And I'm Colleen Patrick Gudreau from Compassionate Cooks, which I founded to empower people to make informed

food choices and to debunk myths about vegetarianism in animal rights.

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

website compassionate cooks.com. One way you can also help us out is by

subscribing to our podcast on iTunes or whatever podcatcher you use and vote for us in those

places as well. This will help others to find us more easily and encourage them to listen. So thanks for whatever you do to help us out.

I've often described myself as a joyful vegan phrase I borrowed from activist

Julie Butterfly Hill because it reflects what I really believe and really experienced day to day.

Recently I came across an essay that beautifully expresses what this means for people like me and

Julia and others who see themselves this way.

It's written by Robert Bass, a philosophy professor of whom I had never heard before reading this short but poignant essay.

Everything I'm about to say is his words but they echo everything I believe. He writes,

If you look at a photographic negative, the colors are reversed.

Nothing seems quite as it should, and the image may be unrecognizable. Once you see the picture

developed, you recognize the face of your best friend.

That's a bit like a common impression of vegans.

We don't eat dead animals or their products, pork and beef, seafood and fowl are out, so our milk and cheese, eggs,

and caviar, and it doesn't stop with what we don't eat. We try to avoid leather and wool

and fur. We don't use them to cover our bodies or our furniture or our floors.

It sounds like a long list of negatives, of don'ts.

Thou shalt not this, thou shalt not that. why would anyone want that?

You get a better picture by reversing the colors, developing the negative.

...