Ciao a tutti,

This is a late message which introduces me to such a great and healthy group.

My name is Franco Tedaldi, and I was born in the January of 1957 in a wealthy region of Italy. Here a variety of industries have success, and fruit, grains and wine are some of the products making our happiness but...

As you may know, 95% of the meat italian meat eaters eat comes from intensive farming. Well, the region where I belong is one of the places where this principal cause of animal suffering is most widespread.

I always felt sympathy for animals, and I became a defender of animal rights in late eighties. I also had friends which had been practising for long natural food preparing. I liked most of what I could taste of it.

Since when I began going to the university I use to eat in canteens. I've always been lucky finding a good variety of foods of good quality. Now I'm an electronic engineer, application software designer in a factory which produces equipments for quality control. I have lunch five times per week at the factory canteen, and guess what? I started eating vegetarian right there, in 1991.

I started overnight. I had been to a demonstration against a farm where animals were breeded for vivisection. The same farm even sold tools for stabling them. At the congress of LAV (the League Anti-Vivisection) which immediately followed, I heard a girl explaining that she was a vegan and suffered for any exploitation of animals.

I didn't use to regard as exploitation milking a cow, but I realized that at least it usually was. So I became immediately a vegetarian, but still I sometimes eat food prepared with eggs and milk. Ovo-lacto-vegetarian, by now. But I've learned how to prepare a vegan dinner for me and my friends.

I still wear wool sweaters and trousers, which have been implicitly taught me to be part of a democratic and tender person. This image is going to change. I look forward to the day, soon to come, when cruelty free food and cloths will be available to everyone, and all intensive animal farming will be banned.

Now I translate some IVU-EVU www pages and articles from English into Italian, and I'm supposed to be the IVU co-ordinator for italian translators. I'm a member of AVI and of Società Vegetariana, and I provide a small group of vegetarians in Forlì with information on animal rights and vegetarianism.

I'm going to have a wonderful new year beginning, travelling toward the venue where I'll find you, on a Thai plane where I'll have my vegetarian meal.

I wish us all a Merry Christmas, and a new year in which vegetarian issues be more successful than ever

See you soon
Franco