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OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
Artwork – James He (Year 12)
Were your family vegan for this week too? How did you work around mealtimes? My family doesn’t eat red meat anyway, so it was quite easy for us to eat the same meals for a week. Would you recommend it as a thing to persuade your friends or family to engage with? Oh yeah – 100%. In my view, it’s a lot easier to stay healthy when you cut out meat, because a lot of meat products are processed. I definitely recommend it. How hard is it compared to vegetarianism? If I’m being completely honest, stopping eating meat wasn’t that difficult for me. The hardest change for me was stopping eating dairy. It’s only when you stop eating it that you realise how many products contain dairy.
clothes you wear. It’s not as if vegans are some aliens from a different planet; they’re just people who don’t consume animal products. I think the whole ‘all vegans are annoying’ thing is pretty ridiculous. It is my experience that anyone I’ve ever spoken to who doesn’t eat meat, or who is vegan, simply does not care what other people eat. What did you like about your week of veganism? I was happy that what I was eating was most likely healthy, because the food that I was eating was largely unprocessed. What didn’t you like about it? Admittedly, there were days when I noticed I didn’t look forward to my meals as much as I used to, either because I was having to put in a bigger effort while making them, to ensure there was no dairy
or meat in them, or because, in some cases, they wouldn’t taste as good as something like a steak would.
Did you discover that any non-food products were non-vegan and thus had to stop using them? I didn’t discover anything new, aside from finding that dairy is basically in every snack ever. I just had to stop wearing the few items in my wardrobe that included leather, like my school shoes and a leather jacket, which was pretty easy. Do you have any tips for someone on a meat-heavy or
Do you think vegan foods are less filling than their meat counterparts? Or did you notice no change? Maybe eating tofu and beans and stuff is less filling than eating, say, a steak. But that doesn’t mean you can’t feel full: you can still eat carbohydrates, which are great at filling you up.
What variation(s) of milk did you use? Did you like it?
My personal favourite is oat milk, which I use a lot anyway, because I just prefer the taste to that of normal milk. But there are lots of great milk substitutes, like almond milk, cashew, soya, and so many more; I think there are about 12 variations as of now. So if you don’t immediately find one that you like, keep going, as you’ll definitely find one.
animal product-heavy diet who is considering moving to a vegan one? Take it one step at a time if you’re aiming to become fully vegan. First of all, cut back on your meat intake, before taking out meat entirely, just eating fish and becoming a pescatarian. The next step is to become vegetarian, and the final step is to cut out eggs and dairy, which is probably the hardest one. Could you comment on the current ‘internet politics’ of veganism and the stigma surrounding it? I think that part of the problem is that a lot of attention has been paid to a very small number of people, such as ThatVeganTeacher, who essentially shame people who eat meat, thinking that’s the right way to bring people to veganism, and making it their aim to convert people. I think that becoming vegan isn’t some massive personality switch; it’s literally just a change in your diet and the
Did you experiment with any vegan cooking? I did try cooking a tofu dish with spices, rice and peppers, which was really nice.
Do you have any final comments? I’d say that being vegan is not necessarily as massive a change as it might seem. It might seem like a big scary lifestyle change that could result in you despising the food you eat, but that’s not actually the case. If you look hard enough, you will find a bunch of go-to recipes that are really easy and cheap to prepare.
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