The great news is eating a vegan diet has never been easier. Vegan meals can be as easy and cheap to make as beans on toast or as expensive and complex as tomato terrine with basil infused sauce and poached asparagus. Like anything in life, it’s what you make it. I don’t view it as giving up some foods, but as discovering new ones and finding fresh ways to cook and eat.

There are a plethora of sumptuous vegan recipes on the internet and books on the subject are growing in number all the time. I particularly love ‘Appetite for Reduction’ by Isa Chandra Moscowitz. Plenty of American cookbooks and websites will keep you going if cup measurements are your thing, but the Brits are catching up and charities like Viva! have fantastic recipe resources, as does The Vegan Society. Charities such as PETA and Animal Aid  are getting in on the act too and you don’t have to be a fantastic cook to master tofu scramble really, do you? Vegetables are such an important part of our diet, but so many people view them as something to go on the side, rather than being the main event. Beans provide heaps more protein than meat does (without any of the nasties) and how many times have you eaten a vegetable curry, stir fry or pasta dish and thought ‘this is a vegan dish, I’m depriving myself!’? Broccoli is packed with calcium and has none of the horrid fats that milk products do. I can get really excited about vegetables, but let’s not forget the cakes. In answer to your question, can you bake without milk or eggs?- the answer is a resounding yes!!! I first headed over to the Post Punk Kitchen for some cookie and cake inspiration, but vegan baking recipes are all over the internet these days. It’s easy to sub butter and margarine for things like vegetable fat (Trex) or sunflower/olive oil spread. The most obvious substitution for moo-cow milk is plant milk like, oh, I don’t know, coconut milk, almond milk, hemp milk, oat milk, hazelnut milk, soya milk…

As for eggs, all you have to do is work out whether the eggs are there for binding and/or leavening purposes and then you can veganise any baking recipe you choose. Popular egg baking substitutes include: for binding, arrowroot mixed with water; ground flaxseed mixed with water; applesauce (which is generally what I use) or blended silken tofu (I know this sounds fancy, but you can get it from Sainsbury’s, I promise.) If it’s leavening you need then you can use apple cider vinegar mixed with non-dairy milk (easy peasy), or non-dairy yoghurt. There are also commercial egg replacers that can do both jobs and these are generally available in health food shops.

If you’re a meat-eater and are interested in going vegan, I’d say try to cut out red meat first, then white meat and fish and see how you go. I went pescetarian for six months before going fully vegetarian, although that was mainly because back in the eighties vegetarians were still seen as somewhat alien, and for the sake of my family I compromised in some restaurant situations (I was only twelve years old.) However, I’d worked out how to get around things in those six months and haven’t eaten meat since. If you’re happily jollying along without meat, then cutting out milk and cream should be easy enough. Try all the non-dairy milks and see which is your favourite. My husband has coconut milk on his cereal in the mornings, which is yummy, but too sweet for me at breakfast time, so I tend to use unsweetened almond milk. I was never a great user of cream anyway, but I can’t really taste the difference between soy cream and the ‘real’ stuff, so that switch was a cinch. The custard that Alpro make is better than the dairy stuff I reckon (available at Tesco), as do many of my non-vegan friends and family. I serve it with homemade apple or rhubarb crumble and they yum it up.

I’m going to be honest here, cheese can be a bit of a bugger to give up, but never fear, there are ways you can make it easier on yourself. First of all, if you say ‘I’m addicted to cheese’ I’m likely to believe you. You see, the milk that cheese is made with has high levels of a protein called casein, which is highly addictive. The reason it’s in there is to keep the baby calf coming back to mum for more so they can grow into an adult cow. Unfortunately the stuff has the same effect on people, perhaps explaining in part why some of us are struggling to keep our weight down. But, help is at hand. Vegusto does some devilishly convincing vegan cheese, standing up to the dairy variety in various blind taste tests. Their no-moo melty (great name!) is particularly good on pizzas. I must admit to being nervous of trying a pizza without cheese for the first time as pizza is one of my very favourite foods. To my surprise though, I found that much of the sensory experience that is pizza, has little to do with cheese. The crispy crust, tomato rich sauce and varied toppings were more than enough to keep my cravings at bay. In fact, when you think about it, some pizzas aren’t covered in mozzarella anyway, some just have little discs of goats cheese. This is again something I’ve tried out on my non-vegan friends. Pizza Express do a vegan pizza and because their base is vegan, if you order any of their pizzas without cheese, you’re good to go. I’ve offered friends a slice of mine and they are always pleasantly surprised. If you choose carefully (some of the supermarket dairy free cheeses for example, are quite frankly, gross) then you can have a cheese free life quite happily. You never know until you try, so try! There’s also a vegan ingredient, available from health food stores, called nutritional yeast, or nooch for short. Now I know it doesn’t sound too appetising, but it’s amazing what whizzing these savoury flakes up with some cashews, mustard and turmeric (amongst other things) can do. There are many vegan cheese sauce recipes out there, and they’re definitely worth trying. Nooch can also be sprinkled on top of pasta or any other dish as a kind of parmesan substitute. (See a more detailed description here.)

More and more restaurants are offering vegan options, especially in the cities. To make things easy on yourself, Asian restaurants are particularly accommodating. If you ask for the meal that’s cooked in oil at an Indian restaurant (instead of ghee, which is clarified butter) then you’re good to go. In a Thai place, as long as there’s no fish sauce or egg, every veggie dish should be open to you. Chinese places are probably the easiest of all for vegans, as even mock duck isn’t an animal, it’s chunks of gluten that can be extremely tasty with the right sauce. Even if you’re in an Italian place, they usually have pasta with a tomato based sauce on the menu and pubs can do you veggie chilli or a baked potato and beans. If you’re drinking, check out the list of vegan beer, wines, ciders and spirits on Barnivore.com to confirm that none of the alcoholic beverages you’re consuming have been filtered through fish or egg albumen or animal bones (yes, they do this.) Some sugar is even filtered though bone char, so go for unrefined sugar as this dodgy practice happens during the refining process. I like to keep a wee note of beers I like that are vegan, just to remind myself (especially if I’ve had one too many…) Chains like Wetherspoons and Toby Carvery both have vegan options and if you’re on the move, the takeaway salads at M&S have good vegan choices.

If you can cut down on your meat consumption, then great. If you go vegetarian, even better. If you become a vegan, then you’re doing something incredibly positive for animals, your health and the planet.

It seems that the majority of people, even steak guzzling ones, understand why someone might become a vegetarian. Although most people don’t like to think about it, they know deep down that meat comes from the killing of animals, and let’s face it, that’s not too nice. If forced to contemplate it, most people can see that a select few find the deliberate terrifying of innocent animals, production line slaughter of those same sentient beings and then the consuming of their flesh to be somewhat less than appetising, or indeed moral. So far, so comprehensible. One in eight people are vegetarians in the UK, fact fans. In polite society, while vegetarians can be viewed as sensitive souls, vegans are often seen as odd or extremists, those who have taken the idea ‘too far.’

The three main reasons for becoming vegan tend to be 1) Health; 2) The Environment; 3) Animal welfare. Many people site all three as great reasons, although personally animal welfare comes top for me, with the other two being fabulous bonuses. I’ll go into detail about that later, but let’s go through the reasons for becoming a vegan in the order above.

Ok, starting with health, one of the things that surprised me when I went vegan was the amount of people who said ‘Well, there are all those elite athletes who are vegan, so there must be something in it.’ I admit I was pretty ignorant about that side of things at the beginning, but the more I looked into it, the more runners, body builders and tri-athletes I found who attributed much of their success to their vegan diet.( For example, the multi Grand Slam winning tennis playing sisters Venus and Serena Williams are both vegans.)  I knew of celebrities who endorsed a vegan lifestyle, but I don’t generally turn to faddy Hollywood for health advice. Athletes are a better yardstick I’d say as their careers require them to be fit and healthy, not just thin. Many people cling onto the statistic that vegans tend to be about ten pounds lighter than non-vegans, but most sugar is vegan and take it from someone who knows, when you’re weaning yourself off cheese the sugar monster is ready in the wings to take its place in the unhealthy food fight. If you avoid processed food though, a vegan diet is about the best one you can get for your health.

Environmental issues are not just the concern of tree huggers. The animal agriculture industry is probably the most damaging contributing factor to the production of greenhouse gasses, deforestation and climate change. The recent documentary ‘Cowspiracy’ reveals this in chilling detail. So much land is cleared for grazing and so much methane is released into the atmosphere that it’s pretty hard to justify such a destructive business. Alternatives, like intensive factory farming are still damaging to the environment and the welfare levels for animals are utterly appalling. I’ve even seen cows being fitted with invasive devices, horrible open valves in their sides that supposedly sort out the methane problem. It seems cutting out meat from our diets or even cutting down on meat consumption are mad, extreme tactics compared to these other grotesque plans. The human population is growing, the land available to farm is shrinking and anyone who can put those two facts together will realise that if the world keeps consuming meat at the rate it does now, it won’t be long until the food wars break out.

Here is a fact. If everyone in the world stopped eating meat tomorrow, there would be nobody starving in the world. There’s a sobering thought for you. Did you know that most of the soy grown on earth is fed to farm animals? A staggering amount of grain is consumed by animals that are bred to be killed, when it could be going to feed people who don’t have enough to eat. I find it pretty shameful that just because rich countries have steak challenges in their restaurants and a McDonalds on every corner they force so many people in poor countries into starvation. A billion people go to bed each night with empty stomachs. Vegans get called weird all the time, but let me tell you, many vegans find it weird that meat-eaters are ok with what I’ve just told you.

So, onto animal welfare. It’s difficult to know where to begin with animal welfare. Non-human animals are used and abused in so many ways, not only because they are killed for their meat or skins but also because we put them in so many horrific situations in order to exploit them generally. When all is said and done, animals are alive and they see and hear and suffer, just like we do. It seems though, that people are content to think of farmed animals as alive in the same way a tree is alive. A tree doesn’t have a brain, or eyes, or ears or a heart that beats faster through panic when threatened. And you know that it’s a different thing to go at a tree with an axe than it is to go at a cow with an axe, don’t you? Animals feel fear, discomfort, pain: so why do we put them through these things? There is no moral justification to use and abuse animals in the way that we do, whether they’re on a farm, in a circus or at Seaworld. Check out the movie Blackfish.

It is wrong to hit an animal or confine one to a tiny cage or enclosure that sends them mad and causes them injury. Anyone who does that to a dog or cat here in the UK is shunned by decent people. Just because we don’t directly see the day to day cruelty that is inevitably involved in the commercialisation of animals, doesn’t mean it doesn’t go on. The only reason it does go on is because these abusers are making a fat profit from us, the consumer. If we eschew animal products, then we are going a long way to seeing an end to their suffering. If you vote with your feet, or should I say your wallet, then companies will listen. Factory farming only exists because there is a demand for cheap (and sometimes not so cheap) meat, dairy and eggs. It is up to us, the consumers, to decrease that demand, so that conditions can improve for the animals’ sake.

To produce meat, animals must be killed. That’s a no-brainer. Many feel that this is reason enough to give it up although some choose to kid themselves that ‘high welfare’ farms and ‘humane’ slaughterhouses are ok. I’ve seen enough undercover investigations of such places over the years to realise that that’s bunkum. Forget about ‘organic’ too. Organic meat has nothing whatsoever to do with the welfare of animals, it just means they won’t be given antibiotics if they develop infections.

To produce milk and all its derivatives (cheese, cream, butter etc.) requires a cow to be made pregnant. This is normally done artificially and then once her calf is born, he or she is cruelly dragged away from Mum after a day or so, and we humans start nicking the milk that was meant to feed her calf. As if this wasn’t traumatic enough, she is then often forced into a cramped area for milking until it dries up and then she’s made pregnant again. She will go through this process again and again until her body gives up producing milk at which time she will be shipped off to the meat industry for slaughter. If a cow produces a female calf, she is destined to follow the miserable life of her mother. If the calf is male however, he will be seen as a by-product. This means that if it’s uneconomical to send him to be made into soft leather shoes, or veal, he’ll probably just be shot on sight.

 

To produce eggs, hens are often kept in barns which are far too cramped to allow them to display any natural behaviour at all, like scratching around or even stretching their wings. Although many people realise battery cage eggs are unethical and avoid them, still more do not know of the hardships suffered even on free range farms. Female chicks are kept for egg laying, but most male chicks are killed, sometimes left in a bucket to die or put in a grinder while still alive. And once the hens’ laying days are over, it’s off on a truck to be turned into nuggets. On an environmental note, chickens and pigs are the largest consumers of fish in the world. They are fed way more than humans are. Check out TheBlackfish.org for more details.

I can’t put it more plainly: as soon as you put a price on what an animal can produce, cruelty and exploitation will follow. Become a vegan and you won’t be supporting any of that. Decreasing demand for cruel products is a very powerful way to help both animals and our environment. It can be a very healthy diet too so who knows, you may lose a few pounds as a cheeky bonus!

I get this question a lot. I work with a bunch of meat eaters (is ‘bunch’ the collective term? Answers on a postcard…) some of whom have only recently got their head around what a vegetarian is. Just so you know, a vegetarian doesn’t eat meat. If it once had a heartbeat, veggies don’t eat it. A pet hate of mine during my quarter century as a vegetarian was the constant ‘do you eat fish?’ question. Let me be clear (as the politicians say) Vegetarians Do Not Eat Fish!!! There is now a helpful term for those who eat a mostly vegetarian diet, but still consume fish, and that is pescetarian. (From the Italian for fish, don’t ya know.) I have close friends who are pescetarians so I’m not prejudiced or anything…

Now I’ve got that off my chest we can get back to the subject in hand – what is a vegan? Well, a vegan is someone who consumes no animal products. It sounds easy enough when I put it like that, but let me go into a bit more detail, as you probably consume a lot more animal products than you realise. Did you think of honey as an animal product for example? Vegans obviously don’t eat meat (they’re dead animals, yuck!), but we also don’t eat eggs or any form of dairy such as cream, milk or cheese, as one requires hens or cows to produce these products.

Speaking of cows, they are also used in the leather industry (even many vegetarians don’t wear or buy leather as obviously, cows are not alive at the end of this process.) The same goes for animal fur, like mink, ermine or bearskin but you knew that, didn’t you? Really, unless you’re a member of the royal family, or the aristocracy at the very least, you probably don’t have to work too hard to avoid these things. There have also been some quite horrific practices discovered in the angora industry, so steer clear if you like bunnies. There’s so much cruelty out there it’s tricky to contemplate. And don’t even get me started on Foie Gras…

Let me see, what else is there? Well, silk is one many people don’t think of. Silk worms people! We’re keen to avoid wool too, as sheep are farmed commercially for it, and duck or goose down pillows and duvets, as the clue is in the name. The best illustration of an answer to the question, ‘what is a vegan?’ was put in the form of a quite brilliant flowchart that the Vegan Society produced. The vegan society is a wonderful resource by the way. Here it is.

Simple, eh?

There are all kinds of reasons that people go vegan, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but my personal rule is that if animals have been farmed, bred or commercially exploited in any way to produce something then it’s best avoided. When animals are used for commercial gain the door is opened to corruption and abuse – it’s sad but true. One of the ways we humans can try and redress the balance is to boycott animal products and try to make the world a better place. Man. The best news is you don’t have to wear a poncho to do it! So if you thought the answer to ‘what is a vegan?’ was a hippy weirdo, then I hope I’ve gone some way to setting the record straight.

So, now you know what a vegan is, the next inevitable question is why?