Pass the chickpeas, please
How would the average student cope without bacon sandwiches, cheese toasties and Efe’s pizza? Jenny O’Mahony embarks on a week as a tofu-munching vegan.
For the last week, I have lived as one of Britain’s 800 000 vegans, eschewing meat, gelatin, dairy products, honey, fish and eggs. I envisaged a week of immense gastro-envy, growling at diners in the Charles, violently attacking people outside MilkShack and ultimately eating my own arm in a frenzy of meat withdrawal. Those staples of the student diet such as bacon sandwiches and almost the entire menu of Efe’s would be out of bounds; I faced a formidable task.
I prepared for my first day by purchasing some Alpro Soya Milk, and working out what I could eat with ingredients I already had. My Shreddies tasted inexplicably sweet, which I later realised was due to the soya milk, and my first experience of soya in coffee was quickly established as my last. It fizzed and frothed on the surface and left a bitter aftertaste similar to vomit.
The rest of the first day was comparatively normal: a jacket potato with baked beans for lunch and a vegetable stirfry with brown rice for dinner. I wanted noodles, but realised they contained egg; however, this was only a minor annoyance. The first day left me smugly satisfied with the comparative ease with which I had altered my eating habits and, after the revelation that I could still eat peanut butter, I slept a contented slumber.
My saintly image was soon shattered. The next morning as I was eating toast with Flora Light, my flatmate pointed out Flora contains buttermilk. I replied, “What? But it’s called Flora! Like vegetables!” I had truly believed that margarine contained no dairy.
‘Dried peaches and prunes do look like deformed animal droppings - but they are an incomparably healthy snack’
That night I ate out in Orgasmic. Scanning the menu before we entered, I saw nothing for a vegan. Eventually, from a list of around 40 different items, I selected a tomato and mushroom risotto, which I was assured fell under the vegan category. That was the only possibility, however, bar the mixed leaf salad, the prospect of which sounded so sparse and anaemic it depressed me. When my food arrived topped with cheese, I sighed the long-suffering sigh of a food martyr and scraped it off. As my friends gorged on prawns and chicken, I picked at the accompanying bread and stared longingly at the pizza oven.
How difficult it must be for a vegan, even a vegetarian, to eat out. In the average Italian restaurant, for example, the main course is typically pizza, pasta, meat or fish. Three-quarters of the menu are immediately unavailable to vegans and, given the Italian preference for meaty sauces and carbonara, the pasta is likely to be unacceptable as well.
By midweek, I realised my food supplies were running dangerously low and embarked on a journey to Alligator, the organic food store specialising in vegetarian and vegan foods on Fossgate. Strange roots were laid out in the window and an entire wall of rice and oatcakes beckoned to me. Not wanting to appear ignorant, I hid by a secluded lentil shelf and tried to make sense of the different types - dried to split, red to green, canned to bagged, and so on.
Eventually, after much deliberation and comparison with mung beans (I just liked the name), I selected a tin of green lentils in brine, grabbed some chickpeas and scurried over to the more familiar realm of dried fruit.
I would heartily recommend Alligator, simply because they have the kind of unique products you will not find anywhere else. The healthcare section, for example, includes organic toothpaste, washing-up liquid and even tampons. The dates and olives are the best in York. I also picked up tofu and my greatest find yet: vegan chocolate. Green & Blacks 70% Cocoa became a sugar lifeline during my time as a vegan and when yet another apple just wouldn’t cut it, I reached for the 70%.
Good recipes were harder to find. Websites like www.earth.li/~kake/cookery/recipes and www.veganfamily.co.uk /kitchen provided a massive selection to try, whilst my usual port of call, the BBC Food website, proved disappointing, with very few vegan recipes at all and certainly nothing appealing. Following my Alligator trip, I concoted a lentil, potato, carrot and onion soup with a hint of curry. This was by far my best effort: tasty and incorporating lentils in a whole new way, despite its discouragingly chunky-brown slime appearance. Not to be defeated, I held my head high and gobbled it up, thinking at least I was doing my body a favour.
My next couple of efforts, a chickpea curry and a tofu and rice casserole, were mediocre at best, at worst almost inedible. I didn’t cook the chickpeas enough so they cracked in my teeth, and the tofu I tried was abominable. My friend, a vegetarian of a few years, described the taste of tofu as, ironically enough, pork fat. It is flabby, flaccid and inexplicably fatty, never a winning combination, and managed to permeate the rest of the casserole, rendering the entire thing a mess. All in all, my culinary experiments could safely be described as failures, though I do have a new-found fondness for lentils.
One of the most irritating episodes of my week came on Shrove Tuesday. I hosted the annual Nouse Pancake and Punch Social, yet could not eat a single deliciously browned, smothered-in-chocolate pancake. I settled instead for the limp and pale results of my vegan mixture. Made of soya milk and flour, it was bland and refused to crisp properly in the pan, as the few others who tried it out of curiosity will testify. Forgetting my resolution never to drink coffee with soya, the other disappointment of the week was provided by Starbucks, whose mocha with soya milk was caustic, hideously sweet, and, as per usual, cold.
My week as a vegan revealed how hard it is to live on such a diet. Cooking had to be re-learned, eating out was severely restricted and my shopping basket and the places where I filled it metamorphosed. I found myself drowning in lentil tins, packets of dried pulses and mountains of dried fruit. In terms of health, I felt slightly tired for the first couple of days but subsequently (quite literally) full of beans.
I have become very attached to lentils and dried fruit, the latter falling victim to an image problem (in my opinion). Just because dried peaches and prunes look like deformed animal droppings, this should be ignored in favour of the taste of this incomparably healthy snack. Finally, my bowels have never been more active, something I was glad to leave behind; even if my waistband did feel looser towards the end of the week. I have a certain admiration for full-time vegans, but personally I have little moral conscience on the topic of consuming meat.
The appeal of the vegan lifestyle for me is the choice of foods that all too often go untested, plus the health benefits of a diet with no cholesterol and very little saturated fat. I will continue to eat vegan dishes every so often, but the steak and cheese sandwich I devoured at 12:01am after my last night speaks for itself.
Lynn
You want to try eating a gluten free diet. This is not a lifestyle choice but a medical necessity for diagnosed coeliacs. No wheat, rye oats or barley means no pasta, pizze, proper bread and a host of other foods you normal people take for granted!