Hey there. I’m Jessica & thanks for visiting The Domestic Vegan! I’m a 26-year-old animal-lover, kitchen addict, and vegan living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I started this blog as a way to demonstrate how delicious, rewarding, and amazing the vegan lifestyle is. I find that many people are confused about what “vegan” means, what vegans eat, and why anyone would choose to be vegan in the first place – and I hope to work toward demystifying all of that through my posts here.
My journey to veganism… I was an off-and-on vegetarian from the time I was 10 years old until I was 22, when I decided to go vegan. I remember being fairly young & realizing that the barnyard animals I loved so much in my story books were the same animals that were on my dinner plate. The cartoon baby chicks that adorned my pajamas were the same animals whose real life counterparts grew up to become the animals we grilled every summer. The stuffed animal piglet that I carried with me to bed each night was the same type of animal whose body we carved into each Easter. I decided to be vegetarian more times than I can count until it finally stuck when I was in college, and I learned to grocery shop & cook for myself.
I started on the vegan path in 2006 while writing a term paper on sustainable agriculture. I was already vaguely aware of the cruelty towards animals that was inherent & institutionalized within animal agriculture – but for the first time, I learned that animal agriculture causes so much pollution, environmental degradation, and unnecessary waste. With all this information laid out before me, I just could no longer turn a blind eye to these problems – and all arrows pointed towards veganism as part of the solution. By the time I was finished writing my paper, I had decided to go vegan.
Unlike some people, it wasn’t an overnight transition for me. I slowly phased out most animal products from my diet, but like a lot of aspiring vegans, I still clung onto cheese. In the meantime, I read a lot about plant-based nutrition & the vegan lifestyle, and I started buying vegan cookbooks & looking up recipes online. (You can check out my favorite books here.) I experimented with vegan cooking & baking, yet I still felt intimidated by “going all the way” and making a commitment to never again eat animal products. I think it was the fear of failure & wanting to avoid the (perceived) embarrassment of having to tell people that I wasn’t vegan anymore – that I had “fallen off the wagon” – if it didn’t work out for me.
Finally, one morning in July 2007, I woke up & literally the first thing I thought was, “I’m just going to try to be vegan. If I don’t like it or if I feel deprived or if it’s too hard, I don’t have to stay vegan forever. No one is forcing me to do this. But enough thinking about it – just try it.” Well, I tried it, and I haven’t looked back since! At first, I didn’t tell very many people that I was trying to be vegan; I guess I felt like I wanted to feel confident in my ability to stay vegan before I broadcast it to everyone I knew. But before I knew it, I realized that I had been vegan for several months, and I had never felt better. My skin was clear, my energy was soaring, and I felt so joyful. Corny as it may sound, it’s an indescribably wonderful feeling to know that you’re doing what you can to protect animals from senseless cruelty, while bettering both your personal health & the environment in the process!
Throughout my journey to becoming vegan, I read everything I could get my hands on about nutrition. Sure, I felt a strong pull towards veganism, but I didn’t want to do that at the cost of my own health & well-being. I wanted to be confident that I was taking care of myself – and I was very encouraged by what I learned. Turns out, a plant-based diet is incredibly healthy, and in general, it provides all the nutrients humans need (yes, even protein!). Reading all of this information really sparked in me a passion for nutrition (I still love reading any book & article about nutrition that I can get my hands on). In September 2010, I was interviewed by Shape magazine about how I make my vegan lifestyle easy & fun. You can read my interview here!
So, that’s me in a (large) nutshell! In addition to cooking, baking, and eating amazing vegan food, I spend a lot o
f time drinking tea, watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, doing Pilates, and hanging out with my boyfriend & our rescued (toothless) dog, Mabel.
If you want to contact me, please send an email to thedomesticvegan (at) gmail (dot) com. You can also follow me on Twitter @ DomesticVegan!
