Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗
Being a vegetarian, I flip between being becoming fully vegan constantly, there’s a lot of crossovers with the meal formats, substituting out one ingredient can make it vegan. So, like many, when Veganuary came around I decided it would be better time than any. With an abundance of products stacked up on the shelves of supermarkets, straying from the routine would be near impossible.
There’s a preconceived notion of vegan food being nothing more than lentils, vegetables and pea protein. This couldn’t be further from the truth, I tried a wide range of delicious snacks, meals and desserts, all of them came at a relatively low price, from chocolate orange styled cookies to a vegan pad Thai. Â
A dish I discovered that is going to become one of my ‘go-to’ dishes is a light marinated tofu burrito wrap. With a creamy tomato base topped with mushrooms, salad, onions, garlic and a plant based sour cream sauce, it’s easy to make, tasty and I only had to substitute the protein for it to become vegan. ‘Chocolate’ covered nuts like almonds and cashews offered a nice snack that was healthier than you’d think, plant-based chocolate has lower sugar and calories than its dairy counterpart.
The’ eating out’ side of things was mixed. A pancake shop I often frequent had a vegan option, excited I ordered it only for them to arrive 50% smaller than the usual dish, why? I guess the place didn’t want to expend extra money into plant-based ingredients? Getting less for your money can certainly be a downside when visiting restaurants and is something I’ve experienced even on vegetarian dishes. An upside however is you can often find niche dish combos that aren’t regulated to the same generics as meat dishes. For instance, I had a sweet potato slaw starter, the name doesn’t do it justice but it was genuinely one of the nicest starters I’ve ever had.
Interestingly and annoyingly, I found many products labelled as ‘Vegetarian’ are in fact Vegan, meaning the diet could be made a whole lot easier if companies took the time to certify their products, instead I’m in the middle of the shop researching online to find out myself. Especially since around 6 million brits haven taken part in Veganuary this year.
Of course, the whole idea of Veganuary is a fad used by corporate chains to make a profit on a piqued shared interest, but there’s no doubt that more vegan products need to be put on the shelves for the other eleven months of the year. I have hard enough time trying to find vegetarian substitutes.
Doing Veganuary unquestionably helped ease my mind, being conflicted about going full vegan I’m often guilty about just changing out dairy and eggs, seems simple right? Changing your diet in turn effects your lifestyle, however I found Veganuary a positive enough experience that I might just take it up full time.
