So you want to open a vegan restaurant in a town where you’re one of the few vegans? Or perhaps everyone around you hears the word “Vegan” and darts in the opposite direction, because the word brings back memories of encountering an aggressive (possibly partly naked!) animal rights activist? Maybe they’ve tasted some prepackaged, processed vegan food, and to them, vegan = “tastes like cardboard, grass, etc.” Whatever the challenge may be, we’ve got good news – you have no reason to give up on that dream!

The most common question I hear when people learn I am a vegan baker is “How do you bake without eggs or butter?” To this I always say, “It’s easy and I’m happy to show you how!”

There are quite a few helpful lists online that provide good ideas for veganizing recipes. One Green Planet’s dessert substitution guide is an excellent resource and I also find Vegan-Nutritionista.com to be very complete and clearly written.

Our earliest ancestors didn’t drink milk and didn’t need to worry about calcium at all. Milk didn’t appear in human diets until around 10,000 years ago, and even then it was common only in certain population groups. But anthropologists speculate that the diets of early humans were rich in calcium—with intakes higher than today’s RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) for this nutrient—because they dined on calcium-rich greens.