Then, thinking it through still further, I realized that I'd also have to set aside all my wool sweaters and SmartWool socks—which I'd already worn that day and the day before—during the coldest week we've had this winter. Which, since I have basically no other socks that are truly warm, would mean either running out to the store to look for synthetic socks warm enough to get me through the week (which would hardly fit my ecofrugal charter) or spending the rest of the week indoors and getting basically no exercise (which hardly fits the ideal of a healthy vegan lifestyle).
Faced with these alternatives, I took the easy way out. Reasoning that my challenge was to eat vegan for a week, not live vegan for a week, I decreed that I was only going to worry about things I actually put into my body. I also drew from this my Second Lesson Learned: The hardest part of being a vegan isn't actually the food. It's all the other animal products in my life, like my warm socks and DIY face wash, that are truly hard to live without.
By contrast, eating vegan—aside from the one glitch with the bread on Day 1—has really been no challenge at all. So far, it's involved:
- A soup that we make all the time anyway;
- A dinner out at a place with good food, good service, and not-unreasonable prices;
- A birthday cake that's actually quite a bit easier to make than most cakes with eggs and dairy;
- A minor substitution in a bread recipe, which made no significant difference to the taste;
- A simple milk switch in a latte, discussed below;
- And, yesterday, whipping up a batch of vegan mozzarella to take the place of regular cheese on Brian's Butternut Squash Pizza with Fresh Sage. Doing this is, admittedly, more work than just cracking open a package of real cheese, and it's significantly more expensive ($4.56 for two cups, as opposed to just $1 for sale-priced mozzarella). But it's not a lot of work, and the taste and texture are just as good as the real thing. Even left over for today's lunch, the texture was still fine.
Even our local Dunkin Donuts, as it turned out, didn't bat an eye when I went in yesterday and requested my birthday latte made with almond milk. In fact, considering all the special requests I was making at once—the birthday freebie coupon, decaf espresso, almond milk, and my reusable cup—the transaction was amazingly smooth. The only question the guy behind the counter asked me was, "With sugar?" and I said no, as I usually find the mocha latte too sweet with sugar as well as chocolate syrup added.However, upon tasting the almond milk version, I found it was actually significantly less sweet than the mocha lattes I've had in the past. I'm not sure if this was because the new "Cocoa Mocha Latte" formula has less sugar, or because they're using unsweetened almond milk, which is much less sweet than lactose-laden dairy milk. Whatever the reason, my latte had only a faint hint of sweetness, which was not what I'd expected, but wasn't at all unpleasant.
So will I always ask for almond milk in my mochas from now on? Honestly, I'm torn. The drink itself tasted fine that way; what I truly missed was the whipped cream on top. The coconut whipped cream from Trader Joe's makes a perfectly acceptable (if rather pricey) substitute at home, but coffeehouses are only just starting to get the hang of providing plant-based milk; they haven't gone as far yet as plant-based whipped cream. So until they do, I think I might prefer to enjoy dairy drinks, complete with whipped cream, as a once-in-a-while indulgence. If I'm going almost entirely dairy-free in my daily life, I figure I can treat myself once a month or so without pumping up my carbon footprint too much.
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