The beginning

This blog will be all about me being a vegan. Because I'm also a painter, I thought I call my blog "The vegan painter".

 I have been a vegetarian for a long time now, and thought about taking it one step further, so since last week I try to be as vegan as I feel comfortable with.

Being a vegetarian meant that I would still eat dairy products, but then, for dairy products like butter, cheese and milk, an animal needs to have calved. Most of those calves will end up being killed sooner or later. As I can't kill an animal (No, not even a spider although I'm scared of them) I should try to avoid as much as possible products that involves the killing of animals. Of course there will be things that contain animal products without knowing, or you just can't get around it, but being vegan is not about being perfect. In my opinion it's about trying to do as much as possible to avoid useless killing of fellow animals.

 What does that mean "feel comfortable with" you might ask.

Well, for instant; Vegans don't eat eggs. If it would be battery eggs, I can understand that, and even free range does not always mean really free. I know that a lot of the time free range means that the chickens live in big sheds. They don't really run free in a garden or so, they just have a bigger enclosed area.

We have been thinking of getting some ex battery hens from a rescue centre to give them a nice free live. Chickens lay eggs, if you want it or not and no vegan has yet been able to tell me what to do with those not fertile eggs if I'm not allowed to eat them.

There will definitely be more things that I think 'mmmm, why is that" but I will deal with that when the occasion arises.

There is already one positive thing that I encountered. I'm a chocoholic and doing my shopping would surely mean ending up with something chocolaty in my trolley, and because I try to shed a few kilos, that's not a good thing. Now, when I do my shopping and I feel a chocolate craving coming I just think about the milk in it, and I don't  want it anymore. Of course there is lots of chocolate that I am allowed to eat as a vegan because chocolate is from origin vegan, but the things I like are not.

I know there are dairy free chocolate products, but I have to travel quite a distance to get those. I could buy them over the internet of course, but I'm not that desperate:-)

In this blog I will also try and review vegan stuff and let you know the outcome. Because  I live in Ireland it will be most of the time products  available in Europe, but if you want to put up a review from vegan products available outside Europe, please feel free to do so.