What You Need To Know When You Are Starting Out As A Dollar Strapped Vegan

You are almost ready to become a vegan, and you are wondering about what to expect. You are somewhat wary, a little anxious, perhaps.

After all, this will create a big shift in your day to day habits.

Day by day, what will you do for food? How will you have lunch when you are at work? Are you able to eat at regular places at all? What about eating out with non-vegan friends?

Making the shift to veganism three years ago, I can tell you it was both easy and hard at the same time.

It is easy and hard to adopt and maintain a full on vegan diet and all round vegan way of life. Yes, it is. And let no one tell you any different.

As you know, vegan eateries are still not commonplace today, and they weren’t three years ago.

Yet I was lucky in that regard. There was actually a 100% vegan restaurant near the last room I rented. This was three years ago. And I have already moved to another rented room. But I digress.

Back then, and now, I had little to spend by way of daily food money, and could not afford to have most of my meals at the fancy vegan restaurant that was only a five minute walk away.

Why, just having a simple vegan burger there would cost nearly a whole week’s worth of groceries that might consist of simple, local vegetables, pasta or rice, and various sources of protein like beans and tofu.

As a vegan on a tight budget (euphemism for ‘being poor’) this meant only one thing.
I had to learn to become a good cook. I had to, I just had to, if I was to survive as a vegan. The most daunting ongoing challenge facing a vegan is not motivation. It is not how do I keep myself from consuming animals or animal products.

It is the cooking.

Oh good golly gosh almighty.

It is ALL the cooking. All the time. Every day. Every night. And the washing of dishes. Every day. Every night. Don’t get me started on all the washing of all the dishes, my friend. That tale has no end in sight.

You know, I have watched the gruesome, heart wrenching animal agriculture footage, and you may have seen them too. After all, ‘Earthlings’, the documentary exposing factory farm practices, is classed at IMDB as ‘documentary/horror’.

I was a vegetarian who ate eggs and consumed dairy for decades before I made the switch. But I had not watched the footage taken at egg and dairy farms prior to the switch.

I believe, had I done so decades ago, I would have gone vegan in my teens. Instead I made a “safe” choice. A choice, I believed at the time, that was a fair compromise between my personal ethics and the practicalities of having to live in this kind of world.

Being that kind of vegetarian meant that falling off the bandwagon was a regular affair. You got the eggs and cheese, and who’s to know, when you slip in some fish once in awhile.

First the fish…
It went on like this for decades, when fish gave way to ‘white meat’.
Then -pinched for time and stranded in some mall — you get a McDonald’s Big Mac.

Before you know it, you’re just back to regular amoral, ’normal’ food consumption habits, not taking a stand, not being what your conscience and your heart knows you must be. Not caring about the consequences of the choices you’re making, or the untold suffering they do cause.

But that’s not you.

That was me.

And I must take full responsibility for my mistakes, now that I know the full story.

So, I became a vegan. Despite society’s strange fear of vegans. Despite the innumerable warnings of malnutrition and worse- food cravings.

But the fact was, the switch was pretty painless.

I have not wilfully slipped off the mighty and sturdy vegan wagon yet. The whole scale nature of the change and the primary moral reason behind it, will sustain a person, I found, through rough times and bad times, where it gets really hard to find any “non-animal” food. If I find myself craving anything, I remember, it’s not really “food”. It once was a being of joy and tears, fear and love. This is not food. This is a person. Or rather, this was a person.

And I do not eat people.

So you cook. Even if you cannot. You learn. Through mistakes and burnt dal and bryani rice dinners, you learn. First you get a small portable hot plate. Because, you stay in a tiny room. After the hot plate goes wonky, you get an induction plate sorta-cooker plate type thing. Woah, way better!

Safer to cook on, easier to clean. A small mini-fridge in the corner. The back of which has not been cleaned in a year. But I digress. You cook. You cook with all the strength you got. Because, the animals.

You watch the well-to-do vegan cooking channels on youtube with their super pricey, 100 odd ingredient “easy” recipes, and peruse endless vegan recipe websites. Most promote this idea of veganism as some kind of trendy, High Street lifestyle kinda thing, you don’t want to know. Makes you feel angry and guilty for not being as rich as a Kardashian. So, f*ck that.

Simplified versions of the sorts of meals those recipe sites feature can always be whipped up, minus the expensive saffron, or the “harder to find than an intelligent Trump supporter” nutritional yeast. You need to experiment. A lot.

Nobody told you that a chickpea flour mock omelette takes roughly 20–25 minutes to cook since in your experience, cooking the original egg version took less than five minutes, if at that. Nobody told you using less cooking oil in the beginning is much better, and adding more as you cook is far better than already having too much oil in because you can’t remove it — at all.

So you learn, and you cook, and you learn some more. You factor down, not up, to the staple meals you can make on the ready, the sandwiches you can take with you when you go out, the easy to find and cheap store-bought pasta and pasta sauce (read the ingredients! So important! “May contain eggs”! Ok, nope. Try another brand. Ouch!) when you are not up to making anything even remotely fancy, and many a day or night you won’t be. The ‘nice’ vegan eateries, all trendy and cool, with their mostly expatriate or upper middle-class clientele, you can only afford to go to very, very occasionally.

This is your life now.

Well, it is my life now, anyway.

But you know what? You really know what?

It’s the best. It’s the best life, ever.

I love it. I love it so much. Because nothing I could ever go through, the little inconveniences, the daily difficulties, the reading of the teeny tiny packet ingredient lists, none of this can ever compare. It can never compare to what we collectively have done and continue to do to the animals.

I’d like to think that I make a difference. I intend to make more of a difference, in time.

This is my stand. This is my life.

You know, I really do want to sign up to do more. In time. If at all possible. Volunteer at animal rescue farms. Find an appropriate vegan activism bunch and get involved.

That will be great. One day.

But for now the rice is cooking, and I really need to tend to it before it burns.