And I'm Welcome to Food for Thought. My name is Colleen Patrick Gudro from Compassionate Cooks, which I founded to empower people to make informed

food choices and to debunk myths about vegetarianism and animal rights. You can

learn more about who we are and what we do by visiting our website

compassionate cooks.com.

Hi everybody it's great to be here with you today so soon. I'd like to thank today's sponsor first and foremost. The sponsor for

today's episode is Linda Coxes, whose wonderful story about her own

transformation to veganism is on the joyful vegan blog

which you can access through compassionate cooks.com. I asked Linda to contribute

her story of becoming vegan to the Joyful vegan website and I'd love

to just read a few excerpts here before we get started.

I love that she's able to remember so many of the little seeds that were planted before full consciousness set in.

Here's a bit of her story. When I was child I loved animals or so I thought for while I really felt a kinship and a great deal of affection for all animals I hadn't made the connection between their lives and who it was I was sacrificing and eating every day. When I was growing up we

always had pets, birds, fish, hamsters, rats, hermit crabs, dogs and many cats.

I was an only child in our pets. We're really a part of our small family of two humans.

I wanted to be a zoologist or an oceanographer when I grew up.

I empathized with worms that I would see washed up on the

sidewalk after a rain on my way home from school and I would stop to move them back into

the soil when I saw them. I was really into animals.

When I was 11 I went to a friend's house for dinner. They were preparing lobster, which I never

had before. I watched in horror as my friend's father put a live lobster into a huge pot of boiling water.

They acted like this was totally normal, but I'd never seen anything like it.

Then a couple of long minutes later the poor lobster threw the lid of

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