Help! DH wants us to go vegan!

[SparePartz]

I'm not a good cook and tend to stick with what I know. I'm panicking slightly! He's watched the Netflix show and has decided we should try to eat vegan during the week.

I have some issues:
first and foremost my tea. I drink milk in my tea. We tried oat milk a while back and even he decided it wasn't great. Is there a better option?

Mushy food makes me gag. He's talking eating lentils, peas and beans. Is there any way to prepare them so they're not mushy?

We, especially DS, eat a lot of cheese and yoghurt. How do you keep a growing teenager full without cereal/milk/cheese on toast? We're not looking to try out highly processed vegan copies of non- vegan food.

I cannot eat mushrooms. Well, I can eat them but then get horrific stomach cramps a few hours later. Lots of recipes seem to be mushroom based.

How do I make sure the DC are getting all the nutrients they need as they come into and through puberty?

Nuts - hazelnuts make DC2's mouth blister, walnuts make my mouth itch and I don't like any other nuts.

Is there an idiots guide to being a vegan somewhere?

Be careful forcing your son to go vegan. A friend of mine at university studying nutrition decided after 2 weeks of the course that he needed to go vegan. 3 months later, he kept fainting and was told sternly by a doctor that a 6ft2 late teen who does lots of exercise NEEDS meat and dairy and he'd essentially made himself anaemic.

Aiming to eat less meat is a good idea (if that's what you want to do, he shouldn't be able to decide for you!) but going vegan cold turkey is a bad decision. Especially if you're not keen on pulses, you need to get protein from somewhere.

The thing is if he wants to go vegan, he can.

But he wants to go vegan on the days he doesn’t cook and doesn’t have to put any mental or physical energy into it.

If he wants to do it, he can put the energy into it.

Getting op to show him receipts or buy him books and or send him links is just reenforcing his view that he has decided something for the whole family, op has to go along with it and be the one to do the work.

If he wants to cook vegan I am sure he can google and find receipts himself.

They’re very aware she doesn’t have an eating disorder though, they weren’t asking in case she was trying to restrict her eating, they were asking because they thought her illness might have been caused by some sort of deficiency. We were on an all inclusive over Xmas and it was a job trying to get her to STOP eating, we went through all this immediately just when she was getting triaged as I couldn’t explain how an 11 year old had lost 6kg during 10 days of her having 3 course breakfast, lunch and dinners

I don't think he should be told to sod off for wanting to eat some vegan food. I think he should be told to sod off for imposing a new regime on a household which nobody else wants and for which he is not prepared to do any of the work involved.

I'm not a vegan-but quite a lot of the food we like happens to be vegan. Or could easily be vegan by swapping to vegan yoghurt. So I have no dietary skin in this game. Just "men are not the boss" skin.

I think it would be far easier to go vegan two days a week at the weekend first where there is more time to cook meals and try out new things rather than a week day when you just want to pull together a faithful reliable meal that you know works

So it would be far better if he took the lead on this at the weekend, at least to begin with.

This is crazy. He doesn't unilaterally get to decide something where all the work falls on you.

Tell him he's welcome to go vegan himself, he's welcome to cook for DC, and you'll sometimes join him if it's a meal that you like.

No pulses, nuts or mushrooms will make being vegan very limiting.
You can make other choices around food to limit environmental harm?
If it's welfare, you could still eat locally produced eggs for example.
A vegan diet when you have strong dislikes/allergies will be harder to make balanced and appetising.

Why does he get to decide what you eat? What a bloody cheek.

I can't believe this is still in Active and OP hasn't addressed the glaringly obvious issue with DH dictating what other people cook and eat?!

You can co-exist.

DP is vegetarian and was raised vegetarian. I eat meat. We compromise in so far as we eat a vegetarian diet at home. If we buy a takeaway, I will still choose a meat dish if I want or if we eat out I might order meat. He's recently switched to plant based milk so we have that and buy dairy milk for me and DC. DC are veggie for now until they want to make a choice as to their diet.

Swap with him, if he wants to go vegan during the week he cooks in the week and you on the weekends. If he can't swap (due to shifts or similar), tell him he can go vegan on the weekends instead when it's his turn to cook.

Reminder this is the vegan board.

And yet my brother as a 6ft 2 teen didn’t have meat and as a 6ft 2 guy in his 20s is vegan with no issues, that doctor didn’t know what he was talking about. If he “made himself anaemic” he wasn’t eating enough iron. Incidentally female iron requirements are higher and my bloods have always shown I have a good iron level (13 years vegan). My parents were anaemic on and off before going vegan but never have been since (circa 10 years vegan).

That doesn't sound like coexisting. It sounds like you amd your children are pretty much made to eat veggie at home and you sometimes are allowed meat only in takeaways. Almost zero compromise then.

IME mumsnet will remove anti-vegan posts from the vegan section. I appreciate most replies aren’t anti vegan and are just slating the husband for deciding for the OP, which is fair enough, but hopefully the “veganism is unhealthy” or “just make a bacon sandwich” posts are not appropriate on the board.

Yes and hopefully it's not seen as OK to push like a religion onto children or partners who don't want to eat a specific diet.

Your husband does not decide what you eat. He sounds very controlling.

Although (disclosure) I'm vegan, being vegan itself is not healthy in itself and many make the mistake of just changing their meat diet to highly processed vegan ones, with faux meats and dairies, which are helpful for transitioning but should in no way be seen as a healthy diet. What is super healthy though is a whole foods plant based diet which has helped many people reverse disease and athletes become super fit.

I would just also point out that most Drs receive very little training in nutrition so can sometimes give advice on diet in ignorance. Processed meat is a carcinogen and both meat and dairy are highly inflammatory. So is processed vegan junk food ...

I think when people talk about vegans forcing their beliefs or diet on their children, I think to a large extent that's what all parents do, vegan or not. Make decisions, certainly while they are small, on what they believe is best for them to eat. It's the parents who buy the food and fill the fridge whether meat eaters or veggies or vegans. Just being devil's advocate :)

Just to add that no person should be demanding their partner eat a certain way though. I wouldn't eat meat just because a partner did and wouldn't expect them to go vegan either. There are ways around it so can cook for both with a little compromise ...

Could you BE any more patronising? what a tube.

Thank you @soupfiend and @MayThe4th for your sensible words

And @saraclara and @AllProperTeaIsTheft I agree, we can post where we like. That poster is just adding to the vegan stereotype

Yes!!

A vegan diet is much harder to be balanced though - as in having enough iron, choline or omega 3 for example.
It can be hard fur some people to have enough protein too - mainly because they switch from a omnivore diet to a vegan one by removing foods and replacing some if them with ‘alternatives’ that are just not as nutritious.
eg they don’t eat pulses or nuts.

Thats not to say you can’t be healthy. But it needs a lot if work to start with to get that balanced diet, more than if you are omnivorous - starting with the fact you have no frame of reference. Few people (and clearly not the student in that story) put the work in

we always have a few different milks (usually oat, soya, cows) in the fridge and eat a mostly plant based diet but some cheese and yoghurt. DH is dairy and egg free and we don't eat meat at home so I guess vegan, so I tend to cook stuff dairy free then add cheese if necessary for me or the kids. Mostly its stir fry, curry, veggie chili, (decent) salad, tempeh, tofu.

I find Alpro soya best in my tea. I dont like cows milk so soya is my overall favourite!

Sounds like DH could do some more planning, shopping, cooking for vegan meals with the option for you and DC to add non vegan things if you want to