My challenge for May was to cut meat and animal products out of my diet and go vegan for the entire month. In this post, I will go over my dietary habits in the past and list some of the reasons someone might go vegan and explain my personal reason as to why I think it is important to cut down on meat and animal product consumption. Then, I will go over how my month being vegan went and finally I will explain how I try to move forward with my diet after May.
Meat Everyday
As for most people with non-vegetarian parents, meat was part of every meal we had, when I was living with my parents. From time to time we had some dishes that actually did not contain meat, but that was pretty rare and usually you had meat in another form that day anyway. As a result, I did not really know many non-meat recipes. When I started to live on my own, I started to meal prep a lot and the two main meals I made, were chicken with broccoli and spaghetti bolognese. So, as a result, I had at least one portion of meat everyday.
I was never really interested in having a strict vegetarian or vegan diet, however, I definitely wanted to reduce my meat intake pretty much since I lived on my own. The main reason why I never did so was the effort I had to put into looking for other recipes that I could cook on a daily basis. I had the few recipes that worked good for myself and putting in the time to find new ones seemed so daunting to me. So I put it off for a few years until I came around to it again at the end of April, when visiting a friend of mine. But more on that later on.
As a sidenote, I mainly talk about meat here and not animal products, because I never really had much of an intake of animal products anyway. I donāt really like milk or cheese and never liked eating eggs. Yes, I do eat pastries and other food that contains some milk and eggs, but very rarely and compared to eating them on their own, there is very little in processed food anyway. One animal product I do often eat is honey, although I mainly used it for sweetening my tea and coffee. So cutting out animal products was not going to be the main issue for me personally, when going vegan.
Veganism ā Veganism
I believe that more people should cut down their meat consumption. Unfortunately, the main argument, which is widely used for going vegetarian or vegan, is that it is unethical to kill animals for food. The problem with this argument is that not many people share the same view on the morality of killing animals and as a result they donāt cut down on their meat consumption. I am one of these people and so for a long time there was not incentive for me to reduce my meat intake. I think that there should be a higher emphasis on the other reasons for vegetarian or vegan diets.
The first and most common reason for veganism, as I already stated, is on the ethical concern of animal farming. The argument here is that killing animals for food is ethically wrong. Normally, this is taken a step further by rejecting the commodity status of animals altogether, as in most countries in the world, an animal is considered a thing and not a living creature. This would then also include not using the animals for the products they produce, e.g. milk, eggs and honey.
Another reason for veganism are health reasons. Veganism is linked to lower cholesterol and blood sugar levels and a lower risk of heart diseases. So people, who already have problems with one of these, might go vegan for the health benefits.
Lastly, there are the environmental reasons for going vegan. The current meat production is unsustainable and massively damages the environment. Meat production needs an extraordinary amount of space, because you need farmland to grow food for the animals and then farmland for the animals themselves. This extra space often comes from clearing forests, which in turn is bad for the environment. The extra space could also be used to grow more food and feed people, who are currently hungering. Another problem in the meat production industry, which got more attention now with the COVID pandemic, is that the close proximity in which the animals have to live is a breeding ground for viruses. There is also a problem with spreading of bacteria, which results in a high usage of antibiotics. This makes the bacteria in turn more resistant to the antibiotics, which is going to be a huge problem for us in the future. I feel like there is a lot to unpack here, but this would go beyond the scope of this post.
As you might have guessed from the lengths of the paragraphs, I personally want to cut down my meat and animal product consumption because of environmental reasons. I think that the unsustainable and environmentally damaging animal farming will, at some point in the near future, lead to massive problems for us as a society.
Being Vegan
At the end of April, I visited a friend, who was doing a vegan diet at the time. On the train ride, I decided to also try to eat vegan for the time Iām visiting her. I didnāt have any plans for when I got back home, because I actually wanted to do another challenge for May: cold showering every day. On May 1st, I was standing there under the shower. I looked at the shower head and decided to take a warm shower and go vegan for the month. Yes, being a little bitch and not taking a cold shower led to a month of becoming vegan.
Anyway, while I stayed there, being vegan was relatively easy. We both shared the same meals and had the same problems, e.g. the lack of vegan options. The real challenge started when I got home and had to endure all the lack of options alone. It wasnāt so much of a problem at home, where I could cook my own meals, rather the problem started when I went to work. In university and my old workplace, there was always a vegan option for all the people with different dietary restrictions, kinda like a catch-all meal. However, here there wasnāt a vegan option. So I had to take a salad with some dressing and a pretzel. Not the best lunch, especially because I didnāt have any breakfast, but whatever. I then decided to take my own meals with me to work; Iām definitely not going to eat a salad for lunch again!
As for the meals I cooked at home: I basically just switched out meat with tofu, falafels, seitan and tempeh depending on what dish I was preparing. One of the common responses I got from people after they heard that Iām currently eating vegan was that there isnāt a whole lot of variety in the food. Surely I must be eating hummus with bread and tofu everyday. Letās ignore the fact that those people also just eat the same three meals every few days. There are surprisingly a lot of options for vegans, if you know where to search.
Although Iām not very fond of it myself, there are a lot of vegan substitute products for meat dishes: schnitzel, fish sticks, ground meat and more. As my main goal for this month was to find vegan options to include into my normal diet, I didnāt want to waste time trying meatless substitutes of meat dishes, when I could just eat the actual thing. Still, I do see the benefit of these substitute products for people who want to eat vegan, but donāt want to give up on some meat dishes they like.
There are also different kinds of tofu and different ways to cook them depending on the meal, not just the block of slimy and disgusting tofu that most people know. You could just fry it a little longer to get a more crisp tofu or buy fried tofu, which tastes phenomenal in Asian dishes. Because tofu doesnāt have a strong taste, you could just add any spices to it and make it taste like whatever you want. For example, put some gyros spice on it and fry it for that Mediterranean taste. You just gotta experiment a little!
Some other substitutes for meat are tempeh and seitan. I only ate those a couple of times. I feel like there is a lot you could do with these, but I just didnāt have the time to do so. I mainly used seitan in dishes where I would normally use beef and tempeh as a crunchy alternative to fish sticks. Falafels are also a good alternative to meat in wraps or just with some fries.
Also, I started to eat way more nuts as a snack in between meals and I cut out all pastries. To be honest, I just couldnāt be bothered to read the ingredients of every pastry to figure out if they were vegan or not, so I just didnāt eat them at all. I guess that is also a plus for veganism. Yay!
One concern that I had with having a vegan diet was that I could be impacting my social life. You are very much in control with what you cook and eat at home, but when you go out or visit some friends there might just not be any vegan options. As for the going out part, especially in bigger cities there is pretty much always at least a few vegan options available. Even in most fast food restaurants they have a vegan burger or sandwich option now. I also didnāt have any problems when visiting friends. Either they were already used to having vegan guests over or they happily tried a new vegan dish for the first time. I gotta say, I really appreciate the effort some of them put into this. Thank you friends!
Overall, I didnāt have a lot of trouble with my vegan diet. I needed some time to get used to checking ingredients and searching for the little vegan label when ordering food, but that quickly became a routine and I didnāt think much about it. Also, I didnāt really crave meat or any other non-vegan food at all, although, I attribute that to the temporary nature of the challenge. After all, I only intended to do this for one month and afterwards I would be free to eat whatever I wanted again.
In this one month, I learned a lot about how much variety to food there is and I also found some new meals I really enjoy. I guess my big takeaway is that meat must not always be part of a meal to make it a real meal. I could also see some of the struggles that vegans go through and Iāll consider these next time I hear a vegan complain about something or see someone complaining about them. Understanding more about people that are otherwise so far away in your life always helps to understand the world a little better.
Future: Part-time Vegetarian
So, what is my dietary plan for the future? Iām definitely not going to continue to eat vegan. It feels too restrictive for me and I do enjoy to eat meat from time to time. However, I donāt want to fall back to my old eating habits and have meat everyday again. So I decided to go part-time vegetarian: I will not buy and cook any meat at home. I want to make eating meat something for special occasions or when going out with friends. That will cut my meat consumption down like 90% compared to before.
I feel like this change in my diet was long due and now I finally got around to changing it. Feels great when you tackle something you intended to do for a long time.
Next Up: Pause for June; Yoga for July
I decided to pause my challenges for June to get a little rest from committing to these things. It got a little exhausting to try so many new things and I feel like I ran out of ideas to do. So instead of creating challenges out of thin air that I donāt want to actually do, I decided to not do any challenge at all for one month. I guess you could see that as a challenge in and of itself.
For July Iām going to do yoga every morning. I found this great 30 day yoga challenge on YouTube that I want to follow.
See you next month :)
Ash