The Livewire Guide to Going, Being and Staying Veggie

Juliet Gellatley

Chapter 18 – First Steps for Virgin Veggies

So you’ve decided to go veggie or vegan – now what do you do? Panic? No way! There are now so many of us that you’re no longer considered a weirdo who does strange things in private! These days, even most burger bars offer a meat-free alternative to minced cow.

A vegetarian is someone who doesn’t eat any dead animals or bits taken from them. That means no meat; no poultry – chicken, turkey, etc; no fish or other water animals like prawns or crab; and no slaughterhouse products such as gelatine and animal fat. A vegan is someone who doesn’t eat any animal products at all, including eggs or dairy produce such as milk, cheese and butter.

Perhaps the most obscure-sounding of all things to look out for is gelatine. In fact, it’s in a lot of food we generally don’t think of as having anything to do with meat. Gelatine is a form of edible glue and is used to stick together sweets like some fruit gums, mints and liquorice all-sorts. It’s also used in some yoghurts and ice creams, as well as jellies.

Gelatine is made by boiling the ligaments, tendons, bones, hooves and horns of pigs, cows and horses. In most European countries, manufacturers have to list all the ingredients of a product on the label so check on the packaging if you want to avoid gelatine. (As cows are used in the manufacture of gelatine, it’s doubly important if you’re worried about BSE.) You may find checking the labels a pain at first, but you soon get to know which products use gelatine and which don’t. If you see the words ‘guar gum’ or ‘agar agar’ in the list of ingredients, don’t worry. These are the veggie alternatives to gelatine, which more and more manufacturers are using.

Animal fat is just that – fat from the bodies of dead animals. It’s boiled off the skin and used in some biscuits, margarine, cake, soups and other things. Suet is the fat taken from an animal’s kidneys. Fortunately, animal fat and suet are increasingly recognised as unhealthy, and loads of products now only use vegetable fats – again, just look at the list of ingredients on the package.

Label reading can be a drag as I’ve said, but there are ways of making it easier. Once you know a product is animal-free, you don’t have to read the label again. There are also manufacturers who only produce vegetarian products, so once you discover who these are, you’ll be able to buy their goods without worry. These brands are still mostly stocked by health food shops but increasingly they’re in a lot of supermarkets as well.

In fact, most of the foods we eat don’t have bits of dead animals in them. Most kitchens usually have plenty to much on which is veggie, including tins of beans, cereals, pasta and pasta dishes, vegetables, fruit, bread, veggie soups and veggie spreads, including yeast extracts like Marmite, Vegemite, Vecon and Promite, to name a few. So before your hunger pangs turn to panic, have a rake around in the cupboards at home and see what you find – you could be in for a pleasant surprise!

If you don’t come up with much, it’s time to visit the shops where you’ll find a choice so wide you won’t know where to start. Supermarkets, especially, have been quick to cash in on the growing veggie boom and nowadays sell most of the ingredients you’ll need for a complete veggie meal.

Some supermarkets even have a ‘special’ vegetarian section, but this is really a bit pointless because vegetarian products are on virtually every shelf. In the tinned-food section, there is every imaginable fruit and vegetable. There are loads of pulses too – red kidney beans, black-eyed beans, canellini, borlotti beans and chick peas to name a few – all great for salads or to use instead of meat in casseroles, lasagne, bakes or pies. Tinned baked beans or curried baked beans, baked beans with veggie sausages in them, spaghetti hoops and vegetable bolognese in cans are also easy to find and cook. (Just pop them in a pot and heat them up.) There are plenty of tinned soups, too.

In the dried-foods section, you’ll find all the different pastas as well as the jars of veggie sauces to go with them. Noodles are also good and easy to cook. There’s every kind of rice, dried potatoes and even some products you may never have heard of before – bulgar wheat, cous cous and polenta. You can even get pizza bases in packs!

Now whiz your trolley round to the frozen-food cabinets and feast your eyes. Here are the veggie sausages, burgers and ‘beef-like’ pies, veggie-steaks and nuggets, imitation chicken and toad-in-the-hole, as well as ready-to-eat pasta dishes such as veggie lasagne and cannelloni. The cooking instructions are dead simple. If the rest of your family is having meat and two veg, you can just heat up one of these to eat instead of the meat.

What often gives these frozen foods their ‘meaty’ feel is wheat protein (gluten) as well as textured vegetable protein (TVP) from soya beans. You can also buy TVP on its own dried mince or in frozen chunks and make up your own dishes, using it in the same way you would meat to cook savoury ‘mince’, chilli, casseroles, shepherd’s pie, curries and the like. If anyone asks, TVP is healthier than meat. It’s high in protein and vitamins, and low in fat. (And no one’s ever died from food poisoning or mad cow disease from eating TVP!)

As well as finding TVP sausages in the supermarket freezer, you’ll probably find a whole range of non-meat bangers made from vegetables and tofu. Most of these taste spookily meaty. There’s also a range of dry sausage mixes to which you add water, shape and then fry.

You can’t get away from burgers even as a veggie, and again there are lots of different types. Some are made from chopped-up vegetables held together in a burger shape while others mimic meat. These days the veggie burger’s in such big demand that most supermarkets have produced their own brands. I’ve even discovered a ‘chargrilled burger’ which I guarantee even the most blinkered carnivore couldn’t tell from meat. (Once you become a more confident veggie cook, you may even want to make your own burgers with roast peanuts of TVP.)

Most of the big supermarkets also do their own range of ready-made vegetarian foods, from curries to mushroom stroganoff, cheese-and-spinach rolls to lasagne, cheese crowns to veggie cottage pies – all usually kept in the chiller cabinet. You don’t have to be a whiz in the kitchen to get by. However, if you do want to get more involved in cooking, there are some good vegetarian cook books to help you get started, like The L-Plate Vegetarian, see page 189.

Be careful when buying cheeses because not all of them are vegetarian. To make a lot of cheeses, including Cheddar and Cheshire, a product called rennet is added to the milk to make it curdle. Most rennet comes from the stomachs of slaughtered calves but there is a vegetable variety and it’s this that’s used in veggie cheeses, including veggie Cheddar and Cheshire. So look for ‘vegetarian cheese’ or ‘suitable for vegetarians’ on the label. A lot of soft cheeses like Brie don’t use rennet at all. However, if you’re not sure or if the label isn’t clear, don’t be afraid to ask.

Ice creams too, believe it or not, aren’t necessarily vegetarian either. Pure dairy ice creams obviously are, but others are made from ‘non-dairy’ fat, which can either mean vegetable or animal fat, and it doesn’t always say which on the label. Yes, you’ve guessed it – cold piggy cream in a tub!

There’s often a big temptation when people first go veggie to overdose on cheese and other dairy products. Watch it! It isn’t good to overboard on these foods because at the end of the day you’re still eating a type of animal fat.

If you’ve decided to skip dairy products as well as well as meat, then the humble and amazingly versatile soya bean comes to the rescue again. Replace cow’s milk with soya milk. It’s available from almost all supermarkets and certainly all health-food shops. Different brands of soya milk taste very different from one another, so if you don’t like one, try another. One of the most popular is the type that’s sweetened slightly with apple juice and had calcium added to it. You can use it on your cereals, in tea, coffee and milk shakes, just as you would cow’s milk.

I used to be a mega chocoholic and I still am! Only now I crave for plain, not milk chocolate. Again there’s a reasonable choice available in most shops and supermarkets but, until you learn which brands are milk-free and which aren’t, you’re probably better off in a health-food shop.

Cheese is usually the first thing people miss when they go vegan. However, you can buy some brilliant vegan cheeses, although they’re not sold in supermarkets – yet. Ask your health-food shop to stock them if it doesn’t have them already. One of the best is a soft cream cheese which tastes exactly as if it were made from cow’s milk. You can even buy vegan hard cheeses, including Cheddar, Cheshire, Edam, Gouda, Mozzarella and even Stilton! For pizzas, try putting some extra tomato puree on the base and missing out on the cheese – it tastes great.

There are also several makes of vegan ice cream now available and although some are sold in supermarkets, the best place to look is still the health-food shop. Replacing butter on the other hand is dead easy as practically all the supermarkets sell an own-brand vegan margarine.

Basically, there are vegan alternatives for everything these days! (A brilliant book which lists them is the Animal Free Shopper by the Vegan Society – see p. 184.) Whatever it is you’re looking for, the trick is not to rely just on the supermarket. Definitely check out your local health-food shop. It can be a bit daunting going in for the first time and you can feel embarrassed because you don’t recognise half the foods in the place! That was my experience, at any rate. But the staff are usually really helpful and if you can’t find what you want, they often order it in.

There are now millions of young vegetarians in Britain and around the world. Despite this, there is a chance you may feel a bit isolated from your meat-eating friends to begin with. There may also be a whole host more questions you want to ask. If this is the case, then there are a number of veggie or environmental groups around which may be able to help you. Most of these are listed in the resource section at the back of this book – just get in touch with the one you think will be most useful to you. You don’t necessarily have to become a member as most are happy to provide help and advice.

Never forget that you are a consumer and, as an individual, you have power. Don’t be afraid to exercise it. You can choose what you do and don’t buy, where you do and don’t shop and which cafes you hang out in. We’re always being told about choice, so where you have choice, use it!

If there are things that upset you, write to the organisations or people responsible. Don’t be fobbed off. If you don’t get the response you want, take it higher. If it’s a company, writing to the managing director may be more successful than writing to a department manager. And bear in mind that acting with other people as a group will have added effect. So if you’re complaining about a product, perhaps because it doesn’t list its ingredients clearly, don’t hesitate to let people know that you won’t be buying it in future and that you’ll also be telling all your friends to do the same.

By deciding to go veggie or vegan, you have changed your way of thinking. This simple fact will probably have an effect on lots of things – friends, the kind of places you go and the things you do – you’re unlikely to become a supporter of fox hunting for a start! You’ll almost certainly get into debates, even arguments, and whether you realise it or not, you’re going to start influencing other people simply by having made a stand on something important to you. That is one of the strongest things anyone can do! And you should feel proud!

As a virgin veggie, you’ve started down the road of change. The end may be a long way off, but we’re getting there.