18 Tips on How to Go Vegan in a Non-Vegan Household

Going vegan in a house full of non-vegans can be tricky. Whether you’re a teenager living with non-vegan parents or an adult with non-vegan roommates, this post is your guide on how to best manage this situation.

In the past 14 years as a vegan, I’ve lived with non-vegans several times, so I have a sense of the challenges and how to meet them constructively. Read on for 18 tips on being vegan when your parents, spouse, or roommates aren’t!

1. Participate in the grocery shopping.

If you’re living at home with your parents, your mom or dad may complain that they don’t know how to buy vegan groceries for you. This is a fair point because reading labels for non-vegan ingredients can take some time to learn. (See my guide to reading labels here.)

There are two simple ways to address this issue:

1. Offer to come along to the grocery store and help pick out the foods.
2. Offer to go buy your own vegan groceries for yourself.

Even besides the issue of veganism itself, whoever wants to be most picky in their diet should do the grocery shopping. I learned this by living with a vegan friend. We decided to just split all grocery costs 50/50 and only send one of us to the store each time.

Well, I quickly realized it was easiest to volunteer to do the grocery shopping myself. That way, I could be picky about getting exactly what I wanted in the store, without having to ask my friend to find a specific kind of oil-free, unprocessed, blah-blah-blah ingredients!

2. Become the best chef in the house.

If you take an active interest in cooking and baking, this means you can be the one who’s doing more of the food prep, and you can make sure there are always great vegan options in the house.

It’s generally a lot easier to convince your roommates or family to try eating your vegan food with you, rather than convincing them to make a bunch of vegan dishes for your sake.

Your best vegan culinary creations may also win some of your house-mates over. Maybe they’ll want to know how to cook it, too. It’s possible with time that you’ll even convert someone else in the house to be vegan with you.

3. Do meal prep on the weekends.

Have you ever cooked enough food for the week and stored it in containers in the fridge? This kind of meal prep can be a game changer for any vegan—but it takes on extra value when you’re living in a non-vegan household.

When you do meal prep, you always have ready-to-go meals throughout the week, regardless what everyone else is eating. You’re not at risk of going hungry or needing to spend a lot of time cooking your own separate meal from scratch.

The way I’ve always enjoyed doing meal prep is with soups, stews, and other dishes where you just mix everything together in a bowl (rice and beans, pasta with sauce, etc).

But if you want to do meal prep that keeps different parts of the meal separate, that can be done, too. It just requires more containers—or special ones with compartments, like these (Amazon link):

4. Communicate your boundaries clearly.

One of the things that can really go wrong with a vegan in a non-vegan household is if your house-mates don’t know how seriously you take certain issues.

If you don’t want people using your pans for cooking with meat or butter, it’s okay to politely let them know. Don’t suffer in silence and then explode at them someday from letting it build up.

Try to use nonviolent communication methods to make these conversations go as well as possible. Try not to be accusatory by saying “You always do ______!” Instead, speak in a way that’s expressing how you feel and what you need. Here is a better example:

“Honestly, when I see ______, I feel kind of hurt because I need _________, and I’m not getting that. Would you be willing to ________?”

5. Don’t worry about converting your housemates.

Many vegans ask how to convert their parents, friends, or family to be vegans. In fact, I wrote a post about tips for converting your romantic partner to vegan. But honestly, the right path is usually not to try so hard to convert roommates and family.

If you’re someone who takes veganism and animal rights seriously, this can be hard. You may feel that you have a special responsibility to “break through to them,” as their loved one. But focus on the bigger picture.

You can potentially convert multiple people to a vegan diet in a single afternoon of handing out leaflets or showing people factory farming videos on a college campus.

Your home life should be a place that is healthy and energy-giving for you. It should be a place that sustains you, your mental health, and your energy to go be a positive example of veganism in the world.

Many vegans fall into the trap of feeling like they need to make their personal relationship with their dad or their roommate into a battleground—an ongoing debate that never ends.

Here’s my opinion: Let your dad just be your dad. Let your roommate just be a roommate—not an end to your means of making a vegan world. I understand the impulse. But you’ll have a much bigger activist impact outside your house. So just let your home just be your home.

6. Know your vegan nutrition.

As a vegan surrounded by non-vegans, you may get challenged on issues like protein, calcium, iron, omega 3’s, or whatever else.

If you know more about nutrition than anyone else in the house, you can easily answer these questions.

A well-planned vegan diet is sound from a nutritional perspective—major organizations have said so—but there’s a lot of misinformation out there.

Personally, I’d recommend Nutriciously’s vegan starter kit as one of the best resources to get up to speed on the relevant nutrition. It even includes a dedicated e-book with common questions about veganism and how to answer them.

If you’re strictly looking for free resources right now, Nutriciously also has a shorter free email course that covers the basics.

If you’re living with your parents, they may be glad to see that you’re learning so much about how to meet your own nutritional needs on this diet.

One word of caution: Many people have very strong feelings about nutrition. If you tell people that a food they eat is unhealthy, they may feel really judged by that and push back against it. Remember, you don’t want a fight.

Like I said above, I don’t recommend trying to convert your house-mates to vegan. But you want to know enough about vegan nutrition to take care of yourself and stay confident when your dad throws some dairy industry propaganda at you.

Again, I recommend checking out Nutriciously’s Vegan Starter Kit. It’ll arm you with the facts you need. You can also check out their shorter free course to start with.

7. Establish vegan areas in the cupboards and fridge.

Most shared kitchen situations between adult roommates involve each person getting their own cupboard or shelf. This is even more likely to be helpful if you’re vegan in a non-vegan household.

You might like to see if you can call dibs on one of the “crisper” drawers in your fridge, too. Then you can lock away your vegan cheese and tofurkey in there, away from the real meat and cheese.

Some houses have two fridges. If that’s the case at your house, consider if you would ideally want one of them to be vegan-only. If you’d like that, consider proposing it to your roommates!

You can always get a vegan-only mini-fridge for yourself, if nothing else seems suitable! They’re really not that expensive. Here’s a sleek one on Amazon.

8. Get your own pans if worried about contamination.

Some vegans will care about this more than others. But most of us would find it a little gross to think of bloody meat being cooked on the same surfaces as our tofu or veggies.

One type of pan you may especially want to get is your own cast-iron skillet.

Many people don’t fully clean their iron skillets between uses because you can end up rusting it if you don’t keep a layer of oil on it. so that can be especially gross for vegans living with non-vegans.

Luckily, these are not too expensive. Here’s one with great reviews on Amazon.

9. Find local vegans outside your house.

Being the lone vegan can be hard. So find community outside of your house.

What you’re looking for is someone who can emotionally and intellectually relate. Someone who you can share meals with. Someone who shares your excitement about vegan pizza or your frustration with non-vegan corporations.

There are Facebook groups for vegans in most big cities and college towns. Just search for “vegan” + your city name in Facebook to find them. You may also find local veggie groups on Meetup.com.

And you always have the option of convincing a friend to go vegan with you. I know I said above that I don’t recommend trying to convert your roommates… But if you have any friends who may actually be receptive, offer to help them get started. Some people just need that push.

Even if you’re hopelessly isolated in the end, there’s always vegan community online. Try interacting in some of these groups:

• Vegan FB Groups: Vegan Cheese Lovers Club, My Vegucation, Vegans United, Vegan Humor, etc.
• Vegan Subreddits: r/Vegan, r/veganfitness, r/DebateaVegan, r/veganmemes, r/veganrecipes, r/VeganFood, etc.

10. Find local restaurants with vegan and meat options.

It can be hard eating out with a group of non-vegans. Very often, they’ll be totally clueless about what restaurants to recommend so you have vegan options and they have something they’re comfortable with, too.

You can solve this problem by knowing what restaurants to suggest. There’s an app I highly recommend for this, called Happy Cow.

Happy Cow lists out all the vegan restaurants, vegetarian restaurants, health food stores, and—this is the key—restaurants with meat<