Vegan Days
New week, new habits
I started this new week willing to do my best and push myself harder in this challenge. They say that every good day starts with a good breakfast, so as soon as I got out of bed I started to prepare for this new kind of experience; instead of biscuits and milk with cornflakes, I ate cereal bread with jam and had a glass of chocolate soy milk: a tasty and healthy combination that really surprised me. Since I had got up quite late I decided to have just a salad for lunch and save some of the ingredients I had bought at the grocery store for the evening. At dinnertime, I invited a vegetarian friend who gave me a lot of useful insights on how to enjoy a plant-based diet. Since he was cooking, my flatmates, who are not very fond of my cuisine, decided to join us and shared a vegan meal. Dinner included three courses: a risotto with mushrooms and leek, roasted aubergines and potatoes with tofu and vegan mint ice cream. At last a decent meal, but just because it didn’t come from me. We cooked all together and sat down for an hour enjoying the food; it has been really nice to include my friends in the challenge, even if just for a meal.
I woke up quite early and decided to try again the breakfast combination I had tried on Monday since I had really enjoyed it. Before heading to Politecnico to attend class I went to the supermarket to buy something quick to prepare for lunch and add some fresh vegetables to my food storage. While I was at the store I decided to give it another shot and try one more time to find suitable cornflakes for my breakfast (or dinner) since I was really missing them. After ten minutes spent checking all the nutritional boards on the boxes, I bought Cheerios which seemed the only ones without traces of milk inside. I paid and arrived home happy to finally have my cornflakes and..guess what? I was so busy looking for milk traces that I totally ignored the huge label saying they were cereals with HONEY! (and honey is obviously not vegan since its produced by bees) …I was so upset that I just hid them at the back of my storage cabinet, waiting for better non-vegan days.
The previous evening I had forgotten to prepare lunch to bring with me at uni so I had to explore the vegan options provided by local takeaway restaurants around the campus. It was quite late so the offer of food was quite restricted, I had to skip a few places because there weren’t any options left for me. Fortunately, at the Chinese restaurant, I found a portion of soy noodles with vegetables. Obviously, I would have preferred the ones with chicken and scrambled egg but these were fine and quite tasty in the end…actually way better than my dinner. In the evening, in fact, I had finished the veggie burgers and vegetables to cook so I decided to go for a soup of potatoes and courgettes which revealed to be quite tasteless. A poor but at least healthy meal, the third soup based on the week.
Trying a vegan experience really makes you realize how many products that we buy in our daily lives must be avoided to pursue this challenging and more sustainable lifestyle. One thing I noticed about ready-made vegan products (like burgers or tofu) is the great amount of packaging that these have: in common supermarkets, they are usually stored in a specific section and have both a plastic packaging and a color printed paper label describing all their features. Finding products without additional packaging is quite difficult, there are no counters where to get them like for example cheese, butchers, cold cuts or fish. This aspect is quite negative for the amount of useless waste produced.
At the end of the week, I will be heading back home in the countryside near Treviso. Being vegan might be a little easier there since I live on a farm and we have both a vegetable garden and an orchard. I already convinced my parents and brothers to try this challenge with me so I’m quite curious about the results of this bucolic weekend.
