I was heavily involved in animal welfare for my first three years of animal activism starting in 1978, and rapidly got involved in anti-vivisection. But I still ate meat. Here I was, doing what I could to save animals and then eating them. Someone at that time said to me, “What? You save dogs and cats, but you eat cows and pigs”? That question changed my life. It made all the sense in the world. It wasn’t even a year before I decided to go vegan. That made even more sense.
Being from an Italian family I must admit cheese took about a week to give up. And I don’t miss it either. Never liked eggs, milk or meat anyway. As a very poor kid growing up in Brooklyn and New Jersey I never ate meat until I was about 11 years old. We couldn’t afford it.
Back then, my mother (I didn’t have a father) would make some kind of cheap cut of meat once every two or three weeks, and I hated it. I would fill my mouth with this fleshy matter and then go and spit it out in the toilet. My mother quickly caught on to what I was doing and yelled at me. When I told her it felt like I was eating flesh she backed off from preparing meat again—at least while I was around. Truth is, she didn’t like meat either.
No one in my family ever liked fish, even though we were surrounded by three fish markets: The Sodano’s; Piccolo’s chicken market (where at the age of ten I committed my first animal liberation—it was a chicken); and Johnny the butcher’s shop with the goat’s head hanging in the window. Thank goodness for the six bread and pastry bakeries around us. At least those smells were pleasant, and no one died in the process.
