Fishing for chicken and burger construction

For some time now, I have been secretly entertaining the idea of going vegan. Not even because of any particular belief but just Google veganism and you’ll be swamped with success stories: vegan diets give you more energy, your skin will glow and it can even alleviate PMS.

Besides, I’ve been allergic to dairy products for a few years now so it would only be a small step to ban all animal products from my diet.

A few weeks ago, I read an article about “Veganuary”: only eating vegan food in January. This was my big chance. I decided to start by going vegan for one week.

Mega-healthy seed mix

It got off to a bad start on Monday: I added a packet of bacon strips to my dinner. Luckily, I could justify it by telling myself that bacon won’t keep forever and that throwing meat away unnecessarily is worse than eating it.

Tuesday was alright. For breakfast, I had oats with fruit. While preparing for my experiment, I made an urgent appeal for help on Facebook; after all, how do you make oats palatable? After many attempts and much suffering I finally mastered it: just add pieces of apple.

On Wednesday, I bought a kind of probiotic, super-posh, mega-healthy seed mix to sprinkle on the oats. It seemed a safe bet, but on closer inspection, the mix contained honey powder – honey is not vegan. Another fail.

I spent most of Thursday on the loo. What they say is true: your body gets completely messed up if you suddenly replace all the animal products in your diet with water and fibre.

On Friday, I constructed burgers from chickpeas. You see, I’d been hungry all day and I’m sure that’s wrong. So I went for protein.

On Saturday, I had dinner at a friend’s house. I fished the chicken out of the curry on my plate. By now, I was so drained I didn’t even mind any more.

What about Sunday? On Sunday, I ate a hamburger. It was much tastier than the chickpea burger and instead of feeling guilty, I mostly thought: ah yes, that’s how it feels when you’re full. Perhaps it means I should eat meat once a week, exactly as I did before I decided to experiment.

And yet another New Year’s resolution comes to an untimely end.