My aunt lives in the Bay Area of northern California. Every year when I was a kid, my mom and I would drive upstate from Los Angeles to visit her. Depending on the route we took, we’d end up on a drive of brief, scenic beach views or constant farmland. The faster route was through the farmland so that was usually the way we went, dipping through acres of strawberry and grape. We used to make it a game: what are they growing on the right? Can you tell what tree that is? What about the left? What are they picking in that field? Grape, almond, walnut, orange, cabbage, strawberry, garlic, grass, onion, artichoke — the list goes on and on.

About halfway through the drive, we’d stop at a place called Harris Ranch. Stuck in the middle of hell, it looks like you picked up a small southern resort and stuck it in the middle of a California valley. They had palm trees and Spanish roofs, fancy hallways and even classy toilets. It smelled like hay and sunshine and the rustic old wood of the hotel restaurant perfectly reflected the old, rich ranch-style they were going for. It’s completely out of place, a lush Eden in the middle of endless miles of dead grass.

The restaurant was decorated like an old hunter’s lodge, upholstered with different plaids on the seats and surrounded by warm, yellow light. Cowhides lined the banisters, the floorboards. They served huge slabs of pink meat, decorated on the edges with stacks of garlic potatoes and corn on the cob. My dad used to order veal. Or maybe it was liver. Liver and onions? That sounds right. When I was little, I would eat anything. Hell, I had escargot by age seven. My first solid food was smoked marlin in Hawaii. I was never one to hold back.

Once we were completely stuffed we’d load back into the car and continue on the drive. Only a couple miles away we’d stumble upon a smell different than anything we’d smelled so far on the drive: it wasn’t gas, not a leaky tail pipe or a field of pungent garlic.

It was cows. Massive fields of cows, hoarded together on dusty brown earth. This wasn’t the happy cow they had in their advertisements — there weren’t any bright white and black animals on lush, grassy hills. It’s a field of brown, dirt caked cows standing side by side other cows in their own shit.

You can see a glimpse of it on Google Maps. Travel up the I-5 on street view from Harris Ranch and soon enough, you’ll end up at the fields on an overcast California day. Or, to make it even easier, put Harris Feeding Company into Google Maps. Just make sure you’re not eating a burger while you do it. They produce over 150 million pounds of beef per year, an average from 2010. With only 800 acres, they have over 100,000 acres of cattle. There’s a reason this spot has been nicknamed Cowschwitz.

A couple years later when I decided to go vegetarian, I was driving up north in a car with my mom and my maternal grandparents. They were sitting in the backseat so I could DJ on the way there. When it got to be around 3:00, they were hungry. Harris Ranch was coming up on our right, and they asked if we could stop there. I turned to my mom, hoping she would pretend she didn’t hear them. But to my complete and utter 12-year-old shock, she turned on her right blinker and took the exit towards the restaurant.

I sat in the old western style booth refusing to eat. I wouldn’t even drink the water the waiter brought me. In retrospect, this was a bit dramatic. But there was steak and hamburger on either side of me, and only a few miles town the road I’d be able to smell the animals' old neighbors.

My intention was never to be the preachy vegan. I don’t throw paint on celebrities wearing fur coats, don’t stand in PETA picket lines outside of MAC stores. Sure, I believe that skinning an animal alive isn’t right and testing animals with harsh chemicals should be unlawful, but for whatever reason, I don’t protest. And yes, the harsh stigma and connotations surrounding the majority of the vegan community aren’t without their groundings. There are bigger issues and there are smaller issues, but that doesn’t make animal rights a non-issue.

A few facts about me: I’ve been vegetarian since I was 12 and an on and off vegan for the past two years. But I’m from Los Angeles, so it was pretty simple to cut meat out of my diet. When I went to boarding school in the midwest, it got harder. People thought I only ate rice and broccoli and seemed to forget that most bread was, in fact, vegan.

But don’t you still eat chicken? Fish? That’s so unhealthy. The thing’s already dead, why not just eat it? Will it gross you out if I eat this burger in front of you? Don’t you get bored only eating salads? If you don’t milk a cow its utters will explode — why are you against helping them? I read this study that plants feel pain too, so doesn’t that make you as bad as me? Don’t you get sick all the time? Isn’t it super expensive? You must be loaded. But I drive a Prius so I’m helping the environment just as much as you are, right? If animals weren’t made to be eaten, why are they made of meat? Where do you get calcium? Are your bones weaker? Isn’t soy bad for women? But don’t you miss bacon? Cheese? Where do you get your protein? Where do you get your protein? Where do you get your protein?

Ask any vegan, any vegetarian, I promise they’ve heard at least half of these.

So let’s start with the basics. I’m no expert in this field, but after years of being told my diet will kill me I’ve begun to know a thing or two. When people say vegans get sick more often, or that they’re not as healthy, they’re really just flat out wrong. According to the American Dietetic Association people who follow a vegan or vegetarian diet tend to display low blood pressure, cholesterol, have less chance of getting colon, breast, or prostate cancer and have a decreased rate of Ischemic Heart Disease.

And where do we get our protein? The average person needs 0.5 - 0.7 grams of protein per pound (of body weight) per day. So let’s say you weigh 135 lbs. Then you need around 81 grams of protein per day. And you know what has 10 grams of protein? One cup of tofu. Black beans? 8 grams in half a cup. Quinoa? 8 grams per cup. Green peas? 8 grams per cup. Oatmeal? 6 grams per cup. Even veggies have protein! Spinach has 5 grams per cup, broccoli has a whopping 4 grams per cup, edamame has 8.5 grams in half a cup. I could keep going, but I think you get the idea. Humans don’t actually need nearly as much protein as what they’re consuming in these meat-heavy diets. And milk? Think of it more as baby cow growth liquid and suddenly it takes on an entirely different meaning. It’s intended to spark a quick hormonal growth to turn a baby calf into a four hundred pound creature. It was never intended for humans. And yet we’re forcing milking, congealing and freezing this product into tasty treats of our own for no reason other than it tastes good.

So let’s break this down a little bit more. Around 500,000 animals are killed for their meat in the United States alone every hour. The grain that is produced to feed livestock could feed 1.3 billion people. It takes 1,799 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, 576 gallons for a pound of pork, but only 108 gallons for corn. Animal food production is one of the leading causes of climate change. In a 2004 USDA survey, only 5 percent of water use was due to domestic use, whereas 55 percent was due to animal agriculture.

Animal agriculture also produces 65 percent of the world’s nitrous oxide, a gas with the global warming potential 296 times greater than CO2 per pound. According to two environmental specialists at the world bank group, using the global standard for measuring greenhouse gases, concluded that animal agriculture was responsible for 51 percent of human caused climate change. 51 percent. And not only that, animal agriculture occupies 45 percent of the earth’s land, is responsible for up to 91 percent of Brazilian Amazon destruction and is a leading cause of ocean “dead zones,” habitat destruction and species extinction (for more info like this check out "Cowspiracy" on Netflix). In 2011 more than 80 percent of the antibiotics produced were used to feed livestock. And with fast production and limited FDA regulations, most of those antibiotics are going straight into your meat.

And not to sound like PETA, but I figure I should at least mention a little bit of the actual treatment of the animals. So in a Factory Farming for Dummies length summary, here we go: Male baby chicks are sent directly into the meat grinder after they hatch because unlike the females, they can’t lay eggs. Pregnant hogs are kept in “gestation crates” that keep them completely immobilized. Veal calves are tied up with heavy chains to keep their energy levels down, kept in almost complete darkness and forced to have anemia to keep their flesh “pale and attractive to the consumer.” Each fully grown chicken in a factory farm has up to 6/10 of a square foot of space, which leads to violence between them and even to them eating each other. Due to genetic manipulation, 90 percent of broiler chickens have trouble walking because their breasts and wings (the parts in high demand in markets) grow too fast for their bones to keep up with.

I’ll stop here with the facts but if any of this sparked your interest and you want to know more, a simple Google search of “factory farms” will do the trick. Or if you’re as into this as I am, a few documentaries on Netflix that are worth the time are "Food Inc.," "Forks over Knives," "Hungry for Change" and "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead."

So simply put, I’m not vegan because of a fad. I’m not vegan to lose weight. I’m not vegan because it’s trendy. I’m not even vegan because I like animals that much (I’ll be honest, if you put me face to face with a cow I’d probably throw up, I’d be so scared). I’m vegan because I think it’s the right thing to do. I’m vegan because I care about our planet, about animal rights and about what I put into my own body. So yeah, part of this article probably sounded like the preachy vegan. But maybe it only sounds preachy because it’s something no one ever talks about. Maybe if we keep talking about it, it won’t be preachy anymore. It’ll just be a conversation.