Vegetarian Tried One Burger, Loved It So Much She Became A Butcher

Tammi Jonas, who had been a vegetarian for many years, experienced a life-changing craving while pregnant with her third child.

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.".

When iron supplements didn’t help, Tammi began to wonder if meat might be the solution to restore her health during pregnancy.

"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.

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"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," Tammi explained, adding that her issue with meat wasn’t about eating animals at all.

"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.

"When you're from land, it's in your bones," she said, reflecting on her deep connection to farming and the land.

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.

"The penny dropped, and we realized that we were going to be farmers and, for me, I knew immediately pigs because they are some of the worst treated in industrial systems," Tammi shared about why she and her husband built Jonai Farms.

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Tammi admits she struggles with the idea of sending her pigs to off-site slaughterhouses, feeling it’s a stressful experience for the animals. It’s something she’s working to come to terms with as a farmer.

"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.

"Hats off to you if you don't want to participate in any livestock production, but try not to have too hard a go at those of us who are trying to restore landscapes with livestock," she remarked, finishing with a jab: "and doing a much better job of it than your vegan impossible burger."

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