Becoming vegan can be demanding. Every time sophomore Emily Mills ate meat, her stomach would hurt. The pain caused her to want to make a change. Just about a month ago, Mills decided to cut meat out of her diet, and became vegan. Despite this demanding change, Mills has noticed a significant change in her day to day life.
“I was a little bit hungrier because it’s not as filling, but I felt more energized. I feel like every kind of restaurant has animal products in it. With that I normally go to any restaurant and then I just ask for the dressing on the side,” Mills said.
Meal prepping is an important part of becoming vegan, and for Mills, making the right kind of food gives her the energy she needs to go about her day. Mills looks in the fridge for a while normally trying to figure out what she can eat.
“I like to make teriyaki tofu. It’s kind of like stir-fried tofu with teriyaki sauce. Tofu tastes like it’s kind of like a whipped bread kind of thing. But if you season it right, it tastes good,” Mills said.
Culinary teacher Molly Gordon, who has been a chef for about eight years, said the process of finding and making vegan food can be difficult. According to her, even looking for a decent vegan restaurant can be challenging because of cross contamination.
“It depends on what type of restaurant you’re looking for. If you’re a cool vegan restaurant, obviously, it’s a lot easier because you’re not bringing in products that could have any animal products on it. But if you’re just a normal restaurant and you’re offering some vegan items, you just have to make sure that there’s no cross contamination, so just keeping them in separate environments, separate equipment, and separate cooking environments,” Gordon said.
Protein is very important for the human body to have a healthy diet. However, there is protein that does not come from animal products or animal by-products. Vegans often make the mistake of lacking their protein intake, a crucial nutrient to the human body. Yet, there are many creative ways vegans can include protein in their diet.
“Protein that [is] found in vegan is from things like soybeans…, a lot of beans, [and] nuts have proteins, so sometimes you see people use cashews. There’s [also] things like nutritional yeast. So things are fortified with things like vitamins and nutrients that are found in animal-like proteins, but a lot of vegetables are provided in vegan food for the protein,” Gordon said.
The hardest part about cooking vegan food is trying to find an alternative meat that will taste good, look good, and provide the nutrients needed in day-to-day life. One of the most important things about meat alternatives is making it appealing to people who need that meat sensation. There are a good amount of companies that now make good meat alternatives like soybeans and Beyond Meat.
“If you’ve been vegan your whole life, you kinda don’t miss it, but if someone’s deciding to become a vegan, they’re gonna miss the way a burger tastes or like the crispness of a chicken nugget. So just making vegan food taste and look not vegan so that everyone can kinda get the same dining experience. You don’t want to be able to look at a table and be able to pick out what’s vegan and not vegan,” Gordon said.
There are all kinds of vegetarianism, for example pescatarian. This is where the only meat one can eat is seafood. Junior Kathryn Ball went from being vegan to being a pescatarian.
“I’ve been vegan/pescatarian for four or five months. The whole animal slaughter stuff just kind of turned me off of meat,” Ball said.
Ball is an active person with cheerleading. She realized she had to find a source of protein somewhere.
“I just told people I’m a vegetarian, but I only eat seafood and poultry. Just because I needed some source of protein and that’s mainly the only really meat I care about,” Bell said.
With cheerleading and being vegan she saw she couldn’t keep up energy which was affecting her performance.
“I didn’t really notice a difference, but I guess my coach did, but I probably just had really bad endurance and couldn’t really keep up my energy. Now I eat a lot of pasta and chicken alfredo noodles. I just have frozen chicken nuggets a lot of the time and mainly, I’ll have deli slices of turkey and that’s usually really an easy snack to grab as my protein,” Bell said.
