By coincidence, I was actually born in the same year as the term ‘vegan’ was coined – 1944 – 81 years ago now. The word was coined by the founder of the Vegan Society, Donald Watson and is derived from the word ‘vegetarian‘. A better, albeit more long-winded, description of what vegans eat is ‘A Whole Food Plant-Based Diet Plus Mushrooms (which are fungi and not plants).
I’ve always been keen on healthy eating having been brought up in a home where my father, having worked in the baking industry and so was well aware of the shortcomings of white bread, insisted on having wholemeal bread, which was very much the exception back then in the 1950s. Also my mother laid great stress on eating ‘fresh food’ as an alternative to canned food (there were no frozen food options at the time) and she could cook a mean curry even back then.
It’s interesting to note that during WW2 (1939 – 1945) was a time when the population of the UK was at its healthiest due to the severe war-time rationing, which continued until 1954. This meant the whole of the UK were practically vegan thanks to the virtual non-existence of severely rationed bacon, butter, along with tea, jam, biscuits and breakfast cereals. Sausages were available – but due to the tiny amount of meat and filler and large amounts of water they became known as ‘bangers’, because the water turned to steam during cooking exploding the sausage and leaving even less to be eaten!
The only bread available was the ‘National Loaf, which was an entirely wholemeal loaf. The only foodstuff not restricted were vegetables and every piece of spare land – including public parks and the moat around the Tower of London – were used to grow vegetables under the ‘Dig For Victory’ campaign.
After eating returned to ‘normal’ after the war, I ate the standard Western diet, which included the traditional roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on Sundays – until the , so called, Mad Cow Disease struck the UK in the late 1980s.
Due to the confusion over whether it was safe to eat beef any longer it was an easy decision to simply delete beef from our family menu. This coincided with my daughter’s then boyfriend being a vegetarian, so it was a natural step to eat vegetarian rather than cooking two separate meals.
I had always been wary of eating large amounts of cheese, much to my daughter’s amusement at the microscopic amounts I cut just to get that wonderful umami taste while minimising my saturated fat intake. It was only after further research that I discovered other dangers beyond the saturated fat of IGF1 and methionine in all animal products including cheese – so thank heaven for Nutritional Yeast!
At that point I became a confirmed vegan, which must be about 36 years ago now. At that time vegetarian meals consisted of a great deal of cheese to compensate for the lack of the umami flavor of meat. But this is not an option for us fledging band of vegans, so over these 36 years I have evolved a way of cooking vegetables and mushrooms with tastes and textures that can satisfy any confirmed carnivore.