Living with The Smiths!: Compassionate Eating

For whatever reason and however long, I have loved chickens! I'm sure it must've started out with something simple, like a kitchen towel or something but I somehow started collecting them. Long before moving to Portland was even a thought, I had quite the collection of chicken things :) You could imagine my surprised delight when upon moving here my landlord said we could get a couple of real hens!!

When I started my chicken "craze" I began eating less chicken. Nothing in particular made me do it, I just thought they were cute creatures and eating them just didn't seem right! That being said, I still had chicken wings on Super Bowl or on vacation or what not. After moving to Portland and having hens of my own, I became aware of how unique and funny chickens are first hand! After they became my pets with names I stopped eating chicken completely. If I happened to be at a friends house and they were serving chicken I would eat it (as not to waste it) but I stopped buying it for home consumption and at the store. But then I realized, why do I protect chickens and not other animals? Why do I consider Slim and Stan, and LayLay, Martini, and EggBerta my pets, yet I have no problem eating a pig for bacon or a cow for a burger? After watching many documentaries, and undercover farm factory footage, vegetarianism became the only way. But wait! Dairy Cows and Laying Hens (besides mine) aren't treated any better than animals that are raised for meat! And so emerged my motivation to eat a plant based, vegan diet.

Eating a Vegan diet is fun. Instead of my husband and I eating "steak and potatoes" for dinner, we explore different recipes and unique foods. Cooking together in the kitchen is even more enjoyable when trying new things. Tonight we invited my dad over and made Buffalo Chick"pea" Pitas as an appetizer, "ChickPea" Cutlets for an entree, and Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies with Almond Dream ice cream. It blows my mind that we, as a society, eat animals when there are so many healthier plant based options. I always had this fanciful idea that the meat that I was eating was from a happy farm with tons of space and sun, if I even thought about it at all. There is so much to thing about that it makes my brain hurt, but for now I am completely happy living on a plant based diet.