How do I feed a vegan son in a meat eating household?

Question

My 15 year old son decided to become vegan, which I support. I support all of the kids and their new encounters, experiments & such, but I am going to go BROKE feeding him! LOL!
I am making 2 different dinners nightly! The food is so expensive and I am still learning how to cook most of it! LOL it is am adventure for both of us. He is serious, it has been going on now for 5 months.

Answer 1

I wouldn't cook two different meals if I were you, at least not every night. I would use this as an opportunity to include more vegetables in YOUR diet, if you don't already have two at each meal, and just make a little extra of those for him and he can have everything you make that doesn't include animal products. The extra veggies will be good for you and your son will learn a new way of eating. The typical American diet of some sort of meaty dish with a little veggies on the side and a bunch of bread with dessert at the end is NOT a healthy diet. This could be a good great opportunity to make your WHOLE family healthier meals.

I do have some tips, though:
Maybe keep a pot of beans in a crock pot for him (chili, pinto beans, baked beans, bean soup) to snack on when he's hungry or if a meal you're making doesn't fill him up. Beans are cheap and very easy to use in recipes. Eating a bunch of processed soy foods are not that healthy! I hope he's using this lifestyle change to improve his health as well as help animals.

Brown rice is also very inexpensive and with some salsa on top it makes a tasty meal. Or you can throw in some pasta sauce with some chopped veggies. Fry it up with some veggies and a little Asian sauce or soy sauce.

Brown rice pasta is another way to stretch a dollar. You can find it in spaghetti noodles or spiral noodles - my favorites. So much you can do with pasta and the brown rice is so much healthier than regular pasta. Just don't overcook it!

Potatoes are good too. You can top a potato with whatever veggie you are cooking with dinner. Or beans!

Pretty much any recipe can be vegafied. I wish I had some examples of what you normally cook for the rest of your family. For example, If you're making spaghetti and meatballs, cook the meatballs in a seperate pan and use marinara sauce instead of meat sauce. If you're making burgers, let your son pile on the veggies and just leave off the burger (you don't HAVE to have some kind of meat substitute at every meal - it's not necessary and it may not even be healthy!) and have some baked beans on the side. If you're making tacos, cook up a little spanish rice (brown rice with taco sauce added!) to put in the tortilla instead of meat. Get creative!

Try and serve a salad before every meal. Live, raw foods are SO good for digestion (they have enzymes that cooked veggies don't have!).

Any baked goods you make can be made without eggs - they make an egg replacer that acts as a binder. It's cheap and it works great. I just made brownies tonight. Instead of regular sugar you can get evaporated cane sugar that isn't bleached white with animal bones (yuck) - it's so much better for you and it tastes and cooks just like regular white sugar. They make vegan versions of so many foods that, I promise you, you would like just as much as the "regular" versions.

The thing is, most vegans are vegans for animal rights reasons, but it really is SO much healthier for you to eliminate cholesterol and animal far and proteins from your diet. There is a lot of science that doesn't get out because it's not popular to go against the MAJORITY of society's eating habits and there are a LOT of big companies that don't want people to start eating healthier because it will means NOT eating their products. But the science is there for people who care to look at it. I urge you to get two books. The first is called BECOMING VEGAN. It will help you better understand your son's new nutritional needs and give a lot of good basic info that will ensure he stays healthy. The other is THE CHINA STUDY. I recommend it all the time because it is SO important. It was written by the professor of nutrition at Cornell who has been a part of some of the most important nutritional studies of the last three decades (plus). I wish I could make everyone in the world read that book. It is changing lives. It changed mine and my husband's drastically and we've never been happier or healthier.

Anyway, I hope some of that helps! If there's anything else I can do to help you out please email me (click my profile). I'm pretty passionate about an animal-free diet and am happy to share any info I can.

Answer 2

Very simple, if you make spaghetti, before you add meat to your sauce, put some non-meat sauce on his spaghetti then add the meat. Very simple stuff. If you make whipped potatoes, do not add butter etc before giving him some. My sister was diabetic, so we all ate her diabetic food without any problems.

Does the family not eat any beans, potatoes, vegetables, rice at all?? Do what all traditional people do all around the world, don't mix the food all together. You have the meat dish, the vegetable dish, potato dish, gravy dish, sauce... they are all separate... then everyone takes what they want.

Buy him a sack of organic oats (it's what, $10 for a HUGE sack of organic oats), buy a sack of rice for him $10 non-organic, maybe $16 organic... Sack of organic whole wheat flour, sack of red lentils (can throw a handful in with rice), ... just find a health-food distributor -- that's what we do. 50% less than retail. Sure, you have to buy 2-300 dollars worth at once (and save 2-300), but that will last a LONG time and he'll have all the base ingredients for making other dishes (cookies, pancakes, bread, oatmeal, ...). Even a sack of organic popcorn is super cheap and will last a year and more... a good cheap snack for him if you have an air popper.

So, we also have a garden. Tell him that if he is serious, that he should start a garden, in the backyard or community garden, rooftop, balcony, wherever. We literally never buy vegetables from the store (other than ginger) since we have a garden. Get him the book "One Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukuoka and let him start growing his own food. Get free seed catalogues by mail or on the internet; also at the library. Order all sorts of interesting seeds (or pick some up at the plant store -- organic seeds highly available these days). A few dollars of seeds = a few hundred dollars in vegetables. Plus, the whole family can eat from the garden too. We have a year-round garden -- lots to eat all winter too.

How lucky he is to have parents like you. You can see SO many people just on Yahoo Answers who's parents are totally against them in an all out battle.

Answer 3

Vegan food doesn't have to be expensive by any stretch. Processed, faux meat products may be expensive, but a whole foods diet is not (buy beans, rice, quinoa, lentils and chickpeas from the bulk bins... cheap!) At 15, your son should definitely be capable of learning to cook for himself and the two of you should be able to plan some inspired menus that include a fair amount of overlap (so you're only cooking, say, 1.3 dinners nightly!) A great cookbook for the budget-minded vegan is "Vegan With a Vengeance" by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. It's GOOD food, quite apart from it being vegan; I cook vegan for myself and my omnivore boyfriend and he wholeheartedly approves of everything I've made from this book (as well as others.) If you and the rest of your family are not married to the idea of eating meat at every meal, you can keep the work and the cost to a minimum by planning a vegan night or two each week.

ps: you ROCK for being a supportive mom (I had one, too, when I went veg at 16, but so many teens come here with questions about how to get their parents to take them seriously and respect their independence.)

Answer 4

This is a perfect time to teach your son how to cook. At the very least have him help. There are cheaper products and some you can even buy in bulk you need to look around. There is always rice and beans which is both cheap, nutritious and vegan. Here is a good recipe I found and a site where I buy Heartline meats in bulk.
http://www.soybean.com/

Black Beans & Rice Cuban Style
Ingredients (use vegan versions):

2 16 oz cans S & W Black Beans Cuban Style
2 cups uncooked long grain rice
2 cups water
1 large onion thinly chopped
2 cloves minced garlic
2 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 teasp oregano
1/2 teasp cummin
1 Bay leave
salt to taste



Directions:

Drain black beans and combine liquid with water to make a total of 2 1/2 cups, set aside. Sautee onions in olive oil, add garlic, oregano and cummin and continue sauteeing for about 1 minute. In a 2 quart pot, combine rice, liquid and sauteed onions, add bay leave and salt to taste. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to low and cook for approximately 20 minutes or until rice is tender. Serve with your favorite green salad and vegan french bread. Buen apetito!

Serves: 4 to 6

Preparation time: 20 min.

Answer 5

Well I say tofu should be good, lot of salads, keep it simple. Also if he does not like what you cook tell him he needs to begin to fix his own food for dinner and breakfast and he has to go to the grocery with you so he can pick out what he would like to eat. That will serve 2 goals one it will kinda teach him how to cook which I think everyone should learn! Two it will show him just how expensive food is, I mean when you take him and he is wanting something that is expensive you will have to remind him that the money for food is not just for his food but for others in the house as well. I mean if he really wants to do this you should support him, but also use it as a way to teach him some things, like how to cook and how expensive food is, even more so for healthy foods like fresh vegetables and fruits. =)

Answer 6

Okay, you can cook all the sides vegan. Use Earth Balance instead of butter, soy milk instead of cows' milk, vegetable broth instead of chicken broth in the dishes. Make your meat dish for the rest of the family and have your son cook his tofu/tempeh/seitan/analogue for himself. Tempeh can be a little expensive, unfortunately, but I can get a pound of tofu for less than $1.50 at Whole Foods, and that provides roughly three servings for me. Your son can also learn to make seitan, a.k.a. wheat meat, relatively inexpensively.

Your son is going to have to learn to cook, and maybe this can be an adventure for the whole family. One good cookbook for you all to try is "Conveniently Vegan" by Debra Wasserman. It has recipes calling for products that are easy to find at conventional grocery stores. www.vegweb.com has excellent resources for veg*ans and numerous recipes, some of them quite simple to make.

If you make a casserole, split the recipe into two separate baking dishes and put the meat in the family dish and an analogue in his portion. When I last visited my family, my mom tried this with a vegetarian casserole, putting feta in one dish and Follow Your Heart vegan cheese in the other. My omni family members tried both and liked both.

Hope this helps! And thank you for being a supportive mom.

Answer 7

Fake meats & dairy products are luxuries, not necessities. The vegan diet should not be more expensive than an omnivorous one. Produce is something you should be buying anyway as an omnivore so that shouldn't really factor in, but beans, rice, tvp, etc are all very cheap.

p.s. he's a teenage boy. You're going to go broke trying to feed his never-ending stomach whether he eats animal products or not ;)

Answer 8

sit him down and tell him the problem.... try to cook more veggies than meat. i am the only vegetarian in my house hold.... and no one supports me at all (neither of my parents). So all i have to say is maybe go to a cheaper store. Most of the time the health food store will be way more expensive than wal-mart. try the dollar store for some stuff. i know it might not be every ones fav place to go but health is important and they have foods like unsalted nuts. Gl and i just want to say thank you for supporting your son, I am 14.

Answer 9

Why don't you just try to eat the same things as him? A vegan/vegetarian lifestle will be a much healthier option for everyone. I'm 15 and a vegetarian and my mom is a vegetarian with also. (I pursuaded her. :])We both feel much healthier. I recently started going to a vegan doctor and she told my mom about how hormones in meat and milk and eggs cause cancer and also cause a lot of diseases that most people mistakenly think as genetic. Doctors already know the cure to cancer: No artificial pesticides or hormones. They just don't like to tell people... less in it for them. Anyway, I'm glad that we met her and she had a lot to do with my mom turning. It is so easy to feed my brother(13) and sister(10) also because vegetarian "meats" (from Morningstar and Boca and such) taste so real. I think your whole family should try it for a week or so just to see. It would be much easier on your wallet, life, and body. :]

Answer 10

I think that beans and rice should be a big part of the diet. many different kinds. They are not expensive and are a complete protein. Also eggs, are a good not too expensive substitute for meat.