Advent is here, the goose takes flight before it’s roasted golden bright. Christmas roast – yes or no? This is precisely the question I asked myself many years ago, when I was still a semi-inveterate flexitarian, shortly before the much-loved Christmas season with all its fanfare and meat feasts. I can still remember the surprise and shock shown by my whole family when, after receiving the obligatory Advent calendar, I told them that I was going to go vegan for the whole month of December. With a smug smile on his face, my father held out his hand to me…

One of the great achievements of humanity… …is the transmission of patterns of behaviour and beliefs based on ideas and culture – known to most as tradition. Paradoxically, however, it is above all tradition to follow all these traditions without a second thought. After all, that’s the way it’s always been done. And that can’t be wrong, can it?

Schweißgebadet wachte ich auf. Ich hatte einen animalischen Albtraum. Und zwar lag ich eingemummelt – der Klassiker 😉 – unter einer tierisch warmen Daunendecke und zählte mal wieder jene Schäfchen, die mir erst recht den Schlaf raubten, weil sie jedes Mal, wenn ich meine Wohlfühlsocken über meine veganen Füßchen zog, ihrem verlorenen Wollkleid nachblökten. Und der Schlaf des (Selbst)-Gerechten war beendet. So schlurfte ich missmutig und voller Gewissensbisse in die Küche, öffnete den Kühlschrank und trank erst mal einen Schluck klärendes Wasser. Doch halt, mein Blick blieb auf dem Etikett der Wasserflasche haften und ließ in mir die Frage aufkeimen, ob der…

It was just before Christmas when the FaceTime symbol lit up urgently on my mobile phone, and the screen showed quite a number of familiar faces. It was the entire family clan, smiling from various windows and reminding me that it was my turn to host our Christmas dinner this year. My stress levels were rising … Before I could even agree, I was already being verbally bombarded with food requests from everyone. Starting with my brother, an aspiring amateur bodybuilder who is currently on a strict diet and only eats protein dishes and mashed fruit, and continuing with my…

This evening, my mates and I are having a guys’ night in again. Things are about to get wild. Inhibitions are going to be cast aside. And it seems like the “ménage à trois” we’ve arranged is going to involve resisting more than one sweet temptation. But before you jump to conclusions – things aren’t as they seem! Because instead of setting out, as we would have done before, on a testosterone-fueled voyage into the night to satisfy carnal desires (of course, I only mean the steakhouse around the corner), my two best friends and I plan to spend the…

My choice to be a vegan is motivated by my own passion – and the main reasoning behind my decision to eat a purely plant-based diet is to cause less suffering to animals. At least, that’s what I thought. Until, one day, having been overcome by a sudden urge to critically assess the contents of my wardrobe, I realized that despite my vegan lifestyle, I was still walking around in my smart leather shoes, occasionally defuzzing my woollen designer pullover, stroking my silk scarf without a second thought and, every night, crawling under a duvet which derived its warmth-giving qualities…

Now, at the latest, is the time to turn good intentions into actions and start a spring clean – on the outside and the inside. To address the effect that a winter of fatty foods and chocolate has had on their expanding midriffs, most people consider it inevitable that they’ll have to put their bodies through a detox involving lots of fasting. For the omnivores among us, there’s no doubt that this healing whole-body-reset can be a huge challenge. After all, our lazy sides love to eat indulgent foods such as fatty meat, difficult-to-digest dairy products, or fish floundering in…

The way to a person’s heart is through their stomach – even if things don’t quite happen as you expect them to … A friend of mine recently told me excitedly about a romance with a surprising twist – and it’s such a good story that I don’t want to just keep it to myself. Who knows, perhaps you’ve even experienced something similar? So my friend starts telling her story: The pictures and details on the dating site made every fiber of my being come alive. He was an architect with a sculpted body, sports mad, a good head of…

The old year has made its exit, and old habits are being assessed. Bring on the next cycle of positive resolutions! While our calendars may still call this month January, in the now ever-expanding cosmos that is vegan lifestyle, this month of change and transformation is quite simply called Veganuary. What started out as a small-scale campaign intended for a plant-based minority in 2014 has now evolved into a global charitable organization, with more than 1.5 million registered members on the Veganuary website. The movement’s stated aim is to raise awareness among as many people as possible about the conditions…

Christmas – the celebration that brings everyone together – is here again. However, if you look closely, you’ll notice that it’s very rarely the time of peace and contemplation that it’s meant to be. In the supermarkets’ overflowing freezer aisles, crowds of stressed people fight over the last fattened geese or turkeys, buttery biscuits are bought to feed the hungry gaggle at home, and the present-buying process (along with the tonnes of packaging its hysteria incurs) mutates into a last-minute emergency operation after which all the ribbons and wrapping paper end up in the trash. And in the midst of…

I recently learned firsthand (again) that demand doesn’t necessarily determine supply. To be precise, I attended a business dinner with my boss and some colleagues which left me not only with question marks written all over my face, but also with a gaping hole in my vegan stomach. While most supermarkets and food shops in Germany now have quite a large range of plant-based food on offer, restaurants offering traditional German cuisine seem to have not yet gotten the memo about this alternative but growing food offensive known as veganism (which, by the way, protects not only animals, but also…