Hardships of being vegan in Russia

I’m a girl from Russia, living in city called Rostov-on-Don. I have a husband and a 4 old years son.

I’ve been vegetarian for over 10 years now. My vegetarianism is veganish. It means I rarely eat dairy or egg products, striving to be vegan. Because I believe that veganism is the most logical and ethically-sound way to eat (and live). But in a country like Russia it can be hard.

In this post I want to share my experiences being a veganish vegetarian in Russia (mostly I’m gonna complain, for now.

So here are my struggles :

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PRODUCTS :

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So. any time I want to cook some vegan recipe from American youtube, I get stuck with the ingredients: most of them you won’t find here.

Spinach and other greens? They’re available for a few weeks in the summer, or in some special expensive shops for a high price. The only greens easily available year round are: dill, parsley, green onions, coriander leafs (yuk). And what about those super healthy greens like dark leafy greens packed with calcium? Have never seen here… So getting enough calcium on Cronometer is a bit tricky. Any suggestions?

Then, TOFU. I fell in love with it long before becoming vegetarian. I was living in Korea, and it was sold in every supermarket, and also marketed on spot (we could taste it with cool sauces in the supermarket). It was cheap, available, and delicious. Tofu in Russia… You can only find it in special health food / vegetarian shops. Most of these shops are in the city center, and if you don’t work or live downtown, you have to find time to go to such special shops. Pretty inconvenient. Secondly, the taste… it’s so much inferior to what I was getting in Korea, and the only appropriate tofu brand I can get in my hometown is also kinda expensive… So I eat it very sparingly, cannot fully indulge as much as I want. Hence, all the foreign recipes for tofu are also a rare thing for me.
Mayonnaise… Just this summer it was available in 4 shops in my neighbourhood, and then in the Fall it disappeared all of the sudden. So frustrating! All at once from all the shops! I don’t know why, maybe there was low demand. And again, now to get vegan mayo, I have to go far to the city center to special shops. (By the way, it’s not called “vegan mayo” here, it’s “the mayo for Christian Lent” so I guess I’ll see it in the next Lent, in the spring, but just for a few weeks ;

Eating in Winter. Most of tasty vegetables disappear till June. From December. All that’s left are: cabbage, onions, carrots, potatoes, beetroot, parsnip. Enjoy the variety. Oh, and some frozen vegetables are life-savers: broccoli, green beans. Canned veggies like corn, green peas, eggplant also help. I know, beans are there, we can survive. But by April I literally cry for vegetables. =)

Vegan sausages, salami, milk. Delicious, but pretty expensive compared to animal-derived counterparts. And also available only in special shops. They are our special treats on occasion) Thank God I found a recipe of a very easy-to-make and CHEAP oat milk. My husband says that if it wasn’t for that oat milk, he would be buying cow’s milk every day..))

Vegan cheeses. Just 2 brands (of course only in special shops). One brand is disgusting taste, second is more-or-less decent, but expensive as F… Still can’t be compared to real cheese (and that’s not to blame veganism, but the technologies that aren’t yet implemented in our country. Cow cheese has a long tradition, centuries to develop all the kinds, and vegan cheese is a new thing, needs some more time).

I think I’ve found a pretty nice cheap-n-easy Mac-n-Cheese recipe, which is a happy thing for me. But I wish I had some egg substitute – something savory which would be as easy to throw into pan and cook as real eggs (tofu would work if it was available, once again, uufff…). Sometimes my husband hints me that he’d like some eggs. It’s sad, and I really want to find some appropriate substitution taste-wise and easiness-wise. Please help.

And it also makes me frustrated, how cheap hen’s egg are here. Cheaper than my 200-grams pack of tofu :( It breaks my heart thinking of how much suffering there is in that cheapness :(( When in fact growing soya and making tofu must be 100 times easier and cheaper than growing and torturing chickens!

And finally, full absence of vegan sweets, cakes, muffins, desserts, milky chocolate stops me from being 100% vegan right there. In fact, in all these 6.5 years my nearly 10 attempts to go fully vegan were hindered by this. And it all started with milk chocolate… If you tell me to cook my own sweets – I can’t bear another hour of cooking in the kitchen, that’s too much for me, and now also having a newborn. And it was mostly psychologically difficult to say “no” to sweets or chocolate offered at work or friends/relatives’ house just because there was some dried milk powder in them (and no substitutes sold anywhere). But I don’t buy this stuff very often.

That’s all about my frustration with veganism food-wise. More about psychological stuff in next posts.

But STILL, I believe in veganism, I believe it’s the future (if humankind continues developing). These difficulties described in the post don’t mean Veganism is inherently difficult. It means that the society, norms and traditions, the existing system make it that way. When we get enough vegans/veganish people ready to sacrifice some convenience of the early stage of a social movement, the system will respond by offering more vegan products. For that matter, I think we’re 10-15 years behind places like the US. But we’ll get there. And meanwhile, we live vegan as much as we can, being creative and inventive, trying to stay positive and see the light.

(I was encouraged to write such posts by my husband @clixmoney , after complaining for the 100th time about how sad I get living in a non vegan world, especially in Russia. He said Blurt community is very supportive and I’ll feel better and get some good tips. Hope for that. Please comment as much as you can and care for. :) )