I see a lot of people at least joking about going vegan lately. I’ve been vegan for roughly… ah, I want to say 4 years now? I lost track awhile ago. It was around the time the wreckers came to Hexbear and convinced a bunch of us to watch Dominion (highly recommend doing so btw, it’s free online).
ANYWAYS, if you’re interested in more than just shitposts and are seriously interested in veganism I was thinking I could help answer any questions you have. Comment here or send me a DM if you’re blush shy. This comm has limits on what we can talk about btw, such as diet. And I think the whole website has restrictions on recommending specific brands of food? So DM for questions like that, thanks.
On average, how much time do you take a week to do food prep at home (hours)?
Related question - what are your favorite/recommended “grab and go” vegan foods?
I can answer the first question here, second question I’ll generalize here and DM you specifics.
So I’m assuming food prep includes weekly cooking. My partner and I don’t like to do all our cooking at once. Let’s see… we’ll typically eat something easy for breakfast like fruit or instant grits/oatmeal, lunch is either leftovers or frozen meals, but dinner usually involves cooking. We cook dinners for 5-6 days of the week. Sometimes it’s an easy 20 minute salad and other times it’s a 1.5 hour chili or daal that we let simmer for a while. On the average week, I’d say we cook a combined 5-6 hours. Less if we eat out more or there’s a great frozen food sale, more if we’re trying to eat more veggies and whole foods.
As for grab and go, there’s a ton of options. If you’re at the grocery store, there are usually lots of vegan frozen meals and vegan chicken nuggets/tenders to pick from. (Never get vegan wings, though, they’re expensive and taste like shit.) Other nice things include samosas, frozen pizza, instant ramen, ice cream pints, sorbet, veggie fried rice, a surprising amount of chips, pretzels, cookies, some chocolate bars and even fake meat/cheese deli options at one grocery store I frequent. They can make whole fresh vegan subs nowadays, and it’s not just filled with vegetables like at a certain sub chain.
If by grab and go you meant eating out, there are lots of options as well. I’m going to assume you live in an area that doesn’t have a ton of vegan restaurants, so this list will be a little generic: smoothies, vegetable subs, veggie/tofu sushi, pad thai, tons of Mexican food (ask if the beans are vegetarian-they can be fried in animal fat), fake protein burgers (fake meat/black bean/veggie/ect), most fries, most hashbrowns, avocado toast, most coffee places have vegan options, acai bowls, and so much more depending on your location. There are entire guides to eating out vegan, since plenty of us have to travel eventually.
Long story short, cooking is great and recommended, but you absolutely do not need to know how to cook to be vegan. Eat as little or as much slop as you want, I certainly do.
My main question is around textiles.
We have replaced all our synthetic fibers in our house to limit exposure to PFAS and microplastics. Pretty much all non-animal outdoor wear I have seen is synthetic.
For the cold and wet months, what are some vegan alternatives that aren’t replaced by plastic?
I don’t think layering cotton is enough to safely protect from the elements, and wool is the most common natural fiber that seems to be available.
Going to be real with you, avoiding plastic in this day and age is like trying to avoid hitting any bugs while you’re driving, and I say that knowing that plastic is technically an animal product. Obviously, I don’t want people to eat a credit card worth of microplastics every day, but it’s impossible to avoid it altogether. It’s used for pretty much every food packaging, furniture, clothes, decor, appliances, cars, and toy on the market. I’m sure you know how hard it is to avoid from personal experience. I try to be as vegan as I can, given the circumstances of the plastic age, but ultimately oil made of ancient dead animals is still preferable to ongoing and unnecessary animal cruelty today.
While I do tend to avoid pleather clothes because most of it sheds in a couple of years or less and is generally too warm for the environment I live in, if my partner or I really need a raincoat for some reason it’ll probably be made of some sort of plastic. We’re indoor nerds that don’t really camp or have physically demanding jobs so that works for us. One of us commutes to the bus, and a simple raincoat gets the job done. I personally use umbrellas and those are made of metal and… yeah, plastic. I guess I could wear big hats more often if I wanted to stop using umbrellas. Most of the time we’ll either layer up or avoid the outdoors altogether… or just get wet lol. It happens sometimes.
If you’ve got the money, there are alternatives to both leather and pleather, although they tend to be on the more expensive and experimental side, such as apple leather, mushroom leather, and cactus leather. There are also vegan wools and cashmere out there, but they can be expensive at full price. If you need vegan work boots you probably will have to save up for them. TBH I don’t think good quality work boots have gotten any cheaper over the years, so you might have to save for new ones regardless. On the bright side, vegan friendly furniture, clothes, and purses have been on the market for a few years and can be purchased second hand if you spend enough time tracking them down. Purchasing second hand is also very helpful for seeing how well a particular vegan material has aged. I have gotten several pairs of goth boots via trading and thrifting this way. Development on these new materials is overall hopeful, but it could still be a few more years before it becomes mainstream. It would certainly be a lot more hopeful if capitalism were toppled, but, well… you could say that about pretty much everything nowadays.
Thanks for the honest answer. Yeah it’s very difficult. I’ve managed to cut out a lot of plastics and want to prioritize it due to the long term health risks, but there is no way to do it completely. I figure clothes and other textiles are probably the most common plastic we come into contact with daily, and they are designed in a way that sheds and gets everywhere. I watched a video recently of a guy putting a new goretex rain jacket under a showerhead and then testing the water that collected at the bottom. The PFAS were incredibly high. If you can stop having plastic constantly on your body all day every day, it surely goes a long way to limiting ingestion. Luckily I mostly can achieve that with cotton and linen, just the winter/rainy clothes which are the hardest.
The biologically active dose of PFAS is in the parts per trillion range. Virtually 0 PFAS is still too much. Meaning half a PICOgram is detectable in a droplet of water.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ht7nOaIkpI
This guy ran distilled water in a closed system for 24 hours and tested it with 0 PFAS, put an arcteryx jacket and ran it for another 24 hours. The results were PFOA: .65 ppt PFBA: 21 ppt
He also tested his blood which was around 1000 ppt of PFOA, and apparently that is below the national average of around 4000 ppt.
Pretty terrible situation, but I guess all we can do is try to limit it in the ways that we have control over. I wonder if the effort it takes to do this is truly worth it, but there’s literally no way to know so I’ll take my chances trying to avoid it as best as possible.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The 10 States Standards states are working to include PFAS rules. The issue is that most current treatment stacks do not remove PFAS/PFOA effectively. It’s mostly a point of discharge and industrial use restriction problem which the US does not do well already—nevermind the hamstringing coming down currently. EPA was moving to make PFAS/PFOA rules which have been walked back by Trump.
This is a highly specific question that may be outside of the scope of the thread, but IDK where else to mention it. My main barrier to becoming vegan is allergies. I don’t know this for sure because I have no official diagnosis, but my grandma does and was the only person who seemed to understand my seemingly random allergic reactions. But, she told me that it could be MCAS+Histamine allergy, what she deals with. Being randomly allergic to different things for short amounts of time. Last time I tried a prebought vegan alternative, I went into shock. Looking at the ingredients list everytime this has happened, nothing really stuck out to me as something that’d cause that reaction. Right now, I’ve only ever had minorly annoying allergic reactions with meat, nothing that’s sent me to the hospital, while it feels like anytime I start getting comfortable with eating vegan stuff (mostly preprocessed tbh, although my own vegan cooking did send me to the hospital for allergies once), I end up in more medical debt.
Are there any particularly allergy inducing vegan foods? Any particularly hypoallergenic vegan foods?
First, I know medical care is expensive in the USA, but I’d really recommend getting tested if it’s so serious that it’s putting you in the hospital. Vegan or not, you might eat something that kills you down the line. Debt is better than death.
Second, I think you’d be surprised by how many allergy friendly processed foods are also vegan. Both groups are such a tiny part of the overall population that often times they’ll just group us all together and assume every vegan is allergic to something. Some of the more common allergens that affect vegans are soy, wheat, sesame seeds, and nuts. I’ve seen various premade pizzas, proteins, crackers, and cheeses avoid some of these allergens. I’d say out of the most common ones, soy is probably the hardest to avoid. However, if you’re eating out, especially at a vegan place, I’ve never had issues finding out if something had an allergen or not. In fact, sometimes they’ll advertise it right in the dish description.
Of course, there are food allergens out there you’d also be avoiding by going vegan like dairy (I didn’t realize I was allergic to it until I stopped eating it), eggs, meat, and fish (shellfish is a major one). Out of the most common allergies, it’s about a 50/50 on whether it affects vegans or not. I will say, as a vegan in America, I’ve gotten way less food poisoning since I went vegan. I basically just need to be careful about washed greens and restaurant cleanliness nowadays, so that’s been nice.
Again, I’d really recommend getting tested if you can, so you know what exactly it is you need to avoid. Tell your doctor about your family history. If you’re American I can recommend a specific grocery chain that likes to focus on allergy specific vegan foods, but I can tell you now that it won’t be cheap. Once you know what affects you, you’re better off cooking at home.
I’m starting to get medical care, I’m hoping I have time to get everything done before I run out of insurance later this year. Last time I went to go get tested was immediately after my allergic reaction where they didn’t mention that taking allergy meds within a week of the test would mess up the results when making the appointment, just when I walked in the door. Go figure. Yeah, I’m probably allergic to dairy. I actually know I’m allergic to shellfish, so I never have that one.
I mean lots of people are particularly allergic to peanuts and those are vegan. What do you mean by vegan foods specifically? Because vegan food can mean anything from an apple to an Oreo cookie. Do you mean meat substitutes?
Usually meat substitutes are made of soy, wheat, beans, potato, mushrooms, jackfruit, or some combination of starches/gluten. So if your allergies cross over with any of those I’d suggest looking into the ingredients on a meat substitute to figure out where you need to watch out.
What I’d honestly suggest though is moving away from meat substitutes entirely. There are a lot of great cuisines that don’t rely on using meat, dairy, or anything similar!
Yeah, meat substitutes like nuggets, the sort of shit you’d grab from the frozen aisle. I’m a prep cook in my day to day so I rarely have the energy to cook at home as much as I love to cook.
CW: animal products
Do you know, is there a vegan substitute for egg? I am quite fond of fried, scrambled egg (and also of just cooking and eating an egg), so if there is a vegan substitute for that, that would make it a lot easier to become vegan.
Unfortunately, my other question is indeed about diet. How you make sure that you’re getting all of the necessary nutrients? My diet is already very unbalanced and I’m probably not getting all the nutrients, I worry if I just stopped eating animal products and changed nothing else, then it’d make it even worse.
Maybe you can DM me the answers if it’s against the rules to answer this for some reasons? Though I’d rather have a reply here, because that means everyone else who wants to know can also see the answer…
Since there is apparently a rule against recommending brands here I’m gonna be a little vague with some of this answer, but there are several egg alternatives I like. The easiest are the pre made vegan egg mixes, which are sold in grocery stores and are a yellow liquid sold near the animal eggs. These are made of mung beans and a bunch of seasonings, and they scramble up like chicken eggs. Very tasty and easy but a bit pricey.
An everyday alternative is making a tofu scramble. Tofu on its own has a mild flavor so it’s a canvas to season it how you want. Look up recipes if you want the most authentic eggy flavor, but I make mine with turmeric for color, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, nutritional yeast, and black salt (kala namak) which gives it the egg-like flavor. Pretty much just tear up the tofu, mix with those spices, then pan fry until it’s hot. Optionally mix in some water or stock if the texture is too dry.
If you want to get really crazy there are plenty of vegan recipes to recreate over easy eggs, shakshuka, all manner of egg dishes. But these are generally quite involved. I like watching Thee Burger Dude on YouTube who makes vegan versions of fast food, but also has good recipes for over easy eggs and similar staples.
I personally track my nutrition with a nutrition logging app that tells me all my micro- and macro-nutrients for the day. Just eating a normal diet with foods I like meets 90% of my dietary requirements, but tracking it like this has shown me when I have deficiencies in certain vitamins or when I get too much salt or fat etc. Recently I noticed I haven’t gotten enough vitamin K or A, so I started putting spinach in more of my meals and now all my vitamins are at least hitting my daily minimums.
One last quick vegan tip: nutritional yeast and plant milk make the world go round. My nutritional yeast brand gives me all my B vitamins, some fiber, and some protein in one serving and tastes delicious. My soy milk gives me calcium, protein, and vitamin D every morning. These are core staples to me nowadays
I guess I need to look up nutritional yeast 😅 But at least that sounds like something I could buy in bulk and then eat for a long time. The local store does have plant milk, but no tofu, and I don’t think I ever saw vegan egg mix there, either… I could try going to the “organic” / “alternative” food store, but it’s hard to reach because of car-brained road design (I don’t have a car). Once I find the energy to go outside again, I’ll look there.
Thanks for the advice!
you also really need black salt. It’s sulfurous salt and it goes a long way to making things taste eggy.
I’m pretty partial to mixing it, and some bessan (finely ground chickpea flour) if I want to make say savoury French toast.
Of course! Yeah nutritional yeast is something you just use like seasoning, I put it on tofu or beans or whatever. Has a savory flavor. It also keeps for a long time ime.
And most big box stores like walmart have at least a small selection of these things but in my country ass town the stocks on the shelves are limited. I usually have better luck at other grocery stores that I won’t name to not doxx myself lol
Also fuck cars, I couldn’t even walk to the nearest store if I wanted to here. I hope you stay safe on your journeys through the hostile infrastructure ✊
Chickpea egg is a great substitute for scrambles and omelettes. I still miss a dippy egg every now and then but at this point I just like chickpea egg more than bird egg.
Chickpeas! I need to buy some of those… Bookmarked the recipe.
cw: animal products
On the same topic, do you have any suggestions for butter substitutes? I like both the flavor and the fat content, and I don’t know what kind of oil would be a good substitute.
Most grocery stores sell vegan butter products, at least in my neck of the woods. Sometimes they are advertised as vegetable spread, sometimes they directly say vegan butter. But regardless of brand they exist and imo are very similar to animal butter in taste and texture
This very much depends on where you live. Never seen vegan butter in my city but there are homemade vegan butter recipes, generally using soy milk, coconut oil(naturally saturated) and some other things like emulsifiers.
Edit: Apparently this is not the comm for recipes sorry.
They may not be especially well-marked, but you can often find them among other margarines.
I live in a third world country where plant milks just recently got into normal markets.
Even the catalogue for the local vegan shop doesn’t have any butters.
I’ll DM you some recommendations, but I will say here that you’d be surprised how many margarines are vegan friendly.
NewOldGuard’s answer was great, let me DM you some recommendations as well.
animal products
What is a good way to deal with clothing/furniture that contain animal products? I have this dilemma where I hate throwing away anything that’s still usable but also I feel gross anytime I wear something made from dead animals, I think it’s morally wrong and it normalises killing animals for the making of products. I’m pretty sure the answer is to just throw it away and never buy any animal products again and I think I need some encouragement to actually do that (the throwing away part, I stopped buying such things a while ago).
Donate it to a trustworthy local charity rather than throw it away. The damage is done with produced items, so there’s no need to add to a landfill if someone else in need could get use out of it.
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I lived in a collective house which was vegetarian and most of our dishes are adaptable. We ate a lot of stews, pasta, and thinks that could be mass-produced easily like homemade veggie patties.
A good veggie pattie which can be a burger substitute or a sausage patty substitute (with more oil, smoked paprika, and sage) is 2-4 parts mashed beans, 4 parts cornmeal, 1 part chia/flax seeds, 1 part cashews, and 1 part pepitas/sunflower seeds. Finely chop the seeds, sautee them, then just-cover with water and simmer for 5 minutes. While they are simmering, add the flax seed and let it form a sticky gravy as the binder. Mix all ingredients in a bowl with whatever spices you like and form into 2" patties. With practice, you will be able to make 3-4" patties.
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You bet!
I’m afraid I only have experience buying and cooking for 1-2 people.
I have seen a lot of great premade vegan chicken nugget and mac and cheese options for kids (even dino nuggies!), but generally we don’t do a ton of prep cooking on Sunday since one of us is hybrid wfh. There are lots of youtubers that have shared their bulk cooking recipes online and even show you step by step how they do it. I can go hunting for some good ones and DM you if you like. From what I’ve seen, the building components for bulk frozen meals include lots of plant based proteins (beans, tofu, seitan, soy curls, other fake meats), veggies, fruits and then some sort of carb like rice or pasta.
We do like to make a big one pot recipe each Sunday since we know that we don’t like to cook on Monday. Usually it’s something like daal, curry, black bean chili, fake chicken noodle soup, or misc stir-fry. Daal is one of our favorites now, and neither of us had even tried it before going vegan.
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I know this is a 2 day old post, and I’ve been vegan for 2 years, but do you have any tips on just adding more whole food stuff to your diet that is low effort? I’ve been eating hummus veggie sandwiches a lot lately for lunch but I am also desperately trying to crawl out of the vegan junk food hole that I inadvertently dug myself into. It’s both expensive and unhealthy and one of my self-improvement things this year was moving over to WFPB.
I am currently digging myself out of a similar hole after losing a bunch of weight a couple of years ago. Let me try and remember some good habits I had for the both of us.
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I love fruit! If you have a hard time grabbing it vs something quicker, you can food prep it for about 30 min on Sundays and make a big ass bowl of fruit salad for the week. It’s sweet and full of fiber, which will help fill you up. Buying seasonal and clearance produce will help reduce cost. Do NOT put bananas into the fruit salad, they rot quick.
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Instant grits/oatmeal make for a quick lazy meal, are easy to customize with fresher ingredients, and usually come in small individual portions.
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Asian and Mexican grocers tend to have cheaper produce and more variety. Maybe I just lucked out with mine, it’ll vary by location.
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White rice, pasta and bread aren’t always the worst. Just portion it out and treat it like a side dish rather than the main course. I didn’t feel the need to force myself to eat brown rice or anything I didn’t like.
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Dry seasoning over premade sauces every time. If you absolutely must have sauce, make it from scratch. And I’m not talking simple stuff like soy sauce, mustard or vinegar: I’m talking fake mayos, BBQ sauce, ketchup. The dense ones. That shit can sneak up on you as much as sugary drinks. If it isn’t a key ingredient for a larger dish, ignore the sauce. If it is key, just be really careful with portions. Yes, this especially goes for vegan cheese sauces, do it from scratch. The worst offender for this is nut butters btw, so if you make protein drinks with any be really careful with it.
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Soy curls are pog, especially in fake chicken noodle soup. A very shelf stable protein.
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I used to focus on making soups when it was cold and salads when it was hot. I’d have it like 2-3 times a week, and they tend to use up leftover fresh ingredients that might otherwise go bad. There are so many different combos out there, but most end up being really filling and healthy.
Appreciate it! And yes, soy curls are the shit. I make buffalo “chicken” with them and use that for tacos. I need to get more and I’m thinking about splurging on the bulk box this time.
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Have you got any diet advice that you would give 4-years-ago you when you started being vegan?
I will have to DM you, but yes I did diet and lose weight.
Sorry, I didn’t mean diet in those terms. I meant diet in the general sense of the word. Like, perhaps there’s a novel ingredient you discovered or a cuisine style that you wouldn’t have considered before being vegan.
Oh, well that’s simple then, and it’s not even vegan specific.
If I had to go back in time and tell myself food related advice (besides go vegan lol), it would be that just like your muscles can grow and shrink, your taste buds are also capable of incredible change over time.
Just because you hated broccoli as a kid doesn’t mean you hate it now. It’s important to try healthy foods you don’t usually eat once every few years to see if anything has changed. There’s such a wide variety of produce out there to try. You can gradually adjust your spice tolerance, yes even if you’re autistic, I used to hate mustard, and now I put that shit on everything. Any flavor can become as normal as vanilla if you eat it enough times, an example being coconut. At first, coconut can be a very overpowering flavor, but if you eat it long enough it’ll just seem mundane and ordinary. Coconut milk will just taste like… well, milk. You might get cravings for food that you don’t really want to eat, but it is possible to find alternatives and get used to them.