Veganuary: ‘Now is the time to ditch dairy products’

This eye-opening statement gave me the motivation to take part in Veganuary, and (hopefully) continue a plant-based diet permanently.

Veganuary involves cutting out animal products for the month of January and replacing them with plant-based alternatives.

Yes it means there’s no cheese, meat, milk chocolate and eggs on the menu - but there are plenty of other options to discover, which you may even prefer.

Recipe - A tomato orzo tray bake recipe I tried 

Dairy milk was a large part of my pre-vegan diet as I had a lot of coffee everyday, but the thought of drinking cows’ milk now just doesn’t appeal for ethical reasons.

Over the past few weeks I’ve tried soya milk, coconut milk, rice milk, almond milk and oat milk in my coffee and cereal.

Some tasted questionable, but oat milk is superior to them all in my opinion, and unlike cows’ milk it contains no pus cells, hormones or unnecessary fat.

I also swapped scrambled eggs for scrabbled tofu, milk chocolate for dark chocolate and cheddar for Violife vegan cheese.

Thanks to a combination of vegan recipes in books and online, I had plenty of inspiration to make a huge selection of plant-based meals each day, ranging from spicy cauliflower and avocado fajitas to a nutroast with vegan gravy and all the trimmings.

Sweet - apple and raspberry breakfast muffins 

I have more energy, my skin blemishes have cleared up, I’m not bloated after meals, and I feel I can look farm animals in the eye without feeling guilty!

It’s good to be eating lots of vegetables and fruit, but admittedly I love something sweet.

So far I have successfully made vegan brownies, pancakes, muffins, flapjacks and cookies which have proved to me eggs are ‘not essential’ for baking.

Normally I wouldn’t go to the effort of making desserts, but as the nation is in lockdown I have found myself having more time in the evenings to bake.

I am sure many people taking part in Veganuary have been getting creative in the kitchen too.

Spicy - a Vietnamese pho dish with mushrooms and pak choi

In fact, figures show in the last decade, the number of people in the UK following a plant-based diet has risen 340 per cent, and there are now about 600,000 vegans in the country.

A spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), said: “Each person who goes vegan saves the lives of nearly 200 animals every year and helps prevent future pandemics, as SARS, swine flu, bird flu, and Covid-19 all originated from confining and killing animals for food.”

PETA also claims about seven football fields of land are bulldozed worldwide every minute to create more room for farmed animals.

It also states it takes the equivalent of 50 bath tubs full of water to produce one pound of meat, whereas it only takes one bathtub of water to produce one pound of wheat.

According to the United Nations’ Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock report, animal agriculture is responsible for a greater proportion of global greenhouse-gas emissions than all transportation.

Many public figures have voiced the importance of cutting out meat from our diets in recent years.

Veteran naturalist David Attenborough recently warned if we don’t take action, the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.

During his Netflix documentary, called A Life On Our Planet, he said: “We must change our diet.

“The planet can’t support billions of meat-eaters.”

Ditching dairy and meat altogether may seem like an overwhelming task, but trying #MeatFreeMondays could be a starting point.