I was 18 when my mother came home to find me sobbing at the kitchen table. I had just received my first PETA pamphlet. It had nothing to do with feedlot beef or chickens, but instead focused on animal testing. Like most teenagers, I thought I knew pretty much everything; I had no idea these kinds of cruelties were taking place every day.

That experience set the foundation for the next 10 years of my life. I didn’t want to be a part of the cruel meat industry, but I was a terrible vegetarian in college – wolfing down salads with refried beans and crumbled chips and stockpiling boxes of macaroni and cheese and salt-laden cans of peas. It got me through those four years, and a few years after that, but I looked anorexic the whole time.

Fortunately, the birth of my son changed all that.

I knew I wanted to raise Max on a vegetarian diet, but I needed to convince my husband and the rest of our families that it was the right choice.

So I dove into books about vegetarian nutrition (Becoming Vegetarian, Raising Vegetarian Children), experimented with recipes from cookbooks (The Vegan Family Cookbook, Vive Le Vigan!, Vegan Family Favorites) and found oodles of information on vegetarian Web sites (www.vegfamily.com, www.vrg.org).

Not only did I learn a great deal more about nutrition for myself, I became absolutely confident that a vegetarian diet was the most healthful choice I could make for our son.

The questions from family, especially grandparents, were inevitable. She wants to do whaaaaat? Is that healthy? How will he get his protein? I don’t know about this…

Of course, all these doubts made me more determined to show that a well-planned vegetarian diet was best.

Max is half way to 4 now and there are no more questions about his health. He is lean and stands above average in height. But for a few runny noses, he is never sick. He eats tofu, hummus, beans and a number of veggies that many kids his age shy away from. He is active, outgoing, curious and imaginative.

I will not say that a vegetarian diet is a cure for all the ills of our society. No, we still have a long way to go and much to do, but at least I know my son and I will have the health and energy to handle the challenges ahead!