It pains me to have to confess it now, but there are no two ways about it: I ate meat every day of my life from the instant that I had teeth. I wasn't just a non-vegetarian - I was unapologetically and complacently carnivorous.

Meat is present in most staples of the Italian diet, and growing up in an Italian-American family I learned very young that to doubt any part of Italy's supreme gustatory authority was to commit outrageous sacrilege. In fact, not only in Italian culture but in most societies, the slaughtering of animals for food is not a custom to question. And until very recently, I never did.

Maybe it seems incredible that I ever got around to questioning - and eventually rejecting - the idea of meat at all. What could make a person like me start to distrust the practice of killing animals to satisfy human cravings? What could entice someone who was once content to snack on prosciutto and sausage all day renounce animal flesh forever? Fittingly enough, the answer is the animals themselves.

In February 2004, I traveled to Orland, California, to start a two-month internship at a rescue shelter for abused farm animals, called Farm Sanctuary. Some of my best childhood memories came from working and spending time on a farm, and so, although at the time I did not subscribe to Farm Sanctuary's vegan, animal rights-centered philosophy, I made the decision to intern there out of a desire to recreate the satisfaction. I was interested in learning what vegetarianism/veganism was all about, but from a strictly academic standpoint; it never crossed my mind that living in that environment would have the profound, about-face effect on my lifestyle that it did.

Waking up in the morning to the noise of roosters, spending the day in the company of pigs and cows and goats, watching the sheep come down out of the pasture at nightfall, and just the daily routine of the farm made relationships with the animals inescapable. At first I was able to simply take the work I did at face value: muck this stall, clean up that cow pie, spread this bale of hay, move that pig to a different barn. But I couldn't continue long without thinking about why I was doing it, what it meant for these animals to be rescued from abuse and neglect. I started to wonder how I could spend my day helping provide a better life for farm animals and then go home and pass my dollar to factory farms.

I started to form bonds with the animals. It's impossible to be with them so often and not become endeared to them. I would find myself still in the barns when work was over, just visiting with them; particularly the pigs and goats, whom I knew by name and by personality. I'd always had cats at home with whom I was very close, and so I was naturally uncomfortable with the idea of eating cats. It occurred to me at that point, first as a pestering little doubt and later as the most pressing dilemma in my mind, that there was something seriously wrong with feeling that same closeness with pigs and then participating in a system which profited from their suffering and death. The horrible absurdity of allowing some animals to endure abuse and slaughter while others are legally protected from cruelty was dawning on me. Is there really so great a difference between a cat and a cow? I found that I couldn't see why, when the two species are equally capable of suffering, the former is to be cared for and the latter is to be killed as a "food animal."

I still could recall fondly the taste of meat, but when I thought about what that meat actually was, when I looked beyond the euphemisms like "beef" and "pork" and saw the dead carcasses of the animals to which I had become attached, I was belted right in the gut by a sense of revulsion, and I knew I could never eat it again. As much as I had loved the Italian meatball, it was clear to me as it never fully had before that meat is quite literally a matter of life and death; whether it tastes pleasant seems infinitely less important. I became a vegetarian, and I will remain one for life. But I might never have done so if it weren't for the animals I came to know on the Farm; I am indebted to them for making it personal.