This ‘conversion’ story of a FORMER vegetarian is absolutely ‘delicious’.
Meat is good.
And this former vegetarian has discovered that for herself.
Ever have a meal so good that it changed your career path? One woman did.
Tammi Jonas, a longtime vegetarian living in Victoria, Australia, had a surprising — but undeniable — craving for a hamburger while pregnant with her third child. Just one prime patty after many meat-free years.
Now, she’s a professional butcher and a pig farmer.
The 49-year-old stopped eating meat when she was 19 — after reading Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s book “Animal Liberation,” published in 1975. She maintained her V-card successfully through two pregnancies, but while carrying her third child, she also became “dangerously anemic.”
She tried supplements, but that didn’t help. She needed some protein to boost her iron.
She told herself that ‘a burger would fix this’.
That was the beginning of the end of her vegetarianism. She gradually introduced meat back into her diet.
“I went back to red meat, so beef and lamb, once a week throughout the pregnancy, and it was some years longer before I had any pork or poultry,” said Jonas, who explains that her beef with meat isn’t about killing animals.
She wasn’t bothered by killing and eating animals, so much as farming practices that were unnecessarily cruel. Having originally come from a cattle farm in Oregon, her next step was not as surprising as you might think.
Her foray into not only eating meat again, but actually producing it, comes from a motivation to make positive change. After a lot of research and planning, she and her husband, Stuart, decided to open a small, sustainable farm in Victoria’s Central Highlands, that promises to treat their porkers with respect.
“The penny dropped, and we realized that we were going to be farmers and, for me, I knew immediately pigs because they are some of the worst treated in industrial systems,” said Jonas of their decision to build Jonai Farms.
She put her money where her mouth was.
Rather than bitch and moan about what was wrong in the world, she made herself part of the solution.
Good for her!
