I have always been a pacifist. My earliest memories include times when I tried to bring people together. As the oldest of five siblings, I was often called upon the settle disputes, or to decide what the next activity would be. Perhaps that is how I learned the satisfaction of being a peacemaker.

We always had a houseful of pets, and long before I knew anything about local indigenous culture, I had become one with the concept that humans are just another type of animal. I became very uncomfortable with eating animal meat, because it felt to me like I was eating my pets. When I was no more than ten or eleven, I told my mother that I wanted to become a vegetarian. She said that was all right with her, but she was worried about how that might affect my health. She advised me to consult with my schoolteacher and with the school nurse to get their opinions.

My teacher, Miss Josephine O’Brien, pointed to the poster of the food pyramid in the front of the classroom and told me to notice the prominent place that meat had on it. The school nurse, Clara Burghart, told me that I needed to eat meat in order to get iron, and that if I stopped, I would grow weak and die. I didn’t want that, so I gave up my quest.

Until high school.

A new family moved into town. Nadia Tao Wend became my girlfriend in our senior year. Her father had been a vegetarian for most of his life. He did not proselytize. He asked me if I knew the expression “strong as an ox” — he explained that oxen are vegetarians. He gave me things to read and told me more than half the people on earth were vegetarians for religious reasons or out of poverty.

I read Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, by Adele Davis. In the back of that book there is a table of food content. Commonly used foods (such as a slice of bread or an egg) were listed, along with the nutrients they contained. I became a vegetarian on March 23, 1963. I began to keep a food diary and I recorded the amounts of each nutrient I was consuming.

I quickly realized that not only was I getting plenty of iron (from green vegetables, for example) but that I was eating, even without meat, more than twice the required amount of protein I needed.

I also learned that it takes six times as much land to grow a given amount of protein in the form of meat than it takes to grow food that can be consumed directly, such as rice and beans. If everyone in the world had become a vegetarian when I did, we would not be in the midst of a climate crisis.