World Vegan Day - 1st November 2025🍉🍒

Yesterday was World Vegan Day so I thought I would talk a little bit about my own journey with veganism.

I’ve been vegan since January 1st, 2018, though it all started as a bit of a whim. I decided to try Veganuary after making an offhand comment about how I thought I could do it. My partner at the time told me I’d never stick to it… and since I’m very stubborn, I took that as a challenge!

To my surprise, it was much easier than I expected. I think that’s because I was already vegetarian and didn’t really like eggs so I was used to eating mostly plant based meals anyway. The biggest change was cutting out dairy and getting used to checking ingredient labels more carefully.

At first, the trickiest part was remembering to check the packaging on anything new I wanted to buy. Luckily, since milk and eggs are allergens, they’re always listed in bold so it’s usually easy to spot them without spending ages reading the whole label.

What really helped was discovering how many foods are “accidentally vegan.” Things like Jammy Dodgers, Oreos, some supermarket garlic breads, marmite, sweet chilli sauce, bisto gravy, most crisps and lots of different sweets like Fruit Pastilles, Starburst, and Skittles. Even Greggs’ Chelsea buns are vegan (though not in the North East Greggs’ for a strange reason).

So, veganism doesn’t have to mean eating nothing but beans, pulses, tofu and vegetables (though those are great nutrient-dense staples and I do aim to eat like that about 80–85% of the time). There are still lots of nice treats out there if you’re considering giving veganism a go!

After that first month, I felt great and decided to keep going and now here we are….nearly 8 years later and I don’t plan on changing that any time soon!!