Show caption Roasted cauliflower steak. Photograph: Tatiana Volgutova/Getty Images/iStockphoto Part-time veganism: the fewer animal products I ate, the less I wanted them Jess Ho As a restaurant critic, I thought adopting a plant-based diet would be hard, but what started as an experiment quickly became a lifestyle choice Tue 14 Jan 2020 19.00 GMT Share on Facebook

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It’s 2020. We all know the world is melting and we need to do everything we can to help the environment. I already walk everywhere, try to grow my own vegetables, eat seasonally, shop local, try to have zero food waste, have a worm farm, compost, host a beehive, bring my own bag and refuse to use takeaway cups, but for some reason I never switched to a plant-based diet.

I know that it is the easiest thing you can do to stop putting stress on the world from an agricultural and an ethical standpoint – with an obvious side effect of overall carbon emission reduction.

But it is hard. For me, it is hard because I write about food for a living. I write about restaurants and bars and aside from the obvious need to eat butter, cheese, meat and other non-plant-based things while reviewing, alcohol isn’t plant-based either. You know the reason why your Campari is red? Beetle shells. That wine you’re drinking? It’s been fined and filtered with eggshells and fish products. And though some people might, a food critic cannot subsist on vodka and unfined, unfiltered wine alone.

But that’s no excuse. There are 21 meals in one week and for me only three are reviews. I also know the contents of my fridge (butter, eggs, stock, yoghurt, congee) and I need to be realistic about how drastically I can change my diet. So three months ago I decided that for three days a week – nine meals – I would eat vegan.

I thought that just because I don’t drink milk or eat meat at every meal, I was pretty good already. I was wrong. I am that asshole who does all her meal prep at the weekend so I have at least five days of breakfasts, lunches and bases in the fridge. I had no idea how heavily I relied on eggs for breakfast, how much butter I consumed and how much I relied on stock-based meals until I stopped cooking them.

Jess Ho with a magnum of vegan wine. Photograph: Supplied

Since the environment was my primary motivation for adopting a partial vegan diet, I set myself some rules.

1. No processed foods. This meant no fake cheese, spreads, mock meat or any of that factory-made “food” that requires a lot of energy to produce. The most processed food I allowed myself was tofu.

2 No grains that have been unethically sourced. I’m looking at you quinoa. When we went through the big quinoa boom, production ravaged Bolivia. Also food miles. The only quinoa I’d be eating had to be locally grown. Cheap? No, but what is the cost of starving a nation?

3. No alt-milks. I don’t drink milk but I have some huge problems with industries that take a product that requires tonnes of water to produce, “milk” it, and then ditch the actual product at the end, creating a food waste. The boom of this category is also a huge bee killer, and no bees mean no food, means no life.

4. No produce out of season. I eat like this already because it’s better for the environment, not just in terms of farming, but it also reduces my carbon footprint. It’s a no-brainer and generally cheaper because there is always a surplus of in-season produce.

Thankfully meal-prepping legume-based dishes like soups, curries and salads takes no time, and any excuse to incorporate more colour and variety of vegetables into my diet is a good thing.

I found myself getting out of my go-to prep or clean-out-the-fridge dishes and making foods I never would have otherwise attempted at home, like dosa (for you sandwich press chefs out there, the batter also cooks very well in a toastie machine and doesn’t stink out the office) and finding more creative ways to eat whole grains, tofu and legumes.

Surprisingly, as I cut animal products out of my diet, I found that I wanted them less and less. My three days of plant-based eating slowly became four, then five, and then I found myself eating like a “regular” person only when I went out with friends or for work.

From an athletic perspective, despite training intensely six days a week, my energy levels and strength did not change. As for my weekly food spend, my grocery bill was halved although if I bought packaged, processed foodsthat wouldn’t be the case.

As for the negatives, there are only a few and they barely qualify as negatives. One is a personal preference: I am not a fan of tempeh. No matter how you marinate it, fry it or deep fry it, we will never be friends.

The second negative is that nothing will prepare you for the wind. I’m talking about your own, your partner’s and the fact that you will be holding in a lot of gas so you aren’t ostracised from society. After a week or two of adjusting, your body gets used to all the starches fermenting in your guts, but you need to hang in there and cross that threshold.

And finally, even though you haven’t told them you’ve switched to eating a mostly plant-based diet, people will have very long-winded opinions about it, and they will feel it is imperative that you listen. How very tiresome.