Living in Victoria, Australia, she suddenly wanted a hamburger—a single bite after years of avoiding meat.
Fast forward, Tammi is now a professional butcher and even owns her own pig farm.
She gave up eating meat at the age of 19 after reading Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s influential book “Animal Liberation,”, published in 1975.
She managed to stick to her vegetarian lifestyle through two pregnancies, but during her third, she became “dangerously anemic.”.
“I was at work one day and just thought: ‘A burger would fix this,'” she told 10 Daily, recalling the moment she decided to give in to her craving.
That one burger eventually led her back to eating meat, albeit cautiously at first, before she fully embraced her omnivorous diet again.
“I never thought it was immoral to take an animal’s life for food,” she continued. “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.”
Having grown up on a cattle ranch in rural Oregon, Tammi was no stranger to farm life. Moving to Australia in the 1990s, her eventual return to agriculture felt almost inevitable.
Her decision to not only start eating meat again but to also produce it herself came from a desire to do things differently.
Alongside her husband Stuart, Tammi launched a small, sustainable farm in Victoria’s Central Highlands.
Their goal? To raise pigs ethically and respectfully, making sure the animals are treated well throughout their lives.
“I think they find all of that stressful, and we’d like to take that part of the stress out of our system and be able to walk them to a death they didn’t know was coming,” she said, adding that she feels “most justified” about eating meat when she knows the animals lived without “no fear, no pain.”.
Although Tammi still supports the principles of vegetarianism, she believes in finding “the best way to eat on a finite planet,”. She hopes farms like hers can “help reverse, or at least mitigate climate change.”.
At the same time, she wishes her vegetarian friends would understand her new perspective, and she hasn’t held back from calling out the booming plant-based meat industry.
