For the first 42 years of my life, I wasn’t vegan. Not only was I not vegan, but I was a big meat eater. I have been an avid weight lifter since 1996, and I would eat 2 or more pounds of meat per day thinking that was needed to build muscle (it’s not, read this to know why). I also did the keto diet many times, which is entirely animal products.

So what changed? Watching my wife’s journey into veganism mostly. When I met my wife she wasn’t much of a meat eater. She ate mostly fruits, vegetables, and grains, with the occasional seafood, dairy, and eggs. Over the years she removed animal products from her diet, until she eventually became a vegan sometime in late 2020 or early 2021. For her it was always about ethics, and how wrong it was that animals were used and abused for food, clothes, and other things. She never pressured me to go vegan nor tried to guilt me into it. Instead, she would just sometimes talk about the reasons why she went vegan, and she would cook delicious vegan meals for us.

All of the ethical concerns had been swirling around in my head since she became vegan. On January 23rd, 2022 I was eating chicken parmesan and something just “clicked”, and I knew that what I was doing was wrong and had to immediately change. I no longer wanted to be the reason that an animal suffered and died. I threw out the chicken parmesan and went vegan on the spot, and have never deliberately or intentionally eaten animal products since. I say deliberately and intentionally because there’s no way to know if I have accidentally ingested an animal product from something that was mislabeled or made incorrectly at a restaurant.

After about a year of being vegan, I became an animal rights activist. My wife and I went through the Animal Activism Collective (AAC) mentee program, and since then activism has become our purpose in life. I have since become a mentor for AAC. In 2023 my wife and I as well as a few others created a local animal rights activist group called Southwestern Ohio Animal Rights Network (SWOARN). I am involved with activism for various organizations such as Anonymous for the Voiceless (I’m a chapter organizer), We The Free (I’m a chapter organizer here as well), Plant Based Treaty, Horseracing Wrongs, and Project Animal Freedom. I’m also one of the organizers/planners for Ohio Occurrence taking place in Columbus in August 2024.

One of my favorite forms of activism and outreach is combatting misinformation about veganism online. I belong to a lot of vegan Facebook pages where people will comment trying to argue against veganism and post misinformation and fallacies. After a few weeks of posting responses debunking what they said, I noticed that for the most part, it’s almost the same 5-10 sentiments over and over. Rather than typing the same answers every time, I started writing in the notes app on my phone and copying and pasting it as a response. But I quickly found limitations to that, because sometimes I wanted to post accompanying infographics and pictures, and Facebook only allows you to post one picture with a post. So then I decided to put up some generic pages on a website with embedded images. But then I thought, well I guess I’ll make it a full website so there’s some context to these pages.

So here it is.

I don’t have any delusions of grandeur that this will be an amazing and popular site, nor do I feel like I’m doing something new and unique here. There are already other sites doing the same thing, but in my opinion, they aren’t as robust, detailed, or data-driven as I want my responses to be (at least not the ones I’ve seen, but I obviously haven’t seen every vegan website), and I also like to give responses in my own voice with my own words.