• eggmasterflex@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Honestly, I’ve stopped chasing substitutes a while ago. Giving up meat and dairy is going to be a lifestyle change, that’s why people struggle so much with it. You can’t expect to just sub in imitations and keep eating the same foods. They’re not close enough to fool anyone, and they’re usually expensive and unhealthy.

      The best way eat vegan is to fill your diet with minimally processed legumes, grains, fruits, and vegetables. Learn to cook a few staple meals from cultural cuisines where animal products are expensive (most cultures outside US/Canada and Western Europe) and you’ll realize how much great food you can make with a few simple ingredients and one or two pots. A huge number of them fall into the same basic formula, so if you learn one, you can easily make them all. Plus, it’s much, much cheaper than eating meat.

      I’m not vegan but I do eat 95% vegan because my wife is and I agreed to buy and cook solely vegan in the house. I come from a culture with plenty of (accidentally) vegan home cooking already, so it wasn’t hard at all. But those substitutes are gross to me. Apologies to those who like them.

    • Emerald@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Well milk is easy. Just get soy milk or almond milk as a drop-in replacement. There’s even weird ones like cashew milk. Depending on where you are at though that might be too expensive compared to dairy milk.

      • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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        6 months ago

        Where I live, soy milk is less than half the price of cow boob milk. Perks of living in East Asia, I guess.

        I bought a 936 mL (1/4 gallons) carton of soy milk today, and it was only about US$1.1 (NT$35). Very affordable.

      • atmur@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Oat milk is really good too and is usually cheaper than almond milk, at least where I live.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          6 months ago

          I normally prefer soy for flavor, with oat as a close second.

          For nutritional value, I think soy is the top, followed by pea, and oat way behind.

          For environmental impact/needs, I think soy and oat are also among the best.

          Soy milk is a miracle food and we should embrace it.