Welcome to Food for Thought. My name is Colleen Patrick Goodrow from Compassionate Cooks,

which I founded in order 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.

Those of you familiar with my regular essays and podcasts know that one of my favorite pastimes

is to respond to myths about vegetarianism and animal rights, and this is one of the things I do

through my organization, Compassionate Cooks. The reason I spend so much time responding to these myths is because there are so many

of them.

People offer so many excuses and justifications so that they can keep eating meat.

And whenever I think about them and take a look more closely at what some of these excuses are.

It turns out that most of these excuses don't actually reflect reality.

And what I find is that they reflect instead a perception of ourselves that we want to hold

on to.

Many of these justifications are just hypothetical scenarios we've come up with so that we want to hold on to. Many of these justifications are just hypothetical scenarios

we've come up with so that we don't have to change how we see ourselves and how we live our

lives and what we contribute to with our dollars. And I remember creating one or two excuses

myself before I thought long and hard about what I was contributing to.

And when I got really honest with myself about how lame my excuses were and they were lame,

I stopped. I stopped eating animals and I stopped making excuses.

The other thing I've noticed that happens when you're vegan is that people try to catch

you as if they're trying to prove that you're imperfect somehow and that your vegan

philosophy is flawed. You've seen this kind of thing. And I'm here to tell you right

now that anyone who attempts this with me, you're right. I'm imperfect. So we can just leave that

...