Because life’s not complicated enough, I’ve decided to go vegan for Lent. Those readers that follow my blog will know that I’m a fanatical purveyor of cheap, good food, and eat a vegetarian diet out of frugality and necessity a lot of the time anyway. I gave up cows milk in favour of soya milk some years ago now, much to the disgust of my friends when I make them a cup of tea in my flat these days, so I figured that this would be pretty easy. Forty days of vegetable-based diet. How hard can it be?
For those not in the know, people who choose to follow a vegan diet refrain from eating animal products, or products derived from animals. As well as the obvious meat and fish, which I don’t consume much of anyway, vegans also don’t eat eggs, or milk products, cheese, yoghurt, animal fats or any other derivatives.
I’ve tried to follow a vegan diet before now, and it’s definitely harder than it looks. Locally, finding vegan food to eat out is difficult, as most restaurants smother their vegetarian dishes in cheese, or label their fish dishes as ‘suitable for vegetarians’. I’ve found The Railway Hotel is a fab place for vegan food, and I have taken vegan friends there for lunch on occasion and been delighted by chocolate orange cake, falafels, curries, burgers and other creative culinary delights. Other than that, I’m scratching my head trying to think of anywhere I can eat a vegan lunch that isn’t just chips or carrot sticks.
So far, I’ve been living on home made soups, breads and pasta, pretty much the same as usual but without the £1.09 bacon and 65p natural yoghurt staples. I made a huge chocolate cake from an adapted bread recipe the other night to console myself and ate the lot in bed in a self-pitying period pain sitting. Too much information? Small Boy has had the last of the mozzarella from the fridge and I’ve sat across the table from him as he chews it with a grin on his two year old face, while i’m poking a fork around my peas and pasta.
However it’s not all bad. With a bit of careful planning, I treated myself last night to a Mushroom Chateaubriand (like steak chateaubriand but just without the steak!) with mashed potatoes and greens, and currently have two different soups bubbling away on the hob. (Tomato and basil, and carrot and coriander, if you’re curious!)
Famous vegans include Portia di Rossi, Peter Tatchell, Pamela Anderson and the girl who plays Rachel in Glee. They all look pretty good to me, which is encouraging. My vegan friends tell me that their diet is not only a way of life without exploiting animals, but also rich in health benefits. They all look pretty good too. I’ll report back in forty days and let you know how I’m doing, but for now, a week in, I’m doing okay. Small Boy is energetic and a loveable menace as ever, so he appears to be doing okay as well. And I’ve lost a pound, but that’s not really the point. There’s a sliver of Sainsburys Basics Brie left in the inside of my fridge door that I should have had on Tuesday. Oh well. Small Boy can have it stirred into a risotto. Waste not, want not…
I’ll check back in a week and let you all know how I’m doing! At least I didn’t give up chocolate…
Jack Monroe. Twitter: @MsJackMonroe
Categories: Comment, Life & Food
Tags: a girl called jack, Echo, gazette, Jack Monroe, Vegan
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I have been vegan for a long time and hope your experiment convinces you to go vegan permanently!
Thanks! I’ll keep you posted, I’m finding it surprisingly easy so far.
It does seem that for a lot of places ‘vegetarian’ means cheese. I have some friends who are veggie (although not vegan) and the consensus from them is to look for places that serve jacket potatoes as a light meal, because at least then you’ll have a choice of topping (cheese or baked beans or coleslaw) and often a side salad too.
Keep going! I always sat think outside the box. I made a lovely chunky vegan sauce yesterday, I forgot that pasta contains eggs! A simple silly mistake! So I have changed to rice, as I know that is vegan! Its going to be fun in couple of weeks as I am due to start work in a secondary school, so my options are more likely to be crudites , which I dont mind. But dont forget supplments, because I became anemic but keep going.
Some pasta doesn’t have eggs in!
Only fresh pasta has eggs; dried pasta usually doesn’t
As a vegan I’d be pretty screwed if pasta was unsuitable.
Theres far more to a vegan lifestyle than not eating meat. Its about the products you wear or dont wear, wool for example. Its about what you clean your house with (many of the large branded cleaning products are tested on animals, both ingredients and end results). Just because a product might say, not tested on animals doesn’t mean the ingredients might not have been. As has been said above it would amaze you just how many products contain whey and milk and walkers crisps in their wisdom have started adding real chicken and other meat products to their crisps. There are companies such as superdrug who are paving the way for low cost cosmetics and toiletries, all of their own brands are labelled suitable for vegetarians and vegans. The cleaning company astonish, they make very low cost cleaning products, all approved by the BUAV. Id never expect someone to go from meat eating to vegan overnight, a lot of people make the transition by going vegetarian first. We all make our own choices, but there’s no getting away from the fact that eating meat = animal cruelty in one way or another. I went vegan after watching the film vegucated, a film that challenged 6 new yorkers to go vegan for 6 weeks. 6 years on, one of them is still vegan and so are her kids. Its also about the wine you might drink or the beer you drink. A lot of wines are fined by using animal by products such as beef gelatine or fish guts. You dont know these things until you do your research. German beer for example tends to be vegan because they dont use additives in the brewing process. And yes, of course its possible to be vegan and make the odd slip up and I dont advocate people bashing themselves up and down if they mistakenly eat something that has whey in it for example. But personally, speaking as someone who is vegan and was vegetarian for a long time, personally Id prefer if someone made the transition to a vegan lifestyle in a way that they knew they could maintain it rather than going cold turkey pardon the pun and then going back to a meat eating lifestyle. Because it can be tough and as you have already experienced when you eat out you have the choice of chips or salad. I wish you well, but I hope you do give consideration to not buying that meat you have been looking forward to when you get paid and keep going with vegetarianism or veganism. And sometimes I think we need to know the harsh reality of how animals get treated before and after they die in order to keep going with it and if people are meat eaters its very easy to disassociate yourself with what ends up on your plate ie tasty and how it suffered to actually get there. Id support anyone who wanted to make a transition to veganism or even vegetarianism, but if you can do it for 6 weeks, you can do it full stop. And I hope you give some thought to doing just that. I didnt consider being vegan for a long time, I didnt think I could do it. Im also on a low income and its no more expensive than being veggie which I was for a long time.
My husband and I became vegan cold turkey (pardon the pun!) in our case there were health reasons as well, we are both very allergic to dairy products and we had to become vegan urgently for our own health, so we made a leap of faith and so far, and it has been nearly six months we have managed to stick with it. We are slowly adopting the ethical lifestyle side of things as well but being on a tight budget and having an extensive stockpile of questionable toiletries and cleaning products we cannot afford to just throw those down the drain and get new ethical products to replace them. It helps being Muslim and vegan because we don’t drink anyway and we avoided gelatine etc due to religious reasons; even whey is questionable for many Muslims because what is ‘whey’ in commercial products is actually rennet which involves the slaughter of the animal involved. I personally know a lot of people who ended up becoming vegan after just trying it out and on the other side of the coin you do get people who are vegetarian for years; research becoming vegan very carefully for years, remain vegan a few years then for some reason just turn their back on it all and become almost fanatical consumers of animal products and advocates of the whole ‘it’s impossible to get proper nutrition on a vegan diet’ myth. So nothing wrong with becoming vegan just to try it out or for lent, I don’t personally see myself as the ‘vegan police’ and nor do most other vegans I know.