Creating the vegan household: part one

Our transition to a virtually 100% vegan diet was relatively easy. We were already 95% of the way there. As we don’t eat dairy, soja yoghourt and almond milk are already weekly staples, and, of course, my hunt for the elusive vegan cheese continues. It was just a matter of excluding eggs, buying an ice-cream maker, and paying a little more attention to product labelling. Eating out is still another matter, unless we’re at our favourite haunt The Hidden Veggie Kitchen, and I have to confess that the other day is was a slice of goats cheese pizza or starve. The pizza won.

Now, I’ve started to turn my attention to other lifestyle areas, in particular household cleaning and personal care products. Here, I’ve found the lack of vegan, vegetarian or cruelty-free labelling on French products is a bit of a minefield. And when I started to investigate further I realised that the problem is not just confined to France. Various terms are bandied about: cruelty-free, vegan, bio and organic. These terms are not interchangeable. A product can be vegan but tested on animals, and conversely, it can be cruelty-free but not vegan-compliant, for example containing milk or honey. I’ve written previously about my research into vegetarian/vegan food labelling, now my desire to move towards more ethical household products has created a whole new level of complexity.

There were a number of areas where we could make some easy changes, although I’m still not sure on the financial implications. However, OH is fully on-board with my aim to create a more holistic approach to our lifestyle. It’s a bit like giving up dairy to become more vegan: once you’ve decided to stop eating meat, then consuming dairy-milk becomes a bit of a no-brainer. In our thinking, once you’ve decided to support animal welfare then why would you want to use products whose production involved animal cruelty. Of course, I fully accept there are areas, such as testing of genuine medicines (as opposed to beauty products), which are ethically difficult, and we never turn down treatments for our pets, do we?

We decided to take it one step at a time, and first of all, look at products around the house which we could review and change. Our first success has to be the home-made weed-killer. Our French neighbours are not averse to spraying with all manner of noxious chemicals, usually when we are outside eating. In the past, we have given them great amusement by hand-pulling all the weeds from the terrace gravel, but with this damp summer we just couldn’t keep up with the little blighters so something a bit quicker and stronger was called for. I’d seen a lot of online commentary about using a vinegar and salt mix as a natural weed-killer that was safe for pets, but we didn’t really rate the chances of success. However, OH’s home-made mix of cheap 8% white vinegar, salt, a dash of washing up liquid and water has proved to be a triumph and much cheaper than any of the organic, bio or ethical weed-killer preparations available, plus less back-breaking than hand-weeding.

Inside the house, there is scope for change in both the cleaning products we use and personal toiletries. There’s no doubt that ethical products are more expensive. There are less economies of scale for a start, a small business producing organic soap for example can’t compete on price with the chemical giants brewing up vats of industrial gloop. A few bio, cruelty-free products are starting to appear in the local supermarket, so rather than take a trip to the bio shop I decided to try out some natural-based shampoo and conditioner and a locally-made bio deodorant. Price-wise the shampoo is comparable to a good brand, and achieves equal results. I’ve now bought some solid bar shampoo to try out in the campervan, which will be interesting. The deodorant is free of aluminium and alcohol, which are the principal ingredients of the cheap supermarket own-brands. It’s interesting that when we first came to France deodorant was difficult to get and expensive. Now, there are several shelves and the price of the bio is equivalent to what we used to pay in the past if we’d run out of our Asda stockpile. The bio deodorant is excellent and another result is that any trace of the eczema we both suffered intermittently has disappeared. So, this initial experiment has seen three successes. Now I need to roll out the conversion process to other areas of the household.