So I get asked a lot of questions and get a lot of comments about being vegan, such as:
- How can you live without meat? It’s soooo good!
- I don’t know how to live without cheese!
- WHAT DO YOU EAT?!
It’s really very simple. I have been vegetarian on and off my whole life; meat never really appealed to me. The main spring-board to my (and my family’s) conversion to being vegan was a book called Skinny Bitch. Then I started doing some research. I don’t get preachy, but here are some facts:
- Cows in large quantities aren’t very environmentally friendly. They burp a lot of methane and pee a lot of ammonia.
- Chickens aren’t any better about it.
- Fish have mercury.
- Slaughterhouses are very inhumane. I have a very not-pretty link here if you want to go look.
- They are pretty gross too. Long, sickening reading here.
- Little girls shouldn’t be busty at the age of eleven due to milk hormones.
- Puss in milk is pretty nasty.
- Dairy can cause headaches.
- Meat has high cholesterol.
I could go on and on. But again, I’m not here to preach. I prefer to be informed about what I feed my family, just like you. So now that you see some of my reasons for being vegan, I’ll tell you how we went about becoming a vegan family.
Say bye-bye to fast food.
Sorry folks, McDonald’s is no longer the stop on the way home. Taco Bell is acceptable, if you don’t mind chowing on bean burritos sans cheese. They are also pretty easy to deal with on subbing beans for meat. The rice contains casein, a milk product. Their beans don’t contain lard (animal fat). We all knew that fast food is bad for us anyway, right?
Start slowly.
Don’t go all-out and throw away all of your non-vegan food! This is very expensive and wasteful. Slide into it gently, incorporating more veggies into your food. The best advice I got was: Drop one thing a week. You don’t even have to start out vegan, just go vegetarian first. When you go shopping, pass over the meats. Check out GoVeg.org’s guide to “Making the transition.”
There is vegan cheese.
Rejoice! There are many dairy alternatives out there. Just make sure to look at the label for that ingredient, casein. My fave dairy alternative brand is Tofutti. They make excellent sour cream and cream cheese alternatives, as well as yummy Tofutti Cuties. Using these dairy alternatives is how our family “weaned” off of cheese.
Veggies are cool.
Okay, so that may sound like a total dork statement. But just think for a minute… How many veggies are there in the world? Yeah, lots and lots. My favorites are squashes.
OMG I WANT A BURGER!
Cool. Check out a Garden Burger. However, please note that not all veggie burgers are created equal. Some do have milk and egg products. Most are marked clearly if they are vegan. If they aren’t marked, they probably are not.
So… What do you eat?
I will admit, I am a lazy vegan. Common ten to twenty minute meals around here are my Frito pie, spaghetti, and stir fry. I am very interested in Indian food, and am learning how to cook it. There are many, many vegan recipes out there, and I’m not going to just re-post recipes that others have made. It’s not difficult to search vegan recipes.
Check out http://recipezaar.com as well.
Really, it’s very, very simple to give up animal products. And when my son is asked at school, “Why don’t you eat meat?” his response is “Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends.” And for the record: He’s the tallest kid in his class!