beth

Before I left Australia I went to breakfast with my friend. We went to three cafes without finding any vegan options, and by the time we got to the third I spotted a yummy looking avocado and sweet potato breakfast bowl. The only problem was: it had cheese on the side. I went to the counter and clarified that if I was to order this without cheese, it would be vegan. I was assured by two staff that it was and they could do it without cheese easily.

I ordered, my friend ordered and we sat down. After a couple of minutes, our food came out.

And mine had come with cheese.

Now, since I went vegan I’ve had a real problem with nightmares about going back to eating meat and animal products. Now that I’ve made the connection, I can’t imagine ever using or consuming anything that has come from another animal.

This was the first time since I had been began that something like this had happened and seeing the cheese on my plate instantly made me visualise how it had got there... the forced impregnation of a mother cow, over and over again until she can’t provide profit any more; the calves being taken away from their mothers at only 1 to 2 days old, and after the maternal bond has been formed; the baby boys being kept in cages and being slaughtered for veal; the baby girls to be raised for the same fate as their mothers... it was so overwhelming that I felt tears coming to my eyes. I had paid for this and I was guilty.

It’s awful to see animal products on other people’s plates, but when you’re given it you just feel so guilty and disgusted.

As I started crying in the middle of the cafe, my friend who was not vegan was a little confused as to why I was so upset. I explained to her that by paying for this I had contributed to cruelty that I wanted no part of, in fact, I was actively trying to get other people to stop contributing to as well because it’s so awful.

My friend called a waitress over for me and got the plate sent back and a new one made without the cheese.

This actually opened up a conversation about veganism in which she asked questions about why I went vegan, what’s so wrong about agriculture but also dairy and honey. We also talked about health aspects. This was something positive to come out of the situation!

When you realise that you’ve been using something that’s not vegan, or you’ve bought or consumed something with animal products in it, it can be really hard to not get fixated on it and think about where it came from. What’s important to remember is that veganism is about causing the least possible harm. There will always be aspects that you can’t deal with or accommodate to, for example, mix-ups at a restaurant, dodgy ingredients lists, unexpected (and unnecessary) uses of animal products and random items, and so on.

Everyone makes mistakes and as long as you are doing the best you can to reduce harm there’s nothing that can be done except think positively and use the situation to learn and grow.

Youre doing the best you can!

Having completely removed animal products from my diet, I thought it was time to start looking at where else I was supporting the unnecessary use of animals for my benefit.

First: cosmetics.

There are SO many lists on the internet about who tests on animals and who is cruelty free, and there are also different types of cruelty free brands, for example:

- Does not test on animals and does not use animal products (cruelty free and vegan)

- Does not test on animals but uses animal- or insect-derived ingredients (cruelty free but not vegan)

- “Officially” does not test on animals BUT sells to China (By law, China requires animal testing of the products being sold there) (NOT cruelty free)

- Tests on animals “when necessary” (NOT cruelty free)

The products in this post that I will be going through are all NOT cruelty free. While I am surprised at how much is here, what also surprises me is that most of the higher-end makeup and most of my favourite makeup that I use is actually cruelty free. This was a pleasant surprise but it also showed me how much more aware I’m going to have to be when I buy new products.

Im disappointed that I have so many products that support cruelty to animals but by being aware of what I’m paying for I’ll be able to make sure that I stop supporting these acts.

Brands

- Dove

- Nivea

- Vaseline

- L’Oreal

- Garnier (owned by L’Oréal)

- Bioré

- Veet

- Maybelline

- Max Factor

- Benefit

- Compeed (Owned by Unilever)

- Estée Lauder

- New York Cosmetics

- Revlon

- Covergirl

- Rimmel

- Lancôme

- Essie

- Clarins Paris

- St Ives

- Sally Hansen

- Sephora

- Chapstick

As of today I won’t be using these brands or buying any more of their products. Animal testing is unnecessary, as demonstrated by many other brands, and we have no need to inflict suffering on innocent beings.

I’ve also linked some lists that I used to classify my products below, I hope they help you in making more ethical choices!

https://logicalharmony.net/cruelty-free-vegan-brand-list/#G

https://www.crueltyfreekitty.com/list-of-cruelty-free-brands/

2 cans red kidney beans, drained

2 cans tinned chopped tomatoes

Salt and Pepper

1 chopped brown onion

2 gloves Garlic, diced/crushed

Olive oil (or vegetable oil)

1 packet of Old EL Paso Taco Mix

 1) Splash some oil into a pan and cook the onions and garlic for about 5 minutes, or until the onion goes translucent

2) Add the tomatoes and beans, stir

3) Add ¾ cup of warm water to the spice mix and dissolve, then add to the pan and mix in.

4) Sprinkle in some salt and pepper to taste.

5) Let it simmer for 15 minutes to half an hour, depending on how soft you like your beans or how much time you have... Usually I go for about 20 minutes before I get bored!

6) Take off the heat and serve with pasta, rice, in a burrito, or just by itself!

 Depending on what I have in my fridge I will also sometimes add some grated soy cheese, almond butter, maybe some basil and oregano or chilli powder if I feel like it. The above recipe is the minimum and still tastes great! This quantity usually lasts me about 3 or 4 servings 😊

As a very recent meat-eater-turned-vegan, I’ve been dealing a lot with guilt and feeling hypocritical.

The reasons I became vegan are because of some things I found out in very quick succession:

·       The agriculture/meat industry is THE worst contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, waste and ocean exploitation (Cowspiracy)

·       A whole food, plant-based diet is HEALTHIER for you than eating meat and dairy! (The China study)

·       After watching a whole load of documentaries, YouTube videos and doing lots of research, I became aware of just how cruel and unnecessary killing and using animals is.

I can no longer justify eating meat or buying animal products. If we don’t need it to be healthy, and we’re intelligent enough to make or find substitutes for thing if we need to, I just don’t understand why we should continue exploiting animals for our personal gain.

The only problem is – I’ve only just realised this.

Why, after 19 years, is this the first time I’ve even considered going vegan, let alone actually done it? I honestly have no excuse except the fact that I was just living in denial, refusing to make the connection between the cute little sheep in the fields and the meat on my plate.

However, now that I have seen the other side I can’t believe I never saw it earlier. There’s so much information out there showing us that going vegan is the best thing for our bodies, the environment, and the animals, yet we refuse to see it.

That’s why veganism is not just about food. It’s literally a matter of life and death. It’s not contributing to separation of mothers and babies, forced artificial insemination, cruelty, exploitation and torture.

There is no humane way to kill an animal that doesn’t want to be killed.

Veganism is activism, spreading the message, helping others to see what we’ve seen, to make that connection, to show them the truth. It’s hard! But every person you talk to about veganism or provide with information or further reading – that’s one step closer to a vegan world.

 Here are some documentaries, YouTube channels, videos and websites that you can give to your friends and family to help them see the truth:

Documentaries

·       Forks over knives

·       What the health

·       Cowspiracy

·       Blackfish

·       Earthings

My favourite YouTube activists (and some of their must-watch videos)

Earthling Ed

·       You Will Never Look at Your Life in the Same Way Again

·       What Noise Does Bacon Make?

James Aspey

Joey Carbstrong

·       Vegans go UNDERCOVER at a Dairy Farm

DrumNBassVeganFace

 Further Reading

Eating up the world pamphlet (VegVic)

 Good luck.

 See you later!

½ cup (100g) Quinoa (I used black quinoa), rinsed

1/3 cup (20g) rolled oats

2 tablespoons plain flour

¼ cup (20g) grated vegan parmesan (or vegan hard cheese)

1 carrot, grated

2 spring onions, sliced

1 cup of hot water with 2 tbsp chia seeds (The chia seeds turn jelly-like and keep the burgers together)

Olive oil

 Cook the quinoa and leave to cool.

Mix oats, flour, cheese, carrot, onion and “egg” in a bowl. Mix in the quinoa.

Use the mix to shape 5 burgers.

Oil a frying pan and cook the burgers on medium to high heat for 3-4 minutes on each side.

Hi guys! In my first post I mentioned I was trying to sort out some kind of composting system at my student residence. Having spoken to the housing office this will not be possible in the way that I had originally imagined due to management reasons, however they gave me approval to find another bin to start collecting food scraps and suggested I use one of the apps or websites available to find people who collect compost for you.

Upon doing some research I found this app called Share Waste. It’s really easy to use – you select whether you’re trying to get rid of scraps or whether you want scraps for compost or other reasons (e.g. for people who keep chickens in their garden and feed them vegetable scraps), and a map is shown of everywhere that you can drop off compost. Using this app I found a community garden looking for food scraps to use for their fruit trees, and it’s only five minutes away.

Currently there are 5 people in the units surrounding ours interested in composting, hopefully that number will only increase!

 See you later!

This is a really quick, easy lunch or snack option and you can always stick it in the fridge and reheat it in the oven when you need to!

 10 cherry tomatoes

2 sheets frozen puff pastry

Pesto (see Vegan Pesto)

¼ red onion

A handful of pine nuts

½ red capsicum

Black pepper

Extra Virgin olive oil

There are plenty of ways to reduce your waste but there are some that you might not think about, or things you use or throw away without even thinking. Here’s a list of the problem areas for me and how I’m trying to improve them:

 Paper towels in public bathrooms

Usually there is now the option of paper towels or air dryers, however if theres only a paper towel option then instead of taking one, how about shaking it off or drying them on your pants?

 Receipts

Simply ask the cashier to not print you a receipt. Usually they will ask you if you want a copy but a lot of the time you’ll have to get in there before they print you one automatically! Receipts cannot be recycled like normal paper as they are coated with BPA, a chemical that causes the paper to react to heat, so that printer ink is not needed.

 Napkins

Restaurants seem to give out so many napkins! At a takeout restaurant they’ll give you three or four to go with your meal. If you don’t need a napkin, mention it before they give them to you, however if you think you might need one then ask them for one but taking four and then throwing away three is pretty wasteful.

 Tissues

As someone who works with kids and suffers from hayfever two seasons a year, I get sick pretty often. I take hayfever tablets and cold & flu tablets a lot which helps, but if you’re not keen on using medication too often then how about carrying a hanky with you?

 Plastic cutlery, takeout trays, coffee cups

You’ve had a busy morning at work or uni, walk into a takeout shop for lunch and end up with a polystyrene tray, a plastic fork, and a disposable coffee cup. While disposable cutlery such as this is useful, along with plastic straws, they’re usually wasteful and unnecessary. Usually (especially in Australia), your council will ask you to not put plastic cutlery and trays in the recycle bin. Here’s why. Some ways you an get around this are:

·       Carrying a reusable straw and spork with you, they’re small and easy to tuck in to your bag

·       If you’re planning to have a takeout lunch, take a reusable tub for them to put your food in or keep one in your desk. The number of restaurants that are fine with you doing this is increasing, usually they will tell you what size serving you can get with the tub you have (a list of the places I know that do this will be coming soon). The same applies for reusable coffee cups! I usually take a coffee from home into uni in the morning, so if I want another one during the day then I just rinse it out and ask for my coffee in there rather than a single-use cup. A lot of coffee shops will actually charge you a dollar less for this!

·       If all else fails and you still want to get rid of them without sending them to landfill, ask your council where you can recycle them.

 If you can think of any other difficulties you have with waste reduction, feel free to add them to this post along with how you manage them!

 See you later!

Finding store-bought pesto without cheese in it is hard!!

That’s why I’ve started making my own. You can google “pesto recipe” and find any number of ways to make it. Here’s mine:

Vegan Pesto

I use this recipe as a rough guide but make sure I have excess ingredients so I can add them to make it taste how I want it!

1/3 cup olive oil

Splash of extra virgin olive oil

1/3 cup pine nuts

2 cups basil leaves (fresh, packed)

3 cloves garlic

Black pepper

A squeeze of lemon juice, for freshness

I would say that the decision to switch to a plant-based diet was not the decision I made at first; my main decision was to be more conscious of the environment and the world around me. As we know, the earth is dying. We can see it in the plastic bags in the ocean, in the fish and in our salt; we can see it in the increasing global temperature; we can see it in the toxic gas coming out of our landfill sites.

  My decision to definitively reduce my waste was not a sudden, spur-of-the-moment one. I first started seeing “Zero Waste” videos on my news feed around November 2017. The first one I saw was NYC Lauren Singer’s video, where she showed the amount of rubbish she had produced in the past 2 years, all contained inside a mason jar. Although this was the first video I saw and it stuck with me, it took until now for me to truly make the conscious decision to change my lifestyle. Why? I suppose because of a number of reasons:

-        I’m a full-time university student, working to put myself through uni and paying rent, and a lot of the zero-waste solutions that Lauren suggested were on the pricier side, for example shopping at health food stores that use less or no packaing, which tend to be slightly more expensive. As a student who is working to save and afford things other than just the necessities, I wasn’t sure if I wowuld be able to afford the lifestyle.

-        As I live in student accommodation, my waste is shared with the 5-7 other people in my house. When I saw how much waste we produced as a house, it really made me question whether the whole movement was really worth it. What difference can one person make?

-        I already knew that most of my waste was from food. In Australia, compost is rare, and at the moment there is no opportunity for composting or alternates to landfill for food waste (such as potato peelings, apple cores etc.)

  However, as time went on, the feeling that it was time for me to change niggled at the back of my mind. More videos of plastic bags in the ocean, information about what’s happening to our planet, and other media made it to my news feed or by word of mouth, through friends and others. Coincidentally, I moved in with a vegan who was having similar thoughts as me. We discussed ways we would try and reduce our waste, we started watching documentaries together; I showed her Blackfish (trailer), she showed me Cowspiracy (I’ll do another blog post on some interesting documentaries later). But Cowspiracy was a documentary that changed my view almost completely. It was after watching this that I knew, if I really wanted to make a difference and commit to helping the environment, then heading towards a plant-based diet was my only option.

  Currently, I’ve got a few things I’m working on to try and embrace this lifestyle.

-        I’ve asked my student accommodation office about composting, whether we would be able to start a compost heap with or without the help of the office.

-        As a house, we take reusable fabric bags to the supermarket whenever we go shopping

-        I’m looking for alternatives for things like cotton wool pads for makeup removal and other single use plastics/materials

-        I recently bought a load of containers from Kmart and have found three zero-waste shops near where I live

-        Soy milk and almond milk are my new best friend!

-        We have a Nespresso machine at home and I have recently ordered a reusable “SealPod” to try out (another post on this when it arrives!)

  Ill keep you updated through this blog and through my Instagram page.

 See you later!