Our long-time project finally came true! We managed to raise enough and make a donation to our favourite animal sanctuary – Dara Farm Sanctuary! It sure took us a long time to make this little project come true, but now it is over. We definitely …
It was a quiet, yet busy time for the low-impact, vegan and environmentally friendly little community initiative that Vegan Very Much is. HAPPY NEW YEAR! Unfortunately, we didn’t post anything to our website for the whole of 2022. Mainly because we changed the direction of …
After three and a half months of living on hiatus, it seems most suitable to break the long silence and share what we have been up to!
Dear you who you just stumbled to this small corner of our big world. Our website, where we mostly write about sustainable living, animals, and vegan food. Or you who you have been coming back and seeing no action here. Yes, we have been gone for a while, but not far at all. We just moved from our desks to the kitchen. The laptop was replaced with a stove.
Ever since we started our home-cooking vegan food business, which mostly concentrates on vegan snacks and dried fruit chips, we had literally no time for writing. That doesn’t mean that we are not coming back. We may, but only time knows. The situation on our Mother Earth is not getting any better, so there are really urgent articles to write. But as urgent it may be, we also need to support ourselves to make the ends meet. As for you, so for us, the current world order has introduced many life changes. So more than ever it is important that we follow our passion and make a living on what we know the best – vegan cooking.
Cooking is not the only thing that matters a lot. We love freedom, we love liberty and animals. This is why we try more to fight for our rights. Not only of the human brothers and sisters but also non-human brothers and sisters. We want to do more for the voiceless, for those who are caged, who are trapped or abused daily. The fight for animal liberation will never end. This is in our blood and in our hearts. We love animals and there is no place for animal abuse in our world.
If you do love animals as well, please consider taking the steps in your life, where you harm them the most. The easiest is to become vegan. If you are not quite ready this year, then please start freshly on the new year. Veganuary is taking place every year. This is your chance to start with a change. If you stop eating animal products, you will notice soon that your dog or cat is not much different from a cow or a chicken. They both have a right to the best lives. Just one is keeping you company and making you happy. While the other is meant to keep far away from you and feed you. They all should be free and not serve us, especially not sacrificing their lives for our taste buds. Living cruelty-free is good for animals, good for the planet, and good for you.
Choose a compassionate living and start with eating no animal-derived foods. We are here to help you. We can help you out with a consultation, we can cook for your Christmas meal and we can become your friends. Help us to help animals by ordering special items from our Vegan Very Much Shop. You can find some fundraising food items made only using plants. We will donate the 50% as promised to a lovely animal sanctuary called Dara Farm Sanctuary. They are a cruelty-free, vegan living organization run by two guys. We have some other great ideas, how we can support them in the near future. Keep checking back and remember all lives matter.
Yours,
Eve and Kerly
As the last post on Plastic-Free July, we will leave you with various quotes on plastic. Learn and make a change!
Be open and let the world inspire you. Dora Attard inspired us when we met her at Woodbine Beach. Please find out more about her work below.
We have been consciously plastic-free for 3 years. But we still hate it, so we are curious if there is a way to make peace with plastic.
When we first started with avoiding spending money on plastic, we had really no idea that it could really stick on us. But luckily it did. I can still clearly remember the first months of being plastic-free. How I was in a panic looking for items in tin cans, glass or cardboard. It almost seemed like a fun, but still difficult game. I didn’t want plastic, and I had very negative feelings toward plastic. The same applies today, but I started thinking maybe this hatred towards the god of the materials is unnecessary. Below is what helped me to decide.
Being plastic-free only brings peace of mind to the one who practises it. Their contribution to avoiding it doesn’t really bring much change. It does if it is possible to cut down the fee of the container waste removal. But most of the time even that is not possible. Perhaps it makes a friend or two think about plastic and its nasty ways as well. But besides all that this is, is a cry in the desert.
Perhaps that cry in the desert is what one needs. Knowing that no money has been exchanged for the very expensive packaging, gives peace of mind. The material is actually cheap while offering a temporary home for the food items we are paying money for to bring home. What makes plastic expensive is its environmental impact. Another thing is plastic is not healthy. So yes, keep using your reusable drinking or coffee cup, ditch the plastic straws, and buy into your own container if possible. If making you feel better is the only thing, then sure continue with it.
This great little table at Chariot Energy’s website is sharing the estimated decomposition of various plastic items:
| Material | Estimated Decomposition |
|---|---|
| Cigarette butts | 5 years |
| Plastic bags | 20 years |
| Plastic-lined coffee cups | 30 years |
| Plastic straws | 200 years |
| Soda can rings | 400 years |
| Plastic bottles | 450 years |
| Toothbrushes | 500 years |
| Disposable diapers | 500 years |
| Styrofoam | 500 years |
| Fishing line | 600 years |
| Glass | Unknown |
Crazy stuff, eh? No wonder it makes one feel good not to participate in that. Even though while we are voting during buying, we do not stand an option of closing down any hundreds of plastic factories in the world. What would help us making peace with plastic is hope for a novel, environmental-friendly materials. Also, more bans at the country-level definitely would help to shake the situation.
According to packaging giant Tetra Pak, here are some really frightening facts about plastic. We may think that if we sort the garbage, put recyclable items in the box, then we are good to go. As all plastic gets recycled and we have done our good deed.
Imagine that only 9% of total plastic is recycled! This completely blew my mind! If current trends continue, roughly 12 billion metric tons of plastic waste will be in landfills or the natural environment by 2050. Twelve billion metric tons is about 35,000 times as heavy as the Empire State Building. Imagine the pollution of the plastic to the groundwater, flora, and fauna, not to mention our oceans. Actually, it poses the biggest threat to the oceans.
Actually, a lot is happening, though we are drowning in plastic, the world is making some direct changes towards using plastic. Governments in at least 32 countries have banned plastic bags altogether and at least 127 countries have implemented policies regulating plastic bags according to the United Nations. Many countries around the globe are implementing plastic bans and encouraging consumers to replace plastic with alternative materials including biodegradable single-use items and eco-friendly reusable products.
Forbes.com shares lots of information on the company’s promise to cut down on plastic waste. Seems like big-name brands such as Nestle, Coca-Cola, Henkel, Kimberly-Clark, Tetra Pak, and so on, are actually working hard on ditching the poisonous and annoying plastic. Why there is so much talk about packaging this year? Due to Covid-19 people got into ordering in and buying online, which probably made the plastic consumption 100 x higher than it has ever been. Results of such destroying behaviour don’t go unnoticed, hence many businesses have sustainable packaging on their agendas. 2021 is shaping up to be the year that packaging transforms from wrecking our environment with excess waste to making the planet environmentally wonderful.
One of our favourite Instagram accounts Live Kindly has put together a nice article on what the world has been doing to ban plastic. Reading this article gives hope, as more countries are banning single-use items, such as plastic bags, straws, plates, cups, etc. This gives us hope and makes us think of perhaps one day there is a way of making peace with plastic.
It has been relatively easy for us to ditch plastic. Being vegan, we do not buy food items, which are coming in plastic packaging. If we crave something such as cream cheese, for example, we make our own using cashews. You can get these in bulk or in no plastic container. Even though we are not giving our money for plastic, it still finds its way to our home. We are blessed to receive food donations for our volunteering gigs from many kind people. And have a good friend who is always sharing her surplus with us. So she kind of keeps our recycling box filled. While we take it out, we from now on think that only 9% of plastic gets recycled. And we get mad again. There is no making peace with plastic. Not at least in 2021!
The header photo is taken by Volodymyr Hryshchenko. We are very thankful for him sharing his creations for free with the world.
We came up with a quick and short way of getting our messages out there. Let this plastic detox post be the first of its kind!
Most likely not, but July allows us to bring more attention to a material, which is polluting our world in every field of the world.
We delivered a big order for a customer who is very supportive of reusing unconventional packaging. Creating less garbage is what we are after!
Since last week we have had our online vegan food shop officially open. This existed for a while in our heads and finally, we had the courage and means to make our dream come true. Though offering good vegan food is our main output, creating less garbage (and not participating in food waste) is just as important.
When you are thinking of the food we offer, we hope you think of tasty, filling, and flavourful food. The kind of food you remember eating when you were young, the food the wise old women in your family made. But you do not have time to make it at home, or have no interest and learning to make yourself. Food which you can’t buy from the store. And you wouldn’t want to either, because freshness would be lost. As though the store-bought food you crave, may fill the gap for your tastebuds, it definitely creates a gap in your health. Commercially produced foods are always full of empty calories, fillers, and unnatural ingredients and additives to stretch the dollar. Nobody should put that kind of stuff in their bodies.
When we think of the food we are creating, we are following the next simple rule set out by wonderful food guru Michael Pollan:
“If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”
Michael Pollan
And another famous quote from “Finding Nemo”, which has inspired us a lot, in a bit changed form:
“Fish/animals are friends. Not food.”
Bruce the Shark
Simple as that? Right? This is why our recipes are simple and made of few natural plant-based ingredients. We love animals and want them to enjoy their lives. By using only plants, simple herbs, and spices, we are creating pleasant cruelty-free eating experiences. The ingredients do not come to us packed in many packages, and they will not reach the customers packed in many packages. Creating less garbage? Yes, please.
We are just making good vegan food. Period. We are not aiming for our products to be visually top-notch. Though we are aware of the fact that we first eat with our eyes, we may not deliver so much in the visual section. But we definitely want to slam in the culinary section! I think this is agreeable, better a bad looking and tasty food, than good-looking, yucky and unhealthy food.
Though I love photography and always want to take good food photographs, I am never aiming to create beautiful, colorful, but always the same-looking Instagram suitable photos. I admit that the vegan food feeds look gorgeous. The creativity of the people is out of this world. I respect plant-based home or professional chefs who make good meals and have wonderful photos. Though I appreciate their work, this is not something I aim to do myself. I want to create less garbage and have the food on the photos look how it actually is. I don’t want to be popular on Instagram, because I want to reach people who appreciate what we are creating. Real food made of real ingredients by real people.
We do not like buying for buying’s sake. And shopping. And malls. We do not want to add to the richness of big corporations. We are doing everything opposite as much as possible. Commercialism doesn’t help to create less garbage, it only adds more. We do not want to invest in fancy, and beautiful packages you are using just once. The package is meant to be practical, not to give you a wow-effect. This should come while eating the food. Again, I do appreciate it when people put so much effort into making their products beautiful. I myself like simple, environmentally friendly packages or reusing of what is already there. Too many things exist already and via mutual aid, we can share and trade things we do not need. A different approach can be done if the volumes are small and you really care.
So we are saying no to single-use plastic and will not buy any containers or Ziplocks or any plastic items to pack our food into. We have been given by our kind friend some of the above-listed items and we will be using what we have.
How lucky we are that the big order we had was received by a kind person, who actually noticed our so-called homemade attempts to create less waste. We delivered a pack of 6 Pride rainbow cookies with glaze, which we didn’t want to put in a large container with a lid. Instead, we decided to use just the lid as a plate and covered it with foil instead (already had). If you are smart, creative, and care above all, you can use foil many times after you have bought it home, depending on its condition.
Our kind customer noticed this and mentioned that in their follow-up email. They were even so kind as to offer extra containers, which we collected the following day. They said that they wash them and prefer that they be reused at least once before ending up in the landfills since the notorious black takeout food containers are not recyclable (the downside of the ordering in) because the machines cannot detect black. Such are the people we want to reach. Who wants to support food that doesn’t torture animals, to create for customers who appreciate taste over looks, and understand the idea of reusing and a more low-impact lifestyle.
Feel free to leave a container on your porch next time you are ordering from us! 😉