During my teenage years, I rebelled and ate everything under the sun, but when I was 18 or 19, I became vegetarian-focused and got disgusted by meat.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I grew up in Texas, eating meat five times a day, and I liked meat. But I began being a vegetarian when I was 19 because I found that I felt better.
I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.
There used to be a time - it isn't so much the case now - that vegetarianism was some kind of religion, and either you belong or you don't belong.
To be honest, I was the world's worst vegetarian. You see - I didn't really like vegetables very much. I'd spent most of my childhood terrified of them - horrid bland mushy things. It's only as an adult I realise that part of the problem is my mother's cooking - she hates using salt and has a tendency to overboil things. Thanks, Mum.
The more I read and watched about the meat industry, the more determined I became to keep meat out of my diet. The things I saw in slaughterhouse exposes made me feel sick and I refused to just ignore what I now knew.
In 1995 I decided to stop eating meat. I could never really quite explain why; I think it was something to do with watching a documentary where they cooked a cat and partly because I had a really crap job working for Wolves Poly and felt my life was slipping away. It definitely wasn't anything to do with any 'vegetarian month'.
I didn't grow up eating meat - I was a vegetarian until I was 18.
I became a vegetarian at age 13 because I was into animal issues and felt like it was kinder not to eat animals.
I became a vegetarian at 15. I was always an animal lover and, as a teenager, became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of eating meat. It was then that I started to research vegetarianism.
When I was 12, I first made the decision to go vegetarian after a co-star's line 'I don't eat anything with a face' suddenly shocked me into reality.