Vegetarian Ate One Burger And Became A Butcher

A mother who followed a vegetarian lifestyle for a decade changed her lifestyle completely when she was pregnant with her third child and ate a burger. Now she owns her own pasteurised pig farm.

Tammi Jonas, now 49, turned veggie in the 1970s after reading a book about the treatment of farm animals.

Facebook/Tammi Jonas

Tammi, who lives in Victoria, Australia, had her first taste of meat in 10 years after becoming 'dangerously anaemic' and everything changed from there.

She told 10 daily: "I was at work one day and just thought: 'a burger would fix this'." She was right, because she never turned back.

Tammi went on: "I went back to red meat, so beef and lamb, once a week throughout the pregnancy, and it was some years longer before I had any pork or poultry.

"I never thought it was immoral to take an animal's life for food - I've always been comfortable with my place in the food chain, but I thought it was immoral to treat [animals] cruelly, to not allow them to go outside and breathe fresh air and to be confined in crowds in sheds."

Facebook/Tammi Jonas

But things went further when Tammi and her husband Stuart did some research and discovered that they could make a living from farming on a small scale with the focus being on treating animals properly and ethically.

On her website, Tammi explains: "My journey from mindless industrial eater to vegetarian to ethical omnivore led me all the way to become a pig farmer to contribute to the growing movement to get pigs and poultry back out of sheds and onto paddocks.

"We now grow, butcher and cure all of our meat, and serve 80 households from our thriving community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm."

Tammi describes her farming practices to as ethical and holistic, explaining there are no harmful chemicals used in her farming practices, and the animals live as they would if they weren't in a farm at all.

She told Daily Mail Australia: "Some people will draw an ethical line that killing is bad. But I don't believe that - I don't think killing an animal for consumption is unethical if it had a good life."

Topics: Food, News, Animals, Australia

Rebecca Shepherd

I'm Becky - a journalist at LADbible. I graduated with a First Class BA in Journalism before going on to cover criminal court cases, medical tribunals and breaking news for the national media - which inevitably and eventually became as glum as it sounds. Can often be found rocking a bag for life - which I made a 'thing' way before Rihanna. You can contact me at [email protected]

@RJShepherd94