VEGAN FOR LESS THAN £20 A DAY

Although veganism is becoming a more and more commonplace concept, I still encounter many misconceptions about it. Both from people who are starting to look into it as a potential upgrade to their lifestyle, as well as from people who just like to comment on the subject.

From outdated nutrition misconstructions, to simply wrong ideas of how hard or how expensive it is to live a vegan lifestyle. I usually cover topics like vegan lifestyle and nutrition a lot more - mainly as it is directly connected with my role as a plant-based Coach and sports nutritionist. So today let’s go over the economic side of being a vegan.

For clarity, I live in the East of England (Brighton), and therefore this budget might vary in other regions and/or countries. When a non-vegan person talks to me about veganism as a diet, they usually think this is more expensive than an omnivore diet. In fact, it is not - mainly if you’re eating a healthy non-vegan diet, in this case, it might even be cheaper.

In this article, I’m sharing with you three days of complete vegan recipes - with a wide range of ingredients - to show how much, within the limit, a vegan diet might cost.

My nutrition adventure started as a way to support my clients with a combo of nutritious, flavorful recipe plans that respect the calorie counting they should stick to for their goals. However, it was so successful amongst them that they started asking the same for their friends and it ended up resulting in me creating my ebook series “The Vegan Table”. You can visit the nutrition section on my website for more info!

And of course, there are a few things we have to take into account when shopping for the ingredients for these recipes:

First and foremost, these are the juicy recipes, which perfectly balance nutrition and richness of flavour with a well-calculated calorie count. I enjoy these greatly, but on days when I don’t feel as inspired or don’t feel like going for groceries, I just grab some tofu and join it with a combination of three or four simply cooked veggies (some beans, cauliflower and carrots for example, and if I’m feeling like it, some potatoes :P). This will bring me all the nutrition I need, and make things even cheaper than the indicative budget in this article!
Secondly, all the mentioned seasonings, pastes, extracts, cooking oils and vanilla powder only need to be bought once in a while. And even if you’re trying this for the first time, you will have some of these at home already!
Also, I use common sense and try to be flexible to an extent when putting together ingredients for one of these recipes. Say that I have pretty much everything I need to cook a recipe but I'm lacking something like a specific spice - most likely, I just use an alternative that I currently have. For example, recently I used Fajita seasoning (one of my favourites!) instead of Moroccan.

So in the end, apart from the occasional more specific ingredient like vegan chocolate or a pack of frozen fruits, the only things you'll need to buy on a daily basis are veggies and fruit, and some form of vegan protein (eg. tofu)! Believe me, that's not an expensive way to shop.

By doing that, I spend an average of about £10 to £15 per day without having to limit myself or be careful with what I can buy. Still, I pushed the indicative budget of this article to £20 to account for some of the more expensive ingredients that I included below, but that I only need to buy once in a while - like for example the protein powders, cooking oils or nuts and seeds.

I purposely gathered a list of ingredients of which 99.9% exist in common supermarkets - like for instance, Sainsbury's, Tesco, Ocado and so on. I frequently buy produce in non-package stores, but I researched Sainsbury's for all the ingredients just to prove this point, and in this vast list the only three things I couldn't find there were:

Cardamom powder which I got from Amazon for £5, but Sainsbury's has cardamom pods (1 flask for £1.10);
Moroccan seasoning but it exists in other stores - eg Ocado;
The vegan protein powders, which for practicality I order from Amazon.

The recipes below are a creative and super flavorful take on what a vegan diet can look like, and when taking into account the three points referred to above, this amounts to an average of a little less than £20 a day.

But as I said above - and just like in any other diet - sometimes we just need something quick that feeds us all the nutrition we need and keeps that stomach growl away :P And for that, not only can you go cheaper, but also you don’t need recipes - just grab a few veggies and get on with it. Besides, so many veggies can be eaten raw if you don’t feel like cooking. I also do this a lot, mainly in the evenings. Cut a few raw veggies and season them with a pinch of salt, join some slices of a nicely flavoured tofu (smoked tofu is yummyyy!) and you’re good to go ;) When comparing this to my pre-vegan routine (years ago), life couldn’t be easier.