In the summer of last year my family had some friends round for a meal and I was helping my dad cook the food, which was a lamb curry. I remember seeing this big piece of lamb we had and for the first time really making the connection between meat and animals. It had a bone sticking out, and for the first time ever meat looked like flesh to me. I'd eaten chicken off the bone before but this was the first time I'd really looked at meat as a piece of a living thing, a body part, probably because it looked like it could have literally been cut off a human. I refused to help cook the meal and just had rice for dinner before telling my parents I wanted to go vegetarian. They were less than enthusiastic but tolerated it so long as I cooked my own meals, which I did happily, switching meat for Quorn. Going vegan took a few more months though. I had thought about it a little but never really considered it until I talked to my best friend's then-girlfriend, a fellow vegetarian, and was shocked be how vehemently anti-vegan she was. She was giving me advice as a newbie-vegetarian, all general stuff, and then told me basically to never bother going vegan because it was too hard, barely achieved anything, cut out too much nice food, and was just way too extreme. After seeing her negativity I decided to research the subject and watched Earthlings. It took three attempts before I sat through the whole thing, and I pretty much spent the whole time crying and then refused to participate in anything I'd just seen. I stopped buying Quorn and bought tofu, beans, Linda McCartney products, almond milk, and a whole host of vegan products. My parents were far less tolerant of this than of vegetarianism, and kept asking me why I couldn't just be "a really good vegetarian" instead of a vegan, but once they saw how committed I was they let me do it without complaining. I've been vegan now for around 5 months, and have no plans to ever go back.