For forty years, I started my day drinking a tall glass of flavoured milk along with two buttery cookies followed by a breakfast of cheesy bread and creamy coffee. As a vegetarian I took care to consume a large variety of dishes loaded with dairy products. I never really considered butter, cheese, cream and yogurt as animal products until one day, when I was introduced to veganism by a leading activist in a talk I attended at the university’s extra-curricular lecture series. The hour-long presentation revealed harsh realities obscured by the happy-looking cows printed on the well-packaged dairy products. The images of pain-stricken animals stayed in my mind like waves in the ocean. It became difficult to enjoy an ice cream or a cheesecake.
So I started a painstaking endeavour to avoid animal products. My search led me to “the world of veganism”. Veganism involves refraining from the use of animal products especially those related to diet – as the activist had said, veganism is nothing less than a fundamental commitment of the individual to nonviolence.
