Finally a Vegan: My Journey to Veganuary and Beyond

By Stephanie Jane

Stephanie took part in Veganuary, the month-long global challenge to try veganism, for January 2019. In Finally a Vegan she describes how her changing attitudes to animal welfare and exploitation led her from staunch omnivore to vegetarianism in the preceding years. She recalls her excitement at taking part in the challenge itself and shares her daily food diary, failures as well as triumphs.

Drawing on her post-Veganuary experiences, Stephanie then responds to the common questions but what about my boots? but isn't it expensive? and but surely it isn't healthy? before honestly asking herself how vegan do I want to be?

Ideal for vegan-curious readers, Finally a Vegan is an insightful memoir inspired by one life-changing month.

 

10% of Finally A Vegan profits will be donated to vegan projects and charities

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephanie Jane
• Release date: Dec 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393444589

Stephanie Jane

Reader, wanderer, vegan. Stephanie Jane has been an avid reader for as long as she can remember. She loves discovering new authors from all around the world and is happiest when engrossed in a compelling novel with tea and cake to hand. Raised in Sussex, England, Stephanie developed a wanderlust in her late twenties. She spends her time exploring the UK and Western Europe with her partner, setting out on foot or bicycle from their almost-vintage motorhome, and firmly believes everywhere has something worth seeing if we slow down enough to appreciate its smallest details. Stephanie has been vegan since 2019 and strives to incorporate zero waste ideals into her life. She enjoys browsing vintage clothing shops and would collect antique kitchenware if she ever again lives in a house with enough space. Connect with Stephanie via the Finally A Vegan Facebook page (https://facebook.com/finallyavegan/), her book review blog, Literary Flits (http://litflits.blogspot.com), Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20893089.Stephanie_Jane) and Twitter (http://twitter.com/Stephanie_Jne)

Book preview

Stephanie took part in Veganuary, the month-long global challenge to try veganism, for the 31 days of January 2019. In Finally a Vegan she describes how her changing attitudes to animal welfare and exploitation led her from staunch omnivore to vegetarianism in the preceding years. She recalls her excitement at taking part in the challenge itself and shares her daily food diary, failures as well as triumphs.

Drawing on her post-Veganuary experiences, Stephanie then responds to the common questions, but what about my boots? but isn't it expensive? and but surely it isn't healthy? before honestly asking herself, how vegan do I want to be?

Ideal for vegan-curious readers, Finally a Vegan is an insightful memoir inspired by one life-changing month.

My Journey to Veganism

In January 2019 I took part in the Veganuary challenge and I can honestly say that doing so changed my life – for the better! In this book I am going to discuss what led me to Veganuary and what I have learned about veganism and about myself in the nearly two years since.

Veganuary (1) is a UK non-profit organisation that 'promotes and educates about veganism by encouraging people to follow a vegan lifestyle for the month of January'. It's a fun idea with a serious underlying message about how individuals can avoid supporting the cruelty involved in intensively mass farming animals, and how turning instead to a plant-based diet and lifestyle can help in the battle to reverse global environmental destruction and climate change. The annual month-long challenge first took place in January 2014 with 3,000 people signing up. I don't personally remember even being aware of Veganuary until I spotted social media mentions of their 2018 campaign. It did look like an initiative I would enjoy, but I dredged up a myriad of excuses as to why it wasn't the right choice for me at the time, and watched the month unfold on Twitter instead.

For me, the first definitive step towards connecting the dots between what I personally consumed and the food production practices I despised was reading Philip Lymbery's hard-hitting book, Farmageddon (2), in January 2015. I can't imagine anyone actually saying they support cruelty to animals, but I was gradually becoming disturbingly aware that this was exactly what I did pretty much every time I went shopping. I was an omnivore who wore wool, silk and leather and laid my head on a feather-stuffed pillow at night. We did conscientiously buy free range eggs and had upgraded our chicken to RSPCA Freedom Food labelled birds after watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's television documentary, Hugh's Chicken Run, broadcast in 2008. (This was over a decade prior to the dXe Hoads Farm exposé (3) so I still believed an RSPCA label was worth the sticker it was printed on.) However, on some level I think I knew I was kidding myself with the 'humanity' of my choices. The idyllic images used to sell animal products were no longer representative of the way the vast majority of animals were farmed in Britain, and I was an active participant in their suffering. I was aware of the horrors of factory farming but, when I considered my food's origins at all, I naively chose to imagine it as a niche part of Britain's farming industry or something that happened in nations without our food standards' legislation. I arrogantly thought I had a pretty good idea of the situation prior to reading Farmageddon. It turned out that my impression was nowhere near the grim truth.

I have included my 2015 Farmageddon book review in the Further Reading chapter at the end of Finally a Vegan, so here I will quote instead from a recipe blog post I wrote a few weeks after reading the book:

"We have been giving a lot of thought to what we eat recently; in fact since I read (and have then been incessantly quoting) Farmageddon. I was shocked to learn about the poor nutritional content of factory farmed meat, although it makes sense when we consider the reduction in flavour that we have noticed over the past few years. We seem to be commenting more often on the blandness of meat and poultry, yet without a similar lack of flavour to all foods so it's not just our taste buds wearing out."

Vegan me was shocked at how selfish my reasoning used to be! While I applaud my motivation to improve farmed animal welfare, seeing my taste buds topping my priority list is, frankly, embarrassing – especially as not wrecking my financial situation came a close second.

"One of the ways Farmageddon suggested individual consumers can help to end factory farming is by not buying its produce. Upping our minimum quality threshold again to free range and organically produced meat seemed fantastically expensive compared to what we were used to paying. I realised that, in order not to totally blow the week's food budget by Thursday, my partner Dave and I were going to need to eat a much greater proportion of veggies."

My brain was buzzing with farming injustices, suffering animals and the need to extricate myself from that consumer chain, but I was unsure how to go about it. Farmageddon was the first time I saw mention of Meat-free Mondays (4). This simple idea caught my imagination and I soon had us both observing a single meat-free day each week. Dave was fairly happy to join in as we both did already like to cook regular dinners that happened to be vegetarian. Breakfasts were almost always vegetarian anyway and a Meat-free lunch would simply be a question of making cheese sandwiches on a work day or a vegetable soup on Bank Holiday Mondays. We often already did this at weekends. Indeed one of my first blogged recipes back in March 2013 was for a vegan Mushroom Soup (5) although I only tagged the post as vegetarian. Veganism wasn't even on my radar back then! The weekly Meat-free Monday commitment combined familiar ideas, but it felt like a huge deal to me. For the person I was at the time, it was indeed a big step. I had first played around with the idea of being vegetarian over a quarter of a century previously and I had finally embraced the lifestyle. For one whole day a week.

When I began to mull over the idea of writing this book I tried to remember when vegetarianism first occurred to me and I think I must have been around seven or eight years old. In our house, the Sunday roast was an institution. My parents had to watch their pennies, but there would always be a joint of beef, pork or lamb for Sunday lunch, or even a chicken as a special treat at the end of the month when Mum got paid. This was back in the early 1980s when a chicken was a luxury. It's amazing how fast we, as a society, have got used to the idea that meat should be cheap. Unfortunately, while I loved (and still do love) crispy roast potatoes and peas with gravy, I wasn't keen on roast beef. It tended to be rather overcooked and dry (sorry, Mum!). I knew it was expensive and we should be thankful we had beef on the table, but I physically struggled to eat it. I would chew and chew, desperately trying but unable to swallow the mouthful, until I had to spit it out at which point Dad, or sometimes Mum, would lose their temper. One Sunday, in tearful response to yet another tirade about 'lack of gratitude' and 'children in Bangladesh' and 'eating what's put in front of us', I whined 'it's not fair' because 'H never has to eat meat'. (H was a vegetarian school friend – quite the oddity back then.) This was not a smart thing to say! The disparity, I promptly learned, was because H's parents 'care more about bl**dy animals than their own children'. I was sent to bed in disgrace which wasn't so bad because I had already devoured my potatoes and could abandon the remaining beef. That episode banished all thoughts I had about making my own dietary choices any time soon.

This is not to say that my childhood home was completely averse to vegetarian food. A weekday dinner would often be Cauliflower Cheese or Jacket Potato with Baked Beans and