I live in a vast rural area in the central valley of California. Here, people are fanatical carnivores. There is very little vegan food and I live very far from where most of it is available and don’t drive for many reasons many of them environmental. Getting there would require riding a bike in the heat most of the year and people here hate bicyclists. Delivery like doordash is really expensive and only the same two dashers will take my vegan order I’ve noticed.
Has anyone found any useful tips for this basic kind of situation that I’m driving at?
Buy bulk as much as you can. Dry lentils, beans and noodles, canned goods, frozen vegetables, tofu lasts a long time unopened. If you have someone who can drive and you plan what you’re going to eat ahead of time, you can probably make it by on a single grocery trip a month. If any stores near you do ordering ahead, that’d save time for you and your driver, but you’ll need to watch close that they don’t try to substitute anything if they’re out of stock. Worst case for environmental reasons, but you can order a surprising amount of dry goods on places like Amazon. The grocery shopping equivalent to Door Dash I think is Instacart, but that may also be expensive.
There’s definitely no ideal option, but it helps to think that there are places in the world where people eat essentially the same meal every day outside of special occasions and that eating whatever you feel like every night is a privilege. So get used to simple recipes with similar ingredients you can take advantage of. This helped me break out of the idea that I can’t have stir fry 3 days in a row because its not ‘balanced’ when you’re fine as long as overall you’re meeting your vitamin and nutritional needs.
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It sounds like you don’t cook at home that much and that picking up more of those skills would solve all of your problems. It can be overwhelming if you’re in the newer stages! I sort of still am lol. But learn 1 dish you like at a time, maybe get a simple vegan cookbook for ideas, or crowdsource easy vegan at-home meals here. If you’re a newer vegan and are into faux meats more so than lentils, for example, then shop around a figure out which products you like. (That might also be an easy way of translating known non-vegan recipes/meal ideas to vegan ones)
shop around
I think you missed the point of OP’s post: they have problems getting to shops that sell vegan fare.
I got the sense they were only seeking already-prepared foods, eg the doordash mention. Maybe there are no grocery stores that sell a plant-based milk or a soy-based burger near them, but I wouldn’t assume that to be the 100% case even if there are no vegan restaurants
No doordash delivers groceries. I’m referring to groceries. I prepare all my own food these days.
Right on!
You live in the country, but don’t drive for environmental reasons, yet you are considering using Door Dash? Can we also assume you don’t want to face the obvious answer: stockpile or grow food and cook for yourself?
I don’t mean to be overly critical, but it sounds to me like you are trying to avoid compromising on both your ideals and modern day expectations, to find a practical solution. Your pre-industrial agricultural ancestor would have spent a week stockpiling food in the root cellar, by scrounging around locally, or going very far to stockpile food. They probably were also farming animals in a significantly more sustainable/humane way, though certainly exceedingly scarcely.
And like I told another person here, I was referring to groceries, not prepared vegan food. There is no prepared vegan food around here, just scant ingredients at certain department stores.
Grow food where? What kind of person can afford enough land to grow their own food? Plus doordashers usually get multiple orders in one trip kind of like carpooling, saves gas. I would just be going just for my own groceries thus wasting gas.
Cook at home. Eating vegan, just don’t add anything you can’t eat.
I wonder if you could buy some of the raw ingredients to make foods you want. If you bought a bulk thing of soybeans, you could make tempeh and tofu with it. There are lots of recipes for seitan out there as well. What else do you wish was more available to you?
Do you mean the fun stuff like soy curls and doing lines of nooch? Mimicking the gluttonous delights of Thee Burger Dude?
