#poor vegan

[nerdykeith]

I’m so sick of hearing the logical fallacy involving the rhetoric of “veganism is a diet for the privileged and rich”

This is so wrong and total misinformation. Firstly veganism is a lifestyle and not just a diet. It’s not all about food. It is so easy to be plant based on a budget. I for one am certainly not rich, not even close.

Last time I checked, caring about animals is free. As vegans we need to shut down this bad faith argument at all costs.

[theonlinevegan]

[youthofnausea7]

Chickpeas of the High Seas, a Tuna Salad Recipe for Plant Based Pirates

So tuna salad might not be everyone's favorite sandwich topping, as a matter of fact it might even be no one's favorite sandwich topping, but if there's one thing that's for damn sure, a tuna salad craving can be fucking hard to ignore. However, if there's one thing I've learned in my years as a broke vegan, it's that chickpeas make a damn good first mate for many of your swashbuckling kitchen adventures. Hoist the Jolly Roger fuckers, we're sinking that smelly tuna boat for good!

What you need:

Prepared Chickpeas (I was extra this time and cooked them myself, but canned works every bit as well)

Diced Red Onion, because why not make it pretty

Diced Celery because crumch

Pickle Relish

Vegenaise or whatever other mayo substitute you have handy, you could probably also use avocado, but only if you're a millenial

A sheet or two of Nori Seaweed

Salt and Black Pepper

Dill Weed (optional, just like most of these ingredients)

I didn't list the exact amounts of the ingredients because it's the kind of thing that tends to turn out better if you just eyeball (or eyepatch) it and sample it along the way, and doing so would just be doing a lousy disservice to the simplicity of this recipe. Also you can sub almost any of the ingredients for whatever it is you like in your tuna salad. Are you fucking weird and like apples in it? Fine then put your gross apples in it, just stay the fuck away from me.

How to make it:

So start off with your prepared chickpeas, put them in a large sealable container. That's right, you're going to make this AND store it in the same container. This is the pinnacle of vegan convenience.

Alternatively you can put it in a blender, I guesss. It'd save you from having to do a lot of chopping which is cool, but I don't let anything go to waste and there's so many things I'd rather do with my day that don't include scraping tuna salad off of blender blades.

Also, using a blender undercuts the best part: Smashing!!!

Okay so I lied, smashing can actually be cruelly tedious. Just be smarter than me and use something better than a fork. You wanna try your best to mash it to the point that there's no more full beans, some halfies might escape your clutches, but who are you trying to fool anyways? Keep it up until the consistency is like that of, well, tuna salad.

Next thing to do is dice up some red onion into little pieces

Cool put them babies in the mashed chickpeas, and do the same with some celery

Since we're mixing this all up into a tasty vomit-like substance (do I talk about vomit too much in my recipes?), I usually just don't fucking care what it looks like; so what I like to do is chop chop cop widthwise and then just go fuckin ham on the pile until it's mostly little pieces.

Fold them in and realize you added way too much fucking veggies

Toss some relish on there, it'll make yer paw proud

Resist the urge to transfer it to another container.

When you've got all that mixed together, get out your mayo substitute and put a couple of big ol' globs on there, as many as you need to coat all the stuff

Mix it all up and continue resisting the U R G E

When it's all mixed up get out one of these. It's called seaweed, and it makes stuff taste like it came from the sea.

Get out two sheets and toast em over the stovetop. CAREFULLY. On LOW heat. These may be the tortillas of the sea, but if you try to toast them like a tortilla you're going to have a bad time.

When you got em all roasty toasty, crunch them up into as little pieces as possible and put em in the salad. The best way to do this is to put them in a ziploc bag, tie the bag to a skateboard, and do a whole bunch of mega rad skate tricks until there's nothing in the bag but ocean dust.

When it's all mixed together it'll look something like this, I guess

Add the salt and spices to taste, and when it's how you like it put it in a sandwich

Bang Bang

There's a lot of ways you can fuck around with this recipe; if you're more of an egg salad kinda person, use Indian black salt instead of seaweed. If you're incredibly boring you probably prefer chicken salad, just don't add either. Just a reminder, this recipe is mostly just a very loose guideline and mainly just serves as an example. Put whatever the fuck you want in it, and do whatever the fuck you want with it.

Aside from the classic tuna salad approach, my favorite thing to do with this technique is to make spicy tuna for sushi. Just lose the veggies and add sriracha, toasted sesame oil, and rice vinegar when you're adding the mayo. I'll provide the photographic evidence when I get better at rolling sushi, because as of current my sushi rolling skills are dogshit.

Picnic time, fuckers!

[achilleansapphic]

shout out to all my working class vegans. we're doing amazing even if people try and paint veganism as an expensive luxury only for the rich

[vegangst]

I'm such a luxurious Vegan, all my organic produce and groceries come straight from the Salvation Army Food Pantry ~

[defoodma]

[antiracistfeministanarchy]

"When I was poor grocery shopping was complex math, holding numbers in my head, constantly remembering..."

[necessaryveganism]

I was scrolling through and I noticed a lack of talk about food insecurity/food deserts. I was wondering if yall are familiar with the concept. Veganism seems like such a class based privelege, only accessible by a certain amount of income and up. I don't mean to make anyone defensive but I feel like if you don't address that then you are perpetuating stereotypes about the "veganism lifestyle" as a gated, greater than thou community- which I think yall are trying to debunk?

This is a common stereotype, the “rich, white, privileged” image that comes to mind whenever someone mentions the word “vegan.” However, the truth is that a plant-based diet is the staple diet of more than a billion people worldwide, due to the fact that plant-based foods are some of the cheapest and most widely available types of food in the world!

The main reason people perceive meat and dairy as cheap commodities in western countries is because they are heavily subsidized industries, which means that the government is paying for the production of these goods to continue, and allows them to be marketed to consumers at a price much lower than their actual cost. But despite this, many of the staples of vegans, and low-income areas around the world, include rice, beans, and grains. The papaya-mango-guava-dragonfruit-granola-chia-smoothie vegans are a very small class of the vegan community: most of us just shop at the local grocer, even in areas that suffer from food insecurity. 

This post discusses the common misconception that poor people cannot be vegan, while this post discusses multiple meal plans and lifestyle adjustments that makes going vegan with a low-income or in an area with food scarcity an absolute breeze. There are ways to eat vegan for only a few dollars a day, with a large rotation of delicious, nutritious, and satisfying meals!

As for the fact that this is a stereotype, unfortunately, we can’t debunk them all. Some vegans are angry. Some vegans are rich, white, and privileged. People will always make us seem like an external community until more people become vegan. It’s something we’re always fighting against, but people love to pretend those that don’t conform to their ‘stereotypical view’ just don’t exist. That means erasure of poor, POC, mentally ill, disabled, or somehow otherwise dis-privileged vegans occurs on the daily. They’re numerous, I promise. 

-Admin Samantha