Pragmatic Vegan

Being an occasional visitor of /r/vegan , this is a common question I see: How do I get enough food on a vegan diet while I'm in college? Having been vegan my whole life, eating a plant-based diet while getting the nutrition I need isn’t much of a puzzle. For those vegans just starting out, figuring out what to eat when you have access to your parent’s pantry is hard enough, let alone rummaging up food while away at college. To that end, this post is geared toward fairly new vegans who have to split cooking time with hitting the books – having been a vegan through a few years of college, I hope I can share a helpful hint or two. The limited appliances can pose a unique challenge (i.e., a mini fridge you share with your roommate and a stovetop with a permanent, odoriferous patina two floors down), but let's give it the ol' college try. Where can you get your food? Different colleges have different options, so I’ll use a conservative example. Your dining hall may h

There is a misconception that, on average, vegans are interminably underweight or weak. This misconception exists for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that the vegan diet is both fairly new to most people (though the term “vegan” was coined in the 40s) and is quickly gaining in popularity. This means that there's a widely popular trend toward the vegan diet, while at the same time basic knowledge on the subject is not so widely available. The dietary restrictions for vegans have become common knowledge – no animal products – so most people can follow along in that area, but knowledge on balanced nutrition is less accessible. This all-or-nothing attitude for many new vegans leads to sudden and drastic restrictions in their diet before they’ve had time to figure out what they can eat and what meals they can prepare – as you might imagine, this approach often falls short in the nutrition department. Newbies Doing Newbie Things There are new vegans so hyper-focused o