Herr Steuer, you have a kind of fetish. They love bear sausage. When was the last time you ate these? In fact, that was six or seven years ago. That must have been just before I became a vegetarian. By the way: Face Sausage tastes just as good as Bear Sausage – I really enjoyed eating both. Well, but now you’re vegan. And that's exactly what you never wanted to be. What happened? My wife and I watched a documentary. Not the first on the subject, not the worst. In fact, she was completely harmless. But in it was the sentence that pigs feel fear on their last way to the slaughterhouse. The fact that I'm a bit scared because I'd like to eat it in the form of a sausage was so burned into my head that I thought: Come on, let's see if there aren't other options. You mention five Phases that you go through on the way to veganism. What's it all about? Comparing my own experiences and those of my community, I was able to identify five phases of veganization. The first stage is rejection. I was in that for a very long time too. The phase in which you are convinced that you definitely still need your meat and your cow's milk and don't want to hear anything about veganism. After that comes the interest. The phase in which a lot of things are already clear to you, but you just don't really know how to approach a complete change. In this phase you are already open to tips and implement them. This leads to phase three: euphoria. This is also known from the New Year's resolutions. At the beginning you are highly motivated - until you start to skid. For example, because you find out that your favorite crisps contain lactose. Phase four follows: disillusionment. That's when you become aware of the small obstacles and challenges. Once you have survived this phase, phase five follows: the change.
Before your book really starts, you can read it, loosely summarized: Family, at first they constantly try to sell you fruit and vegetables, but when you become vegan, nobody likes that either. Was your family that anti-vegan? No. My family is even very open. My two older sisters were inspired early on by Bravo to become vegetarians. At the time, I couldn't understand why they suddenly didn't want to eat the delicious things that Mama cooks anymore. But my parents always said, 'Try it'. Through the exchange with others, however, I have found that for many the family is a problem because they do not tolerate veganism. It is then not accepted that vegan or vegetarian sausages are also put on the grill - the tradition is different. And: Our family has a strong influence on our eating habits.
Some say veganism is healthy, others demonize it as malnutrition. What is it now? A balanced vegan diet is definitely healthy. Sure, if I'm vegan I need to make sure I'm getting things like vitamin B12 supplements as that's not found in the food sources. Many use this as an argument against veganism, but forget that B12 is often added to animal feed, so that we in turn ingest it through animal consumption. Then I can, I think, take it straight away. And of course, of course, you can also eat a damn bad vegan diet. Just because it says vegan somewhere doesn't mean the food is automatically healthy. Case in point: fries and cola.
... the changeover, as you write, was not always easy for you either. I'm just saying: flatulence. What did you learn from it? (laughs) A lot about my body. And that it takes a strong partnership to make big changes. Joking aside. If you deal with a vegan diet, you cannot avoid legumes. Of course they are healthy. But legumes do not play a major role in the normal German diet. If, overnight, you only eat chickpeas with soybeans and tofu, your gut will ask itself at first: what should I do with it now? One result can be the well-known flatulence. From this I learned that it is important to take slow, small steps so that the body can also get used to it.
It takes perseverance. My wife and I have been vegetarians for a long time. So we didn't completely swap everything for alternatives overnight. Meat and fish no longer played a role for us anyway. So for us it was more about: What about cheese? what about milk My advantage was that I'm not a big fan of cheese and yoghurt anyway. For many, these are the classic traps. I had to be most disciplined with sweets.
Have you substituted sweets for meat? Something similar is said to have been observed in people who wanted to swear off the fags. No, but I just really like eating sweets. In the beginning I kept my head above water with Oreo biscuits and Manner waffles. In the meantime, however, more and more products have come onto the market, and as a vegan I no longer have a disadvantage.
Be honest, you are a veganism professional, what are you still doing wrong? When it comes to nutrition, I'm quite satisfied. Even if my aspiration for the future is to eat even more regionally and seasonally. And sometimes it would certainly be a little better if I planned even more ahead. But veganism is of course much more than nutrition: clothes, cosmetics and so on. There are definitely still construction sites. I am not perfect. But I see what is possible and try to make small but constant changes.
You quote the sentence in the book: The vegan is the vegan's greatest enemy. In fact, when many people think of vegans, they first think of proselytization, dogmatism, moral mace swinging. You are also very active on social media, where you share vegan recipes and food for thought. What are you: friend or foe? I'm definitely a vegan friend. I know from experience that the intention 'Let's reduce animal suffering' for many turns into a kind of proselytizing pressure to open the eyes of as many people as possible. When I was in the euphoria phase, I also thought: 'Everybody else has to see that too! How can you not want to understand that?' But now I know that you can't force people to do anything. And when you try, you usually get the opposite result. My way is to make it easier to get started with veganism by sharing easy vegan recipes. On the other hand, I try to create change through information. But all in a way that isn't too forceful, too invasive. But at the end of the book, there is the semi-subtle request to try it: Vegan for a week, on a trial basis, so to speak, why? Ideally, if someone has read my book by then, I've managed to pull them from the rejection phase into the interest phase. That's where I'd like to start and motivate. Based on the Veganuar, where you face the challenge of eating vegan for 30 days, I would like to invite you to try it for a week. It's all about thinking about what the seven to ten dishes that you cook regularly actually are. There aren't many more than that for most of them. And then to ask yourself whether you can change something about them. In the end, maybe seven instead of just three dishes will do without animal ingredients. I hope that people will experience a similar aha moment as I had and they will realize: It is not that difficult to eat vegan or vegan.
Your grandma thought, tell me, that three topics of conversation ruin any party: politics, religion, and food. How do you think she would feel about the fact that they talk so much about food now? My grandmother was an incredibly stubborn person. She also grew very old because she was so stubborn. And she was very opinionated. She always said, 'stand by your opinion and carry it through.' I think no, I'm sure she would be proud of what I do.
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