Member-only story
My Journey into Veganism (Part 1)
As told by Holden Caulfield
If you really want to hear about it, I suppose the first thing you’ll want to know is where I get my protein, why I have canine teeth and what I would do if I were stranded on a desert island with a goddam chicken, and all that kinda crap.
To tell you the truth, as a kid I was the last person you’d expect to see as a vegan. My dad was big on flesh foods, so my young teeth chewed their way through enough meat to cater the Titanic.
One day, Dad took my elder brother JB and me to an allotment garden, where he was to procure a rabbit for a pie. My father ordered his curious progenies to wait at the gate and to look away while the gardener dispatched the rabbit with a rounders bat, but of course we peeked. You can’t tell kids not to look at something, and then expect them not to peek.
As I ate the pie later, I made no link between the wriggling rabbit I’d seen being clubbed and what I was chewing because I was under the impression that we needed meat to survive. It’s a corny excuse, I admit, but I was just a kid. For some children, this sort of connection can trigger a response that could put them off meat, sometimes for life, but not me; I ate my way through a whole goddam menagerie.
