As you may or may not know, for this year I’ve decided to go vegan. I was previously pescetarian (a vegetarian who eats fish), and while this is quite a major change for me it’s not as much a change as if someone who eats meat did the same thing.
When thinking about going vegan, it seemed pretty difficult. No milk. No eggs. No cheese. No honey. No cake! The list seems endless. It would seem easier to write what I could eat. But after a lot of ingredient reading in the shops (thanks mum!), some food was found that I could eat.
And so it began. Surprisingly, it was a lot easier (once the food was there) then I thought. Breakfast was pretty much the same – I can have most of my favourite cereals, and while I couldn’t have the hot cross buns that everyone else had (the stripes aren’t vegan) normal buns with raisins in were fine. The only major change in breakfast was the lack of real milk – soya milk was in my coffee. It tasted a little… different but it was OK.
Likewise, lunch wasn’t much of a change. Instead of tuna/egg mayo or cheese there was some jam. The biscuits were vegan. And, unsurprisingly, the banana and the water were both vegan.
We’re yet to have tea/dinner, the main meal of the day, so I can’t comment on how my new diet will affect it. I suspect it will be quite a big change, especially for dessert – yoghurt, no, cake, no, pancakes, no… fruit, anyone?
4 years ago I never thought I could be vegetarian full time, and that turned out to be completely incorrect. I don’t think I could stay vegan full time, and I don’t think my opinion will change of that. I will, at least eventually, miss milk, milk/white chocolate, cake and nice desserts, and if I did go full time vegan then I think mum would go crazy from reading the labels. Becoming vegetarian… well, pescetarian didn’t affect my life that much, but I think being vegan will.
Once it is Easter, I don’t plan on going back to being pescetarian. As part of a slow transition, I’ll become vegetarian (don’t eat fish or meat or gelatine etc. but do have dairy products) which I look forward to, but it won’t be immediate. There’s a lot of fish to be eaten in the house, and in some restaurants the main nice thing to eat is fish.
If nothing else other than a pain, at least this diet will be a lot healthier. Some berries instead of a slice of cake is a better choice. But the main point of this temporary change is to see exactly how vegans manage their everyday lives and whether it really is possible (of course it is, but it didn’t seem like that before). At the moment, I think I can understand how they do it; I’ll just have to see if I still feel that way in 6 weeks.
