Welcome

Greetings and salutations. It is World Vegan Day, the first day of World Vegan Month and I would like to welcome you to VeganNomadGeek’s first published post. I want to use this post to introduce myself, and let you know who I and where I am in my journey.

Greetings

I first went vegan when I was 25. I had been vegetarian for about six years, and the more research I did the more it felt like the right thing to do. I was very much into the environment, and was studying a degree in environmental sciences, it was clear that if I really cared about the environment the best thing I could do was go vegan. The reduction in the amount of acreage it takes to feed a vegan compared to what it takes to feed an omnivore is crazy but when you think about it, it’s also pretty obvious. I mean I can eat a lot but I can’t eat as much as a being four times my size (cows are big).

While I was living in a big city being vegan was great but then I moved to a small town in Cornwall. There was no health food shop, and only one small supermarket, and this was in the days before supermarkets had really good ethnic sections, and you couldn’t shop online. I ate a lot of salad, baked beans, jacket potatoes, and pasta with tomato sauce. It wasn’t healthy, and it made me really ill. So after three years as a vegan I closed my mind to the suffering and started eating animal products again.

I managed to keep my mind closed for another nine years, on the odd occasion I let myself think about it I had way more guilt about the dairy I consumed than the meat. I abhorred the idea of veal and foes gras but happily munched on chicken wings and other meat products. Then one day I woke up and the smell of meat turned my stomach. It was literally overnight, one day I was tucking into a king kebab from the takeaway the next my housemate grilling chicken made me nauseous….to the point I thought his food must be off. When I expressed this concern my other housemate looked concerned, as they both assured me it smelt normal. To me it didn’t, it smelt like death. It had never been so clear to me that I needed to make changes. I gave my housemate all the fresh and frozen animal products I had, I took all the tinned and packet stuff to the food bank collection bin, and I stocked up on products that were plant based.

It’s been nine months since that day and I haven’t looked back, I sometimes feel guilty for all those years when I lost my way, and ignored the suffering I knew was happening but I can’t change the past, I can only do better going forward. If I’m being honest in this day and age I have no excuse for ever going back to my previous ways, it is so easy to be vegan now. Every supermarket sells dairy-free cheese, butter, ‘milk’ and yogurt. You can pick up vegan meat alternatives in the freezer section of your local Tesco. Lots of shops are selling dried beans, lentils and a vast array of grains. And the flavour profiles are amazing, I have had to remind myself with a variety of items that what I was eating didn’t contain any animal products because the flavour and textures have been so close.

It’s so easy being vegan now, I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.