Lierre Keith was sixteen when she met another girl whose whole family was vegan. The girl had the pictures of the sheds and the numbers about land and hunger, and within a fortnight Keith had decided this was the diet that would fix the animals, the planet and the starving. She skipped vegetarian and went straight to vegan. This was the early 1980s. There were no meat analogues on the shelf. You had to mean it. She meant it for nearly twenty years. Two years in, the pain started in her lower back. A doctor told her her discs were already degenerating. Spines do not usually begin that work at eighteen. Her periods stopped. The blood-sugar crashes got worse. Later came the depression, the insomnia, the dry skin that hurt to touch, the autoimmune disease. She kept going. The values were still the values. Everything the pictures had shown about the sheds was still true. A traditional Chinese doctor finally told her the body was not going to repair itself on what she was feeding it. She started with eggs. The skin improved. She added fish. The difference was large enough that she could no longer argue with it. She wrote the book in 2009. She still lives with the spinal damage. She has said the permanent part is the part she wants other idealistic teenagers to hear about before they reach the same place she did. The sheds are still there. So is the spine.