A former staunch vegetarian completely changed her lifestyle when she was pregnant with her third child, and tried a burger for the first time in decades.
Now, she owns her own pasteurised pig farm.
Tammi Jonas, 49, first turned veggie in the seventies after reading a book that detailed the ill treatment of animals on farms.
The mum-of-three, from Victoria, Australia, tasted meat for the first time in 10 years when she became ‘dangerously aneamic’ and from then on her lifestyle changed forever.
She told 10 Daily:
I was at work one day and just thought: ‘a burger would fix this’.
The 49-year-old continued:
I went back to red meat, so beef and lamb, once a week throughout the pregnancy, and it was some years longer before I had any pork or poultry.
I never thought it was immoral to take an animal’s life for food – 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.
However, Tammi took her meat eating to the next level when she and her husband Stuart did some research and found out they could make a living from farming on a small scale, with the focus being on treating animals properly and ethically.
On her website, Tammy explains her business, writing:
My journey from mindless industrial eater to vegetarian to ethical omnivore led me all the way to become a pig farmer to contribute to the growing movement to get pigs and poultry back out of sheds and onto paddocks.
We now grow, butcher and cure all of our meat, and serve 80 households from our thriving community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm.
Tammy says her farm uses ethical and holistic practices, explaining there are no harmful chemicals used and the animals are free to live as if they would if they weren’t on a farm.
Tammi told Daily Mail Australia:
Some people will draw an ethical line that killing is bad. But I don’t believe that – I don’t think killing an animal for consumption is unethical if it had a good life.
Tammi and her husband have now been running their business, Jonai Farms and Meatsmiths, for eight years.
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Emma Rosemurgey is an NCTJ trained Journalist who started her career by producing The Royal Rosemurgey newspaper in 2004, which kept her family up to date with the goings on of her sleepy north east village. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and started her career in regional newspapers before joining Tyla (formerly Pretty 52) in 2017, and progressing onto UNILAD in 2019.