How To Go Vegan (If You Want To)
How To Go Vegan (If You Want To)
A practical guide for those interested in eating fewer animals.
People are eating fewer animals. Between 1994 and 2020, self-described vegetarians (those who don’t eat meat) and vegans (those who eat no animal products) rose from one percent of the US population to six percent. A 2018 survey of 29 countries found that this cohort was eight percent. What’s on the rise most of all is flexitarianism — eating meat and fish less often. 57 percent of Americans said in 2020 that they were eating less meat compared to years past. In 2021, 36 percent said the same. Clearly, there is an appetite for plant-based eating, but making dietary changes can often feel daunting. I’m not here to make the case for why you should change your diet. There’s no shortage of such arguments to be easily found elsewhere.1 Rather, I’m here to offer a guide for how to change your diet — especially for those who would like to but perhaps feel overwhelmed or ill-prepared. Whether you want to stop eating animal products altogether, or are simply looking to cut back, this article is the roadmap I wish I had when I started out.
I decided that I wanted to become a vegetarian in 2009. The problem was, I didn’t know how. I knew nothing about food, cooking, culinary substitutions, cuisine, nutrition, food science, or how to grocery shop like an adult. The menu at Café Jamie consisted of breakfast cereal, eggs, grilled cheese, and things that came out of cardboard boxes or microwaves. I was a 22-year-old male, which is another way of saying that I was as ignorant as a babe, as cultured as a gym sock, and as out of my depth as a nude Norwegian at Death Valley during high noon. The extent of my culinary imagination was that being a vegetarian meant eating a hamburger but without the patty, or eating a steak dinner but only eating the vegetable sides. I saw my desired change in diet as a straightforward subtraction, and had no idea how to reinvent my food wheel.
Instead, I became a flexitarian, though it would be years before I’d learn the term. After four years, I became a proper vegetarian, and after another three years, a vegan. It took me seven years to go from eating the standard American diet (aptly abbreviated as SAD), to a plant-based diet. Looking back 14 years later, it’s clear that if I knew then what I know now, this process would not have taken the better part of a decade. But just because I blundered circuitously for years doesn’t mean you have to.
Taking Stock
The first step is taking inventory of your existing diet to identify the foods you already eat that happen to be plant-based. Things like fruit, oatmeal, falafel, salads, various vegetable sides, nuts, legumes, rice, and most noodles and pastas. Certain kinds of smoothies, soups, snacks, and name-brand items that most omnivores already eat happen to be vegan-friendly. Other foods might contain a single animal-based component that can easily be substituted (five minutes on Google or YouTube will give you substitution options for every foodstuff known to mankind).
To be clear, this is a first step only, but an enormously helpful one. It can feel like changing your diet requires a 100 percent transformation, but that’s simply not true. By getting a feel for the many plant-based foods you already eat, you can start from a much higher and more manageable baseline.
Experiment With New Foods
Plant-based diets are commonly regarded as boring. This is fundamentally a failure of imagination — the same one I had when I was 22. My diet was never more monotonous and unadventurous than when I ate the SAD. I have tried more foods in the seven years since going vegan than in the 29 years prior. Just off the top of my head, before going vegan, I had never eaten mangos, blood oranges, sumo oranges, cranberries, pomelos, okra, kale, Swiss chard, collard greens, mustard greens, Japanese sweet potatoes, Chinese eggplants, Thai basil, rice vermicelli, soba, udon, somen, shiitake mushrooms, gochujang, shallots, fresh ginger, fresh turmeric, flax seeds, radishes, Brussels sprouts, quinoa, kalamata olives, capers,2 Brazil nuts, plantains, black vinegar, Italian long hot chilis, watercress, bean sprouts, almond butter, kombu, San Marzano tomatoes, and about 20 different kinds of legumes. I don’t eat all of these foods on a daily basis, but they are all foods I now eat that I’d never tried before, and that, in most cases, I would likely never have tried.
There’s a whole world of vegetables, fruits, greens, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, and fungi that most people never explore. There are entire culinary traditions that lend themselves very well to plant-based eating, such as Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Ethiopian, Italian, and other Mediterranean cuisines. Ethnic supermarkets go from ad-blocked irrelevancies dotting the landscape to treasure troves of cheap and amazing ingredients once one becomes epicurious. So much of how we eat can be chalked up to inertia and a lack of imagination. We eat the foods we’ve always eaten because they’re familiar and we wouldn’t know what to eat otherwise.
Of course, one does not need to be vegan to eat these foods. The point is, everything we eat is an opportunity cost. You only have so much time and stomach space. The more plants or fungi you eat, the less animal-based foods you’ll correspondingly consume.
Take Advantage of the Changing Market
In the past 15 years, there has been a massive leap not only in the proliferation of vegan mock-animal products, but also in the food science that goes into them. Most grocery stores now carry an abundance of plant-based mock meats, cheeses, and other items, and restaurants increasingly include vegan options on menus. Just as important, food science has come a long way in improving the flavor and overall experience of these vegan alternatives to the point that many people now prefer them. Again, tens of millions of Americans who aren’t vegans nevertheless report eating less meat. Much as it would benefit them, they aren’t replacing those calories with lentils, but with Beyond Burgers and Impossible sausages. People just starting out on plant-based diets tend to lean heavily on these kinds of products, as it allows them to eat the same foods they previously enjoyed, but without the animals. In time, as you discover more in your food exploration, your reliance on these items will wane, but they are an invaluable resource to help you transition away from meat. It has never been easier, more convenient, or tastier to go plant-based.
Complaints and Simple Truths
Some who claim they would like to eat more plant-based, but don’t, cite a number of grievances that they say prevent them from making the switch. Imitation animal foods don’t taste 100 percent identical to their animal counterparts, and some are more expensive. Not every restaurant has vegan options. Shifting away from the SAD diet entails more cooking. Reading ingredient labels at the supermarket is annoying. What about social settings? I don’t think I could live without [insert animal product].
What these complaints boil down to is: Everything isn’t exactly the same as it was before.
Let me lay some Zen wisdom on you: if you want to change your diet, then you have to change your diet. Change means change. Change entails change. Change means that things won’t be the same. If you want to eat all the same things you’ve always eaten, and for every aspect to be identical, then you need to be honest with yourself and admit that you don’t really want to change your diet. This is like saying you want to become a runner, but you don’t want to have to wear running shoes, or stretch, or wake up early, or go outside when it’s cold or hot, or buy a treadmill, or go to a gym, or, you know, run. You want to be a runner by sleeping in and spending your free time binge-watching Netflix, playing computer games, and scrolling social media. Don’t we all.
Eating more plants and fewer animals is not the personal sacrifice many believe it to be, but it certainly is a change. If you go into it with the expectation that your eating habits will just hum along as they always have without any perceptible hitch, you are dooming yourself to failure before you’ve even begun. This holds for any dietary change, whether you’re trying to eat less added sugar, reduce your sodium intake, or eat organic. There will be an adjustment period where the comforts and familiarity of old habits are stripped away. But people adapt. New routines replace old ones, and it becomes no big deal.
Know Thyself
The single most important consideration when adopting lifestyle changes is sustainability. It’s all well and good to change what you eat, but if you revert back to your prior habits after six weeks, that’s not the desired outcome. When we resolve to improve ourselves, we want it to stick, but in order to do that, we need a degree of self-knowledge. We need to know our own psychology, the things we struggle with, and the tendencies we have.
If you are someone who is very set in their ways, slowly transitioning your diet bit-by-bit may be preferable to going cold tofurkey. If the prospect of being that person who holds up a gathering by inquiring about vegan options at a table full of meat-eaters is so uncomfortable that it’s standing in the way of changing your diet, then make an exception. It’s not an all-or-nothing affair. Your options are not hardcore vegan purist or Homer Simpson. Better to eat plant-based at home and be flexible in social settings than to revert back to the SAD diet. If you relish a five-star steak dinner once or twice a year while traveling, and the thought of giving that up makes you not want to bother with any of it, then make that exception. It’s better to adopt most of the changes you’d like to make and sustain them for many years than to adopt all of the changes and then burn out in a number of months.
Hardcore vegan purists don’t want to hear this, but all things being equal, a society with 10 percent vegans and 90 percent people eating the standard American diet will consume more animals than a society in which no one is vegan but everyone eats half the animal products. It’s worth stressing that totally eliminating animal products from your diet, if that’s what you’d ideally like to do, is nowhere near as difficult as you may be worrying.3 But if you don't think you can sustain that diet for one reason or another, simply move in its direction. When I first decided that I wanted to become vegetarian, I knew at the time that I didn’t have the wherewithal to make it work, so I became a flexitarian. Even years later, when I went vegetarian, I still had no intention of becoming vegan, considering it too extreme and adamant that I could never give up dairy. In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that I had sold myself short. We are capable of more than we often credit, but some of us have to take things one bite at a time.
See also: “Why I Don’t Write More About Veganism”
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Read Peter Singer’s new edition of Animal Liberation (1975, 2023) or Dr. Michael Greger’s How Not to Die (2015), or watch the documentary Earthlings (2005).
Not sure how I avoided these growing up Jewish, but I did.
Just be sure to take a weekly vitamin B12 supplement.