Well, I’m officially out of my 20s and that happened a little over a month into going Vegan in October 2009.
Prior to going vegan I was not even vegetarian. I had been vegetarian before, but I often found the ambiguous nature of being a vegetarian made it easy for me to backslide into omnivorous eating habits. I could easily justify a number of concessions until eventually I was back to eating most meats again.
When I moved back to the Rogue Valley region of Southern Oregon I was once again in an Omni phase. And I remained so for a long time due to the fact that I both lacked financial resources and was convinced that much of the specialty shopping was implausible.
Well, I’m still broke but I have found that that isn’t really a strong reason not to go vegan. Because while there is some specialty shopping involved if you plan on doing things like making fake meats, going vegan is not cost prohibitive. And despite no longer living in a large metropolitan area I can find nearly every food item I am looking for in one store in Medford, Oregon called “Food-4-Less”.
The real challenges for me are that I’m a picky eater, I love cheese and desperately miss milk chocolate. But I’m finding that I can still be a picky eater & eat vegan cheese substitutes. And if I can scrounge up the extra money I can even pay exorbitant prices for bars of rice-milk chocolate.
The transition wasn’t as difficult as most people would think. I totally rocked it out. I know that you can too.