I just know that I didn’t want to eat dead animals any more

Tina has been a vegan since 2007. Meatless Movement recently had a chat with her. She told Meatless Movement that she loves to try out new recipes and sees how they hold up in reality.

Please tell us more about yourself

My name is Tina, I’m from Austria and I’m 31 years old. At the time I’m a math teacher in Austria. Next year I want to relocate to a different country. I’m already super excited about that.

My plan is to pick a few interesting cities, live a month in each and afterwards I’ll hopefully figure out where I want to live.

I turned vegetarian when I was about 13 years old. I can’t remember if there was any specific event that made me go vegetarian, I just know that I didn’t want to eat dead animals any more.

When I was about 17 years old, I consciously heard about veganism for the first time then, read up on it and I agreed a hundred percent with it. And I’ve been vegan ever since.

My reason to be vegan is for animal welfare – environment and health are just a nice side effect.

It’s been amazing to watch the vegan movement grow
Tina

When I became vegan in 2007, I still lived with my parents, in the Austrian countryside and the vegan options there were basically nonexistent.

The only vegan alternative in the local supermarket was one kind of plant based milk and one kind of vegan spread. Even when I moved to Graz, the second biggest city in Austria, in 2008 there were no vegan restaurants and the options in supermarkets were still quite limited. Nowadays there are six vegan restaurants and there’s big selection of vegan items in most supermarkets.

I absolutely love to travel, but while traveling there have been some challenges finding vegan food, especially when there’s a language barrier. For example, I stayed in a lodge in the Amazon Jungle in Peru and tried to explain to the staff that I’m vegan (unfortunately I don’t speak Spanish), well every morning I got a different egg dish and by the end of our stay my non-vegan friend who I was travelling was very sick of eating eggs all the time.

Sometimes, when I spend a lot of times with my vegan friends, I feel like I’m in a vegan bubble, and it actually surprises me when I realize that this is not the norm.

I feel great about being vegan and there’s no way I’d ever stop being vegan
TINA

I’m not one of those people who cook the same thing over and over again until perfection. I love to try out new recipes, but they don’t always turn out the way they’re supposed to, or sometimes the recipe doesn’t work at all.

That’s why I decided to do the Instagram page @veganrealitycheck , where I post the results of my cooking and I shortly write about the practicality of the recipe.

Only a few recipes make it into my repertoire of recipes which I cook multiple times. One of those recipes I’ve cooked a lot of times is the mushroom pho soup from Bosh! I have been to Vietnam and the pho soups there taste very different, but I still think the soup from Bosh! is super delicious.

In the past few years I’ve been trying to go towards zero waste and I’m still struggling with that. Even though I actively try to cut out waste, I still produce quite a bit of waste. But for trying to go vegan and for trying to reduce waste the important thing is to not give up and don’t be discouraged if you’re not perfect from the start.