People are always emphatically telling me that it's not possible to be vegan on a budget. If I've heard it once I've heard it at least a dozen times... "Poor folks just CAN NOT be vegan".
In fact, one outraged fellow all but shouted those exact words at me on Twitter just last night. This mistaken notion (or myth if you will) makes me so sad because nothing could be easier or less expensive than to eat a vegan diet when you are on the tightest of budgets.
We are not just blowing smoke here when we tell you this either because we did it ourselves, my daughter and me. When we first went vegan the sum total of our household income was right around $1,000 a month.
That had to cover EVERYTHING, Rent, Utilities, Gas, Entertainment and FOOD!
Honestly, our budget was so tight I really didn't think we could afford to be vegan at the time either. So I totally get it when folks tell me it's not possible to be vegan on their budget.
But once I got into the store and STARTED BUYING PRODUCE INSTEAD OF JUNK the light-bulb went on and I understood how easy it is to be vegan on a budget.
In fact, once we shifted our spending from the low nutrition non-vegan foods we'd been buying to healthy vegan foods from the produce department and farmers market, we actually ate much better than we had before.
And we didn't spend any more on food than we had previously either. We just shifted it to things that were better for us, tastier and less expensive. That made all the difference in the world.
- Shop Smarter
- Learn To Cook
- Buy Produce Not Prepared Foods
- Make Your Own Vegan Freezer Meals
- Grow Your Own Food
- Preserve Foods In Season
The bottom line is... If we can do it you can too. Especially because you have us here to help you! Each week (more or less) we are going to share with you an in dept post on how we make vegan on a budget work for us. We'll tell you what works for us and embarrass ourselves by sharing the abysmal failures we have had along the way. So without further ado...
