What do vegans eat? Let’s reverse the question

Whether you’re vegan or just curious about this lifestyle and way of eating, you might have heard or had this question before: What do vegans eat? If you’re new to or unfamiliar with veganism, you might think this is a lifestyle of restriction, personal sacrifice, boredom or monotony. You think of all the things you can NOT eat anymore. The things you’ve enjoyed all your life, the things every single person around you eats or drinks every day.

Before we get to the answer of what vegans actually eat, let’s reverse the question. What do non-vegans even eat? You might come up with the spontaneous answer “everything”, but what does that even mean?

Forced to explore alternatives – What do vegans eat?

If you decide to adopt a vegan life style, one of your first challenges will be to find a “replacement” for the meals you’re used to eating. This challenge has changed dramatically over the past decades and depending on the country you live in, you can often find “substitutes” for all the most common meaty dishes, dairy products and other animal-based items. Many non-vegans actually harshly criticize this very fact.

Why would you imitate the texture and taste of a sausage, burger patty, steak etc, if you can just have “the real thing”? But not all of us look for imitating substitutes when trying to create a suitable vegan lifestyle. Let’s explore several ways of finding alternatives and solve the question of what do vegans eat.

Substitutes for minimal lifestyle changes

Meat, dairy and egg substitutes mainly serve the purpose of giving gustatory and olfactory pleasure to the consumer. They also allow you to join social gatherings like a barbecue without being the obvious odd one out sitting there eating steamed cabbage or the grass around the grill, to make reference to a joke every longer-term vegan has heard before.

If those are your main concerns as a new vegan, your challenge is to find the admittedly very few really good and really “realistic” substitutes on the growing market. Vegan and non-vegan companies alike are trying to meet the growing demand of vegan and vegan-curious people around the world. It really is a hit-and-miss-game when you first start trying out new products.

You’ll need a little bit of patience, open-mindedness and most of all humour! Some vegan substitute products really are abhorrent! However, if you keep trying around, there is a very good chance, you’ll find a few really nice items that are just as “good” if not better than the famous “real thing”. Maybe don’t start with the expectation of encountering the exact same taste and texture. It’s all a bit of an experiment and only you can make it a fun one!

Tapping into exotic food items

There might be many reasons why you’d rather avoid relying on or integrating substitutes into your new vegan lifestyle. If that’s you, you’re facing a different challenge, maybe an even more interesting one. Walking down the aisles of a supermarket can become a completely new experience. You will notice products you’ve never paid attention to before.

Some of them could be as simple as some fruits or veggies you’ve never used before, because they’re not part of all those traditional dishes. Maybe this is the first time to try a certain cabbage, purple potatoes, romanesco or topinambur?

You might also make some interesting finds in shops or supermarket aisles that focus on Asian or Oriental food. Have you ever tried tofu, seitan, tempeh, jackfruit, nutritional yeast, bulgur, quinoa or amaranth? Ever spiced up your meals with turmeric, lemongrass, fenugreek, isot pepper or sumac? The list is seemingly endless and it’s worth trying absolutely everything you can get your hands on.

What do vegans eat? Experiment with what you’ve got

The first days or weeks as a vegan can be overwhelming, which makes it all the more important to not freak out about it. It might be especially hard if you consider yourself to be someone who “can’t cook”. However, one secret no one ever tells you, is the following: In a vegan and/or plant based diet almost every combination works! There are no two veggies that create an awful combined taste if put together – provided you like them both independently from each other.

You can put 30 different veggies, legumes and spices into a soup and it will most likely be amazing! Just don’t overdo certain spices that could highjack all the taste. The same goes for fruit salads, mixed bowls, pasta dishes and may other “multi-item-meals”. Just experiment and try combinations you’ve never seen in any recipe before.

Vegan vs. non-vegan: Who has more variety?

This brings us back to the title and question of this article. What do vegans eat and what do non-vegans even eat? Of course, people who call themselves “omnivores” can also additionally eat all those vegan or simply exotic foods. But do they? Most vegans will eat a bigger variety of food items than the average non-vegan. Including spices, many vegans will find themselves eating dozens of different food items each week.

If you’ve never paid attention to your habits, this might be an interesting experiment, too! And this is the very reason why vegans tend to eat more variety than non-vegans. Those who never considered going vegan or changing their diet in any other seemingly “drastic” way, probably don’t pay that much attention to what they actually eat on a weekly or monthly basis.

And yes, of course there are exceptions! You’re probably one of them, or you wouldn’t even be here. But maybe a secret look at the people around you might give you the same impression that we’re talking about here.