And I'm and Welcome to Food for Thought. My name is Colleen Patrick Gudro from Compassionate Cooks.

I founded Compassionate Cooks to empower people, to make informed

food choices, and to debunk myths about vegetarianism and animal rights. I do this through

cooking classes, articles and essays, workshops and lectures, a

cooking DVD, and an award-winning cookbook called The Joy of Vegan Baking and of course

through this podcast. You can learn more about who we are

and what we do by visiting compassionate cooks.com as well as Joy of

vegan baking.com. Today's sponsor is a Canadian listener. I am convinced I have more Canadian listeners than American listeners and her name is Anne Sturgeon.

Anne sent me a beautiful email and I thought I would just share it with you and it includes a bit of her story.

She wrote, Dear Colleen, thank you for all you are doing to help reduce animal suffering

and bringing about my true awakening.

For so many years I felt completely on my own when it came to trying

to help animals. From a child I was aware that meat came from animals and I knew that I didn't

want to eat my friends, but slowly as time passed, the very difficult

child that I was, my mom would say fussy eater, bought into the lie that we were meant to eat

meat and sadly a point came when meat was the main focus of my

main meals. That changed about 20 years ago when as an adult with two children I

stepped out and declared I was vegetarian.

Unfortunately, I believed a vegan diet was unhealthy and unnecessary,

so I continued to eat eggs and dairy.

The lie continued.

Finally, I found the Christian Vegetarian Association, CVA, and my life changed.

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