The Skinny's Vegan Diary

“You’re only doing it for a week?” In terms of possible responses, the first outside take on our office attempt at embracing plant-based dining wasn't a ringing endorsement. Veganism is, after all, an option taken by a not insignificant number of people on a full-time basis. More than half a million people in the UK are vegan, happily living out a plant-based existence without a care in the world. 

The Skinny office, however, is anything but vegan – we point you in the direction of our extensive article from just before Christmas on our favourite cheeses, and trust that it suffices as evidence. We like cakes, and burgers, and tacos; we are full-on omnivores. Still, with the growth of Veganuary as an annual start to the culinary year, and what with it being the season for trying out fad diets and unsustainable lifestyle changes, we thought we’d give it a go. Only for a week, though.

First of all, the rules: no meat, no dairy, no eggs (a point which had to be reinforced with surprising frequency), and no animal byproducts – no whey, Jose. We crafted up a few on-the-fly exceptions, including a rule allowing cod liver oil on the grounds that it’s medicinal (“it staves off winter depression, and this is pretty fucking depressing”), but by and large it was all plants all the way. Seven days, three meals a day, the world is your oyster, except you can’t have any oysters.

Of course, the first thing we all did on our plant-based diet was try to plod forward as before. When you’re conditioned to have a coffee and a pastry in the morning, a sandwich at lunchtime, and something with meat in it for dinner, veganism requires a complete rethink of what's on the menu. Some changes are easy – take the milk out of the coffee, swap that pastry for a delicious orange – but when there is one sandwich in the whole supermarket that you're permitted to have, the dietary game gets more difficult. Couple that with the proportion of apparently innocuous products that feature trace amounts of animal, and things get trickier still. If you're a vegan, and you happen to be allergic to avocados, or nuts, or legumes, then you can find yourself out of options very quickly.

Of course we know that these are the self-regarding moans of the meat-eater class, gladly deforesting the world and pumping it full of cow farts just so they can have a flat white every morning. The figures suggest that a vegan diet can do genuine good for the environment – the calculations suggest that, for each of our vegan weeks, 68kg of carbon dioxide was kept out of the atmosphere, and an area of forest the size of a large living room wasn't chopped down. Rearing animals on an industrial scale for food can do incredible environmental damage, and for what? So we can have a bit of cheese? Mate, if you really want cheese, it's not a problem – we can make cheese.

This is what throws outsiders when they first step into the vegan dojo; veganism presents a grim utilitarianism on one hand, and outlandish invention on the other. For every lentil-based stew and ‘raw carrots are just as good as a bag of crisps’ buzzkill, there are dozens of food science experiments run amok just waiting for your approval once you start to hunt them down. From bacon-flavoured snacks that have never been anywhere near a pig but still taste great, to yoghurts that wouldn't know a cow if it kicked them in the head, vegan chefs are doing their best to keep things fun.

Want vegan chocolate buttons? You’ve got it, although they do come with a rather unfortunate aftertaste that's a lot like sugary tin foil. Vegan fried chicken? Incredibly, yes. The aforementioned vegan cheese? We tried it, and some of it was relatively convincing; some of it also dissolved on contact with heat, leaving an attempted cheese toastie looking like a puddle between two bits of bread. A mixed bag, you might say.

Our results as a group were mixed too; some of us found it comparatively easy, if not a bit joyless and officious. There was a certain bureaucracy that didn't go down well with some, who begrudged having to check every single packet for traces of milk whey. Others went into open revolt, loudly shouting that the whole thing was "bullshit" (bullshit, by the way, is not vegan), while a few gracefully took it in their stride. The folk who did the best were the most adaptable and pliable, who either relished the challenge or enjoyed the regimen; the rest of us free spirits spent much of the time complaining about how dramatically things had changed and trying to break the spirits of the die-hards.

And that's the thing – veganism is actually quite an extreme stance to take; it isn't wrong, or right, but it is extreme. It requires genuine willpower, a scientific eye for detail and a real inventiveness that the omnivorous attitude of 'chucking some meat in the oven and finding something to go with it' simply doesn't. Would any of us stick to a strictly vegan diet in the future? Honestly, no – it may be healthy, but it can be hard-going, plus we all love cheese. But would we try it again next Veganuary? Maybe... but only for a week.