Vegetarians have been around for a very long time - Pythagoreans forbade eating animals more than 2,500 years ago - but even as the environmental evidence mounted, they didn't appear to be winning the argument.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
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.
I grew up on an organic farm in England. And I was a vegetarian from an early age - not just for health, not for the environment - just because I didn't believe in killing animals to eat them.
I became a vegetarian at age 13 because I was into animal issues and felt like it was kinder not to eat animals.
My take is that the optimal approach to food, for health and ethical reasons, may be vegetarianism.
I didn't actually know what a vegetarian was until I was 13 years old. I know in this day and age it's hard to believe that, but I think because I grew up on a farm, I wasn't indulged in magazines, newspapers, Internet, television. And so, for some reason, I was never exposed to what a vegetarian was.
I think that if a person wants to remain vegetarian, they're just going to have to go hungry.
The woman I am currently crazy about was a vegetarian for a year until I started dating her. As is the case with most vegetarians, she had never eaten properly prepared meat, only commercially packaged or otherwise abused flesh.
The United Nations did a study just over two years ago, and that blew my mind. I started thinking that if people are vegetarian for one day a week, that makes a huge difference!
I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it's perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don't do it because they think all the ways in which it's done are wrong.