Why freerangecarrots?

I thought I should take a moment to explain where the name Free-range Carrots comes from. I first turned vegetarian when I was nine years old. Unfortunately, it being the late 1980s and a time when everyone listened to their GP unquestioningly, my doctor told my parents they should force me to eat me and they did. For another four years. Then, when I was thirteen, I told my mum that I really couldn’t eat meat anymore. I’d always felt that I was born a vegetarian, and I needed to find my way into the lifestyle where I belonged. My mum’s initial reaction was that I was just being a fussy eater. I’m glad to say her viewpoint has now radically changed and my vegetarianism has in fact encouraged her to eat a healthier diet. Due to health problems when I was born, I’d struggled with food phobias all my life, and even then I could understand her apprehension at my converting to vegetarianism. So me made a compromise. I would take the conversion one step at a time, and together we would educate ourselves about healthy vegetarianism and make sure I was doing everything properly. Red meat was the first to go, and then I gradually gave up white meat, fish, animal fats, gelatine, leather and so on until I was a complete vegetarian.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the reactions you get from people when you tell them you’re vegetarian. I never set out to convert the world, and my belief at that time was that everyone has the right to eat whatever they want. I only told people I was a vegetarian when I had to, i.e. when someone insisted I eat a cocktail sausage at a party or I was in a restaurant when the menu wasn’t labelled for dietary needs. Most people seemed to want to catch me out, to find something I did that proved I wasn’t a real vegetarian. They demanded to know what my shoes were made of (in case it was leather) and quizzed me on what sweets I ate (assuming I wouldn’t know that most jelly sweets contain animal gelatine). Bizarrely, a common response I received was ‘plants have feelings too’. Although this may one day be proved true, my survival comes first for me, and I have to eat something. Ever the sarcastic teenager, and wanting to confuse people before they could drag me into an argument, my stock answer to this comment became ‘Yes, but I only eat free-range carrots’. Hence the name freerangecarrotsJ