IF you had told me in 2017 that I would become a vegan in three years’ time I would not have believed you.

I am a typical 17-year-old girl and I turned vegan when I was 15. I come from a traditional Scottish household who would have a fish supper weekly, steak pies and sausages on a regular basis, and ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch most days. My mum has been vegetarian since she was 15 by choice as she did not enjoy the taste of meat, and she has stayed vegetarian for 35 years. However, she did not force that on my sister and I and we always ate meat like my Dad.

My journey to becoming vegan started during the first Covid pandemic when as a family we started to think about our food choices and how the food that we ate affected the planet. I became fully vegan in 2020 during the summer holidays after reluctantly watching some documentaries on what meat and dairy does to the human body. That and the animal rights violations that happen daily in the food industry, which leads to the death of billions of animals every year just so we have a nice taste in our mouth for a few seconds at a time.

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I slowly transitioned to veganism by first limiting my meat intake then cutting it out completely. Fish was never a problem for me to stop as I generally didn’t like it anyway. Dairy took a little longer, but I replaced one item at a time with one of the many alternatives. Within a month I had completely cut out any animal products from my diet apart from honey. Honey is produced in a way that is not harmful to bees and no bees are killed to make honey, though stricter vegans would make their own arguments that it still shouldn’t be consumed.

At first being a vegan was hard, especially in the first few months as every time I would buy something I would always have to check the ingredients list to make sure there is no dairy or egg in there somewhere. Planning to go out for dinner results in the need to look online at menus to check that there are vegan options that my family could have and would indeed like. The most common eating out choices in my family are a pub lunch, Italian or Indian as they tend to always at least have one choice that each of us wants. At home we try to avoid meat substitutes as these are still highly processed foods so instead, we get our protein from lentils, beans and chickpeas and other sources. While its unquestionably better for the planet to substitute an unhealthy meat-based diet for an unhealthy plant-based one, you’re not doing your health any favours. Both are bad for you.

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At school being vegan is easy as I just bring my own lunch as the meals supplied there largely contain either meat, dairy products or both. I do not get treated differently by my friends for being vegan and in return I do not judge them for eating meat and dairy around me as that is their personal choice. My typical school lunch would have a source of protein such as nuts or a soya meat alternative, a piece of fruit, a non-dairy yoghurt and a nut and fruit bar.

We have a Labrador at home, but we still feed him a meat-based diet as we have been wary to change his diet at the stage in his life (he is 11) in case it doesn’t agree with him. There are a growing number of folks who now feed their pets non-meat alternatives and seem to do all right, but honestly, I don’t know if that would be right for me. Forcing my own moral beliefs on an animal whose main hobbies involve sniffing urine and bums, humping anything he can get away with, and eating any scrap of barely digestible matter seems a bit much at this point.

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Becoming vegan has also changed how I view the world. Certainly, I’m much more environmentally aware now. We can’t all and maybe don’t want to be Greta Thunberg but in the past, I would have not thought about the carbon footprint of what I eat and where it comes from. It’s important to know if something has been shipped halfway across the world just so I can scoff it for my lunch, or whether I’m consuming something that has been grown a few miles up the road. There is unquestionably an obvious hypocrisy in plant-based eaters lecturing meat-eaters for chowing down on a steak imported from Argentina whilst they are scoffing avocados sourced in Peru. I like to know where my food is from and what the carbon footprint of it is from farm to fork, and that has further my own passion for the environment and animals.

From this point in time onwards I will continue to be a vegan until the day I die. I personally believe that veganism is one of the best methods of eating to limit my CO2 emissions and decrease my own environmental impact. A plant-based diet also provides lots of health benefits and hugely reduces my likelihood of future diseases such as cancer and stroke, provided I stay away from the vegan junk food...

Cara Wyllie
Dunfermline