What They Don't Talk About When They Talk About Going Vegan

Is this too niche?

May 06, 2024

I must be a chef the way I cook everyday.

Halo and happy Monday!

If this is your first time getting this letter, welcome to Kepayang! Here, I write essays and stories on food, sustainability, and culture. For those of you who‘ve been here before, you know the drill.

I think today’s newsletter is going to be very niche, but it’s a topic that is close to me. You will read about:

🏁 My slow and steady journey towards doing a plant-based diet.

🌃 How going vegan is not an overnight job, and you should probably chill.

🍚 How the real problem is not about finding food that you can eat, but food that you want to eat.

🙏 How you should stop making veganism your whole ass personality. You are more than what you eat.

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In case you don’t know, I’m a TikToker. I share plant-based recipes, a highly curated part of my slightly healthy lifestyle, and rants on many food issues in Indonesia. I’m now heading towards 25,000 followers, which is exciting. The account is called Berusaha Vegan, which loosely translates into “trying to be a vegan, because if you know me, you would know that I am, in fact, not a vegan. But I’m trying to, I swear!

I never proclaimed that I was a vegan, and I’m not sure whether I wanted to achieve a full vegan diet and lifestyle. A part of it is simply because I am not one. And another part of it is because I don’t think I can keep up with the strict lifestyle.

But I do enjoy making and eating plant-based foods. It’s fun. Imaginative. And yes, you don’t have to be a vegan to enjoy those. Surprise.

Right now, I’m comfortable being a vegetarian with occasional pescatarian days. On a daily basis, I would get my protein from soybeans, be it tofu, tempe, or oncom, three to four eggs a day, and a protein shake if I’m working out. I put a heavy focus on fruit and veggies on my plate and a mindful amount of carbs. I said mindful because, on most days, I would prioritise protein over carbs. But on a week where I will be doing a weekend long run, I would start carbo-loading from Monday. That means more rice, toast, and potatoes of all kinds.

Occasionally, I also eat seafood. I’m allergic to shellfish and crustaceans, so that’s half of the ocean already that I can’t eat. But I’m fine with fish, octopus, and squid. I don’t usually look for it or go out of my way for them, but if that’s what’s available or if my parents cook that for me (they don’t actually cook it by themselves), then I’ll eat it out of respect.

This is the closest I am towards the vegan pipeline, and it’s been four-plus years. And in those years, I’ve experienced and learned so many things that people don’t really talk about when they’re going vegan.

You see, they always talk about how hard it is to find food, get the right nutrients, or how expensive vegan food is. Like come on, choose a struggle! But some things, even though more trivial, would have definitely comforted me during my transition should I have known them earlier. It’s not like not knowing them caused a huge issue, but it would’ve been nice. It’s like a beige flag, you know?

So let’s go, everyone better be jumpin!

Thank you for reading Kepayang. This post is public so feel free to share it.

1. Being vegan is not an overnight job. The transition could be long, non-linear, and that’s OK.

I started my first transition in 2019 by stopping eating red meat because of my health conditions. In Indonesia, we call them asam urat (lit. uric acid), a condition where I’d get pain in my joints, especially in my feet, right after I ate food with a high level of purine – that’s red meat, leafy greens, soybeans, and alcohol to name a few. But red meat always triggers me the most. So since then, I started to consciously say no every time someone would ask me to get a steak, bakso, or nasi goreng kambing. Fortunately, eliminating red meat wasn’t that hard for me as my whole family also was not a big red meat eater.

After a year, I felt that my feet were never in pain again, and since I am also exposed to many other foods to substitute red meat, I made the executive decision to start eliminating white meat in 2020. That means no more fried chicken, chicken nuggets, and mie ayam.

I was very confident to be able to transition to it in a year. But it turns out that leaving mie ayam was harder than I expected, so I would occasionally allow cheat days to eat them in the first year. It eventually ended up stretching to two years before I could finally stop eating white meat entirely with no cheat days. And since 2021, I kept the same diet of switching between vegetarian and pescatarian.

Ideally, the next step is to go full vegetarian, and to my surprise, it took me more than four years to reach there. I really thought that if I could eliminate red meat in a year and white meat in two years, I’d probably be able to stop eating seafood in a couple of years. But here I am, eating salmon inari sushi in a food court while writing this newsletter.

While others might be able to transition to a plant-based diet faster than me, I’m very content with my slow and steady pace.

Yes, it’s already my fourth year of being a vegetarian / pescatarian, but that doesn’t mean that I am stuck at this point without any progress. Looking at how I ate in 2021 versus now, I can totally see improvements from eating more plant-based food, to knowing way more vegetarian-friendly restaurants. These habits and knowledge were acquired slowly throughout these years and made my transition pretty relaxed.

2. More often than not, the challenge isn't about not knowing what I can eat, but rather about deciding what I actually want to eat.

I am past the phase of getting confused about what I can eat. That’s so 2020! This is all thanks to what I call having the abundance mindset. Instead of focusing on what I can’t eat or what food I should eliminate from my diet, it’s helpful to shift that focus to what food I can actually eat and add to my plate.

For example, if my lunch used to be white rice, fried chicken, and sauteed kangkung, it would be very depressing if I took away the chicken and just accepted the fate of eating rice and kangkung for lunch. But that doesn’t have to be the case, especially if you’re in a warteg (lit. small stall selling food, usually by the road) with so many other options. Instead of settling for a sad lunch, I could add tofu, corn fritters, terong balado, or even, fruit for desserts. The possibilities are endless.

But unfortunately, knowing what you can eat won’t be enough, because you also need to know what you want to eat.

I cook a lot, and my knowledge of plant-based food sources are chef’s kiss. But if you look at what I cook daily, you would see that it’s always the same fried stuffed tofu, sauteed tempe, pasta, and salad. And don’t get me started with ordering food online, because then it will always be from the same few places.

It’s like I have this rotation of food that I will always cook, and when it reaches the point of me getting bored with it, I also don’t know what to order online. Which is why it takes a lot of time for me to just hyperexperiment the hell out of everything I do. This can be done by trying out new recipes or techniques to cook your usual ingredients, or even better, just going full freestyle. Just like what I did on 2021 New Year’s Eve.

There’s a tradition in my family to have a BBQ every New Year’s Eve. They usually grill some corn and sausages, but since the sate taichan wave went viral in Jakarta, the lineup would then be corn, sausages, and sate taichan. So with the spirit of sate taichan, I swap the protein from chicken to tempe, and modify the marination so that it’s more concentrated. Just based on the feeling that it would be harder for tempe to absorb flavours, you know. I then I grilled the tempe until it was charred and smoky, and it was easily the crowd’s favourite and made it to every New Year’s Eve lineup.

My family used to be concerned about me not having anything to eat, and I did too during the earlier days. But with time, trial and error, and a lot of eating out, I eventually gained the hang of it.

3. Going vegan doesn’t make you special. You are more than what you eat.

Vegans have already received so much negative stigma, especially on the World Wide Web. Be it from influencers promoting an unrealistic eating habit to social justice warriors sharing explicit and gruesome videos of animal abuse. Like, stop. Stop repeatedly saying you’re vegan and forcing other people to be vegan. What you eat is a personal choice, and I wouldn’t be caught dead forcing people to stop eating what they enjoy.

Also, imagine if you take that vegan label off of them, do you think you could describe them in any other ways other than their veganism? Probably hard or impossible.

In fact, do not make veganism your whole ass personality.

Other than that you will come off as annoying, you would also be reducing yourself and your whole identity into this one little aspect of your life. Which is dangerous.

What if one day you accidentally ate an animal product? Would you be sad and depressed knowing that you just entered your flop era? Except that, you are not in your flop era. It's just one flop, not a flop era. And sometimes, after the hardest flop, comes the biggest slay. Only if you allow it.

Instead, start listing out other things that you are aside from what you eat. Me, I’m a content creator, I’m a writer, I’m building a community, I’m a runner, I’m a chef, I like indie music, and I love anime even if it’s only a specific genre that is a slice of life.

When you start realising other parts of yourself, you start to notice that veganism doesn’t make you whole (nothing will ever make you whole). It’s just a part of you that makes you, you. So share more about yourself other than just what you eat!

What do you think about going vegan? Would you try it for a bit? Comment down below!