Thinking about changing your diet?
Patrick from Veggies tells his story about why and how he became vegetarian...

In my student days, when money was short and meat was expensive (in money as well as wasted lives etc), half a dozen of us would share a chicken once a week, and that was our meat intake. In searching out cheap recipes I came across an Oxfam frugal cookbook. Although including lamb & goat recipes, it had articles relating western diet to that in the South explaining, for example, the waste of resources in taking cash crops from hungry countries to feed artificially bred animals in factory farms in the west. This started my first awareness of these issues and was followed by reading a Compassion in World Farming leaflet about farm & slaughter conditions, dropped at random through my letter box.

Later, when working at a Pizzaland restaurant, I was always grossed-out by the bits of tubing I found in their Campbells bologneise sauce. This, followed by the release of 'The Animals Film', was the final straw, and by the following Christmas, when the last meat eaten had been the personally sourced free range chicken taken to the family meal the previous year, the time had come to declare myself a vegetarian.