm not vegan.
I'm sure there are a lot of people that are vegan
that have never slipped up and I'm very proud of them.
I don't tell you these things
to try to encourage you not to do your best
if a vegan diet is really important to you.
I tell you these things so that you know
that if you can't do 100%
or even if you don't want to do 100%,
you're not weak and you're not less than.
You just do your best.
Ultimately it's better
to set a reasonable realistic goal for yourself
than to set this crazy unreachable goal
that's just gonna get you frustrated and make you quit.
It is not too late for the planet.
Having no hope is just as useless
as being a climate change denier
and I've been guilty of that myself.
Everyday we can vote with our wallets
and with that we can create change.
So, support industries that you believe in
and just do your best with what you have everyday
and don't be so hard on yourself.
(optimistic music)