If you tell me that you have truthfully tried for more than 1 or 2 meals, more like 1 or 2 months, to cook only vegan meals, then I’ll see your statement as having credibility. I was a COMPLETE & TOTAL meat lover! Most of my friends reckoned I cooked the best steak they'd ever eaten. I use to eat at least 2 packets of bacon a week. I once cooked a dinner that included bacon in all three courses. I ADORED quality cured meats! Steak pies, Lefty's ribs, boerewors, hot-dogs, burgers, prego rolls, schnitzel, espetada! I would book business trips to JHB to coincide with Espetada Thursday at a Portuguese restaurant close to my biggest then client. I was convinced that, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson, it was an animal's duty to be on my plate at supper time. I saw meat as dinner and veggies as a sideshow that didn't really warrant much attention. And there-in lies the problem. Perspective. My viewpoint started shifting about 12 months ago when I first properly started questioning my habits. I’ve been vegan since June this year. I am eating more tasteful food than I ever have in my life. It took and continues to take effort to find new and different ways to prepare the foods that I personally never really paid much attention to. Just in the same way that it took years and years to learn how to cook a meat-base diet well and tastefully. If you look past the one-dimensional view a lot of people have of food, you realize that there is likely a bigger world of opportunity for taste, texture and adventure in vegetables. What you cannot do is expect to radically change a fundamental component of your everyday, lifelong, complex habits and then expect it to just be easy and simple and straightforward off the bat.
