Valentina Raffaelli first questioned her stance on meat consumption five years ago, when she was asked to butcher six chickens during her job at a restaurant. She and her husband, Luca Boscardin, with whom she relocated from Venice, Italy, to Amsterdam for work opportunities, pored over books, articles, and documentaries, educating themselves about intensive livestock farming and its harmful effects on the environment.

Most of the resources proposed one answer to our environmental crisis: Veganism. “An ethical and respectable choice,” Raffaelli and Boscardin call it, but a hard sell for two people who grew up eating bollito misto and rabbit with polenta in northern Italy.