I’m a journalist and the founder of the Maine Vegetarian History Project, (https://scalar.usc.edu/works/maine-vegetarian-history-project/index) which has uncovered 300 years of previously unexamined vegan and vegetarian history in the U.S. state of Maine. My research suggests many other American states also have as-yet untold vegetarian histories waiting for researchers to recover. The hidden history I recovered served as the basis for the first-of-its-kind exhibition Maine’s Untold Vegetarian History, which I co-curated at the Maine Historical Society in Portland. It was on view at the society’s museum from 2024 to 2025, and it travels to the all-vegetarian Good Life Center in Brooksville, Maine, in 2026. For 15 years, I wrote the Vegan Kitchen column for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram newspaper. My vegetarian journey began in 1988 after a high school speech contest introduced me to animal rights. When I arrived at Syracuse University as a freshman in 1991, I joined Syracuse University for Animal Rights and became a vegan overnight. Later, when I graduated with honors from the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, my thesis was titled How American Environmental Groups Portray the Risks of Meat Consumption. As a very young child in the 1970s, I was a member of a short-lived intentional community whose communal meals were always meat-free.
