Vegetarian to vegan

January 4

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

I’m marking Veganuary 2025 by publishing a blog post a day.

I turned 39 at the end of May 2004. By then I had stopped eating eggs and was having soy milk rather than cow’s milk in my coffee, but I still considered myself vegetarian rather than vegan. I invited friends over for a vegetarian potluck dinner to celebrate my birthday. One couple brought a huge platter of gourmet dairy cheeses, and the leftovers were stashed in my fridge. A week later I realised I hadn’t even been tempted to eat any of the leftover dairy cheeses and I thought, “I guess I’m vegan now”.

That was just six weeks after meeting Billy. I’ve never been a black-and-white person, tending to see – and worry about – the subtleties in any situation. Add to this my aversion to potential confrontations, and it could have taken me a very long time to go vegan if I had not had Billy’s example and encouragement.

It was a big change. I spent a lot of time reading labels and was surprised how many packaged foods contained unexpected dairy products: for example, most flavoured crisps, most wholemeal bread, and even a garlic paste. This was 20 years ago and things have changed considerably – but back then, becoming vegan was a good incentive to go back to basics and cook most things from scratch.

One major challenge was figuring out what to eat instead of cheese, which thanks to my mix of English and French heritage I had been eating once or twice a day since I was a small child. I didn’t have cravings for cheese, but I missed the convenience of it and the rich satisfying hit of it (okay, maybe I did crave it.). I started snacking on dark chocolate instead: it has a similar rich satisfying quality.

I had high hopes for some vegan cheese I bought in the supermarket, but those hopes were quickly crushed. It had an unpleasant sharp chemical flavour and a weird gritty texture. I threw it out – which was a dramatic statement because I try very hard to avoid food waste.

I did try my hand at a batch of fermented cashew cheese: I blended soaked cashews and added the contents of a probiotic capsule and put it in the hot water cupboard in the bathroom to ferment. The next morning, I could smell a pungent cheesy aroma and was surprised that the fermentation was happening so quickly: my delight at the aroma took a plunge when I realised the strong smell was from the cats’ litter tray which was also in the bathroom…

I told my sons, then aged 7 and 16, that our household was going vegan – this didn’t mean they had to be vegan, just that they’d be eating vegan at our house. They were probably not thrilled about this plot twist, but they were okay with it and I’m grateful for that.

The biggest challenge was finding a good plant-based milk they would enjoy on their cereal. There certainly wasn’t such a big selection available back then but over the course of a month, we must have tried at least a dozen from the supermarket and the organic store before settling on a particular brand of soy milk. I remember being very relieved that the hazelnut milk from the organic store wasn’t their favourite because it was four times the price of the soy milk.