I'm from Romagna, the region of Italy facing the northern Adriatic sea. I have two children: the first, Arturo, is two years old; the second, Giuliano, only three months. They have been vegetarian really from the start. I've been vegetarian since September 1990. At the time I was eighteen. I became vegetarian following my nature, but only after becoming vegetarian did I understand that I kept eating dead animals as a duty.
It hasn't required sacrifice of me; I haven't dreamt at night of fillets or chicken-legs. I haven't slobbered secretly on neighbours' plates at restaurants. I haven't felt as if I'm lacking something necessary. And during these thirteen years I have never craved - not even one single time - to eat an animal. The beginning of my vegetarianism wasn't a fight, but a sweet and joyous awakening to myself. This is the reason why I feel deeply offended by the many non-vegetarians that cannot (or don't want to) accept a complete absence of sacrifice. They are maybe annoyed by the fact that my choice isn't an act of mortification, or a penance or an asceticism I hold on to with a strenuous effort of will.
But, I do need a determined will - to bear the eyes of a disapproving world, a world that feels threatened. But I don't threaten and judge anybody's life with my own life. Eating habits are a cultural fact and culture is something tremendously complex; it is tradition, innovation, revolution, discovery, taboo, curiosity, fear, feelings, sensations, impulse, memories. I'm vegetarian, but I don't think that all the world has to be vegetarian (even If it would be great). I like my country's traditions, and I like to think that I'm deeply rooted in it, beyond my eccentricity.
It can happen that a person carries a burden that is an inner part of oneself - that we have to bear for living but that we have to remove for surviving. I know that an animals' physical suffering is something which can overwhelm our comprehension, because it overwhelms the victim's comprehension. Unfortunately, not eating animals anymore didn't save me from the abyss. That sharp feeling of the suffering of other creatures drove me near to of madness. Every image, every story about tortured or violated animals was a deep laceration inside me. And those images haunted me so long that I hadn't any tears left at all. It took me ten years of constant struggle against myself, my own thoughts, my own sensibility to remove that unbearable suffering from myself (you can call it a severe form of depression) and to live without a neverending nightmare in front of me. I had the right to a serene life as every other creature.
It was apparent that I couldn't be involved in animal rights activities where it was necessary to be in contact with suffering animals. So I had to find my own peculiar way of active vegetarianism (one that didn't cause me too much pain).
I made a first step when I thought of my ability to create delicious food. I said to myself, "I love cooking, and I have a gift for realising the flavours in foods; so, I can share with others incredible and refined dishes without dead animals. Maybe one day people won't think that vegetarian cuisine is sad and tasteless anymore!"
I made a second and definitive step when I got pregnant with my first child, Arturo. When the time came to wean him, I discovered how many things a vegetarian mother has to know in order to face relatives, society and doctors with their objections and fears. But, most of all, I discovered that we can educate our children about compassion, altruism, delicacy, kindness, love for the earth and for its creatures (men and animals), just feeding them with food that is full of fantasy and joy, and that is healthful.
For this reason, I decided to build the web site called "Il vero momón" (that means, more or less, "the real happiness, the supreme good"). It's a place where vegetarian parents can find scientific information, living experience and practical advice on bringing children up as vegetarians, to respect nature and their health.
Italy is a country with a cult of good eating, and this means an incredible variety of meat, fish and cheese; thousands for every region. We have something like 30,000 different kind of cheese (with different aspects and different tastes), one kind every ten kilometres. I was born in a little village near the Adriatic sea where people for centuries had lived off the fruits of the sea.
My mother is a veterinarian and had worked for years at the local slaughterhouse, and she had fought strenuously for more than twenty years against the spreading of big industrial cattle-breeding that kills the little familiar cattle shed with few animals. For her they meant an ancient culture respectful of life and earth. Where a little farm disappears an emptiness remains that nothing can fill, just globalization and modern buildings on the bare ground.
It was at the slaughterhouse, when I was five years old, seeing cows in single file, with the sadness and the fear of death in their eyes (they could smell the blood), when I perceived for the first time that intolerable pain. But I think that life is much too complex and varied to judge others. I respect my father's love for the sea and my mother's love for the farmland; I respect the traditions connected to those activities, because those are even my traditions. But I decided to be traditional without ever exceeding the point fixed by my respect for the creatures and their suffering.
To me, being vegetarian isn't only an alimentary choice but a way of life, something that informs my actions and thoughts. It is this levity that I'd like to flow over the world. And the sense and the value of my research of the lightness is what I bring with me and that I'd like to pass on to my children and the people I meet on my path. Not as a forced teaching or a conversion attempt. It isn't an apostolate. But it is a militancy. Silent and concrete.
Francesca Gasparini lives in the medieval city of Bologna with her husband Lorenzo and her two children, Arturo and Giuliano. She is a writer and theatre scholar working at the local University.
