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Food

Meat.

Meat. Meat. Meat.

Every animal is made out of meat. I am meat, ya’ll asses meat.

Everything is part of the buffet of the universe.

– Beasts of the Southern Wild

I’ve been mostly vegan now for a little over 3 months now. Only mostly thanks to a few cups of tea at friends’ houses, a jar of Nutella I’ve been rationing (it was in the cupboard pre-veganism but I couldn’t bring myself to give it away) and a little honey (we need the bees!).

I’ve found it a lot easier than I thought I would. My meat intake (oo-er) has steadily reduced over the last year or two so vegetarianism wasn’t a massive step but I thought I’d find dropping dairy a lot harder. As a kid I would drink 4+ pints of milk a day and a summer job testing curdled soy milk didn’t leave me enamoured of substitutes but I’ve been drinking Alpro’s Simply Mild which tastes less like soy milk. It also tastes nothing like real milk, but the flavour’s grown on me.

I’ve lost a little weight though I wasn’t exactly heavy to begin with. I eat a lot more nuts and seeds than I used to, fruit too. Also more crisps which isn’t so great (they’ve become my go-to indulgence, though I have to stick to ready salted most of the time to avoid the milk powder). The biggest knock has probably been to my baking; I’ve played with some egg substitutes but had more misses than hits so far.

The hardest part I’ve found (so far at least) is eating out. Think about the last restaurant menu you looked at and what the veggie choices were, now cross off everything that involves cheese; there’s usually not much left. But cooking at home, taking lunches to work, all that has been a doddle.

I think the best advice I heard was to think of it as a continuous scale rather than discrete isms. Veganism can be a big ask. I think I’m doing pretty well but I’m still not 100% vegan. But that’s ok. I’m eating no meat which is great for the environment (and the aminals) but even when I was eating meat only twice a week that was better than eating it every day.

When that jar of Nutella is gone will I never buy another jar again? I can’t promise it. But either way my milk intake is way down. Maybe one day I will kick my Nutella habit, but just because I can’t right now doesn’t mean I should say, “Fuck it,” and chug a gallon of milk.

At some point in the last year I stopped eating meat but I couldn’t tell you when it was because it happened gradually, I didn’t wake up one day and proclaim myself a vegetarian, I just ate less and less meat until one day I noticed I’d stopped buying it altogether. Just have a bit less, you probably won’t miss it and it might make the world a little bit better.