I grew up in Cleveland, OH among other regular meat-eating folk. For the first 40 years of my life, I enjoyed meat, pork, chicken or ham with almost every dinner, most lunches and weekend brunches. I loved a good steak, a perfect cheeseburger, or a stack of crisp bacon. But after I adopted my dog in late 2009, something started to change for me, and my perspective of and relationship with animals began to shift. The belief that “real men eat meat” didn’t make as much sense to me anymore, for a variety of reasons that involved health, ethics and the environment. Since then, I have undergone (and continue to undergo) a personal evolution of sorts, which I talk about in this episode of the podcast.