How It Accidentally Happened

I never had any intention of going vegan.  After all, I live in the epicenter of Buffalo Chicken Wings! I have probably eaten my weight in wings over the years.  And bleu cheese?  The best part of the wing experience!  Turkey on Thansgiving and Christmas?  Check.  Prime Rib on New Year's?  Check.  Corned beef on St. Patrick's Day?  Ham on Easter? Hot dogs and hanburgers on the 4th of July?  Check check check.  
But that all changed for me on a hot summer day in August of 2010.  I was watching the news and they were talking about the Iowa egg recall.  Two Iowa egg 'production factories' (note how they are not called farms) were primarily responsible for a salmonella outbreak which sickened more than 1600 people.  I was confused at first - I knew that of course you can get salmonella poisoning from chicken, but I didn't know you could get it from eggs.  That just didn't make sense to me.  After spending a few hours looking into it,  I found out that they were feeding chickens charred chicken bones.  In their feed.  They were essentially feeding chickens, chicken.  And it was the dead, charred chicken bones  in the feed that contaminated the chickens, and in turn, the eggs.
The more I learned about the conditions in egg production factories, the more horrified I was.  I won't even go into the overcrowded conditions -thousands and thousands of hens crammed into cages, stacked on top of each other,  or the fact that the chickens are 'de-beaked'.  
That day, I stopped eating eggs, and chicken of any kind.  By August 25th, I had learned enough things to horrify me  that I was no longer eating meat of any kind, or dairy.
And that is how I accidentally became vegan.