dont know how...

yeah i really wanna get into the jainism scene, where they belive in total non violence (ahimsa) which involves eating no meat or anythying that waould not bnatrually be found in the organic world.

BUt i have a problem. everyone here eats meat. it would be a pain to not eat it. not to mention my family and my school dont care. they would still try to feed me meat. what do i do?

 

It will definitely help to do your homework, especially on nutrition and good sources of all the vitamins/minerals you need. There are lots of great resources mentioned on this forum.

I also agree that you should try to cook for yourself as much as possible, and get some good cookbooks. I really like "La Dolce Vegan" and "Vegan With a Vengeance" and also this new one I got called "Raw: the Uncook Book" by Juliano. Try out all kinds of new recipes and spices, and soon your meat-eating friends will see how delicious vegetarian food can be.

If your parents do all the grocery shopping and cooking, make an effort to go shopping with them and point out the healthy veg options you want to try. Also offer to help with the cooking, hopefully they will be understanding enough to eat a veg meal, especially if you cook it. I usually pick out recipes and mark them in my cookbooks, then create my shopping list from those recipes.

Try new foods, learn about the nutrition side of a veg lifestyle, and read as much as you can so you can justify and explain your choices to people who ask questions.

Good luck!

 

Sometimes it is cooler to endure a little challenge to reject what has been fed to you your whole life. If you accept what everyone around you does for the rest of your life, you might not be living to your highest potential...or feeling really comfortable with yourself and your decisions.

Taking action is much more rewarding than not taking action and being apathetic towards to the wrong around you that you can change. It takes the first bump of motivation to get started but it feels great once you start creating something new for yourself that you know you should be doing.

I also highly recommend Juliano's "UNcook book"

 

Let me be a pain in the ass. I support people being supermarket vegans, as I call them. It's way better than being a supermarket omnivore or vegetarian. (This is all just my opinion.) But it is not a cruelty-free lifestyle, as some vegans refer to it as.
If you want to live a Jainish style existance, you need to grow your own food.
Otherwise, it is less cruel to hunt deer than eat supermarket veggies.
The logic is this: Industrial agriculture kills countless animals. Rabbits, groundhogs, ground squirells, snakes, birds, etc, die in farm fields every day after being sprayed with pesticide or ground up by combines. Then the food is trucked all over the place. You will not believe how absurd the food distribution system is. Every wild animal you think of gets hit by trucks carrying organic veggies every day.
Now, where I used to live in Montana, we could go into the back yard and shoot a deer and that was one animal dying for 150 pounds of meat, and if we could get her home without using the truck, no fossil fuels expended. But 150 pounds of organic veggies and you kill thousands of animals and use so much fossil fuel. And I didn't even mention the animals that died because they lost habitat to agriculture years ago.
So being a vegan is great, but eating without killing animals means growing your own food. That's my two cents.