S6. E23: Toni Okamoto: Plant-Based on a Budget
“My family was really suffering from all types of diet related health issues. I had an aunt who had multiple amputations before it took her life because of type two diabetes. I had a 40-year-old uncle who had a heart attack. My grandpa, who helped raise me, died of complications in a triple bypass surgery.
All over the place there was suffering and it's really hard to, feel like you have not the answer, but the direction to go in to reclaim your health, and not be taken seriously.”
– Toni Okamoto
Credit: Lauren White
Species Unite is starting our 30 Day Vegan Challenge tomorrow. So, if you haven't signed up for it, sign up (you can actually sign up any time during October and it will start you at day one). It's 30 days of recipes, tips, information on all things plant-based and if you're already vegan sign up anyway, because there’s really good information and recipe ideas. If you have no interest in ever being vegan, sign up and do it for 10 days. See what it's like.
To kick off the 30 Day Vegan Challenge, we couldn’t think of a better guest than Toni Okamoto. She is the founder of Plant-Based on a Budget, the website and meal plan that shows you how to save money while eating plant-based. Check it out, there are close to a thousand incredible recipes and delicious weekly meal-plans that will make the Vegan Challenge a whole lot less challenging.
Toni is also the author of the Plant-Based on a Budget cookbook and the coauthor of the Friendly Vegan Cookbook with Michelle Kane. She and Michelle also hosts the Plant-Powered People Podcast.
Toni is a regular on local and national morning shows across the country, where she teaches viewers how to break their meat habit without breaking their budget. She was also featured in the popular documentary What the Health.
Please listen, share and sign up for the Vegan Challenge!
Learn More About Plant-Based on a Budget
Check Out the Plant-Based on a Budget cookbook
Learn More About The Friendly Vegan
Listen to the Plant-Powered People Podcast
Second image credit: Lauren White
Transcript:
Toni: [00:00:15] My family was really suffering from all types of diet related health issues. I had an aunt who had multiple amputations before it took her life because of type two diabetes. I had a 40 year old uncle who had a heart attack. My grandpa who helped raise me, died of complications in a triple bypass surgery. So just all over the place, there was suffering. It's really hard to feel like you have got the answer, but the direction to go in to reclaim your health is not taken seriously.
Elizabeth: [00:01:01] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz and this is Species Unite. On October 1st, Species Unite is starting our 30 day vegan challenge. So if you haven't signed up for it, sign up. Go to our website Species Unite and click the 30 day vegan challenge. It's 30 days of recipes, tips, information on all things plant based and if you're already vegan, sign up anyway, because it's really good information. If you have no interest in ever being vegan, just do it for 10 days. See what it's like? Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com/Challenge. The 30 day vegan challenge starts tomorrow, so if you haven't signed up, sign up. Although you can sign up anytime during October and it will start at day one and because the 30 day vegan challenge starts tomorrow, we have a special conversation with Toni Okamoto. Tony is the founder of Plant Based on a Budget. The website and meal plan that shows you how to save money while eating plant based. She's also the author of The Plant based on a budget cookbook and the co-author of the Friendly Vegan Cookbook with Michelle Cehn. She also hosts the Plant Powered People podcast, alongside Michelle Cehn.
Elizabeth: [00:02:37] It's really good to have you here and to meet you.
Toni: [00:02:40] Thanks for having me. I have a dog with me.
Elizabeth: [00:02:43] That's OK.
Toni: [00:02:47] Good because he's definitely like a family member. He sits at the dinner table with us and he does this at his house and we just kind of live here with him.
Elizabeth: [00:02:55] Did you get him during COVID?
Toni: [00:02:56] We did, yep. He came from a shelter that was closing down. So during the pandemic shut down, they had to get rid of one hundred dogs in twenty four hours. They created this line of vehicles of past foster families or foster families that have wanted to foster but just haven't had the opportunity. So they reached out to their whole network and set up this long line where they had you sign your papers in the car, put the dog in the backseat of your car and just one by one filled cars for a hundred dogs.
Elizabeth: [00:03:39] That's unbelievable.
Toni: [00:03:40] Everyone got fostered, and so we fostered Eddie. I knew that, when I was getting really defensive, when anybody asked if they could adopt him, that it was time for me to adopt him, I was like, “What? No, you can't adopt him. You're not good enough.” It was a short foster.
Elizabeth: [00:03:54] That is awesome. I love stories like that. I can't imagine how they got one hundred dogs out of there in one day.
Toni: [00:04:00] Yeah, it's a lot of dogs.
Elizabeth: [00:04:02] So thank you so much, Tony, for being here. I'm really excited. We are starting tomorrow from when this airs, our 30 day vegan challenge at Species Unite. We did it last year and it was a huge success. All sorts of non vegans, which is who we really want to sign up, signed up and had incredible experiences. Everything you've done since you started with Plant-based on a Budget, your website, your meal plans, your cookbooks, it's so friendly and open to people who have never tried anything like this before. So I thought we could talk a little bit about ways to make this easier for people to jump into and ways that we don't scare people away, because it's easy to do with a team full of vegans. But let's start with you, I'd love to talk about how all this began.
Toni: [00:04:58] For me, it was a very slow and gradual change. I didn't even know anything about plant based vegetarianism and what I did know was very negative. I grew up in a family that thought that vegetarians were all hippies. My track coach in high school, when I was around 16 years old, suggested that I stop eating so much red meat. I was like, “What? You're crazy?” I followed his advice. It was to stop eating so much red meat and stop eating so much fast food. I had never made the connection that what I was putting in my body was anything but tasty and to make my belly feel full, and so I tried it. I began to thrive as a runner and I had some struggles at home. I was still in high school, so I was living with my family and I waited until I was out of the house at 18 to become vegetarian. Even then, I didn't know what vegetarian meant, so I didn't think about chicken broth. I didn't think that pulling pepperoni off of a free pizza was bad or anything like that. I just didn't know, but I tried my best and I joined a veg club at my community college, where I got to learn more about what plant based was and what was happening, and in industries that were harming animals. I particularly felt compelled to change more dramatically, when I learned about the suffering that was happening in the dairy industry. That really spoke to me and called to me as a woman and I made changes. Again I was imperfect, but I tried my best and continued on moving in the plant based way.
Elizabeth: [00:06:56] When you started all this out, you're still living at home with your family, even when you gave up the red meat. Was there a resistance amongst your family or were they on board with you?
Toni: [00:07:06] Definitely resistance. My family are the kind of people who would say ‘If you don't want to eat what I'm making, then don't eat it.’ I'm not going to make everybody a special meal. So then you kind of go on your own. At the time, I was eating a lot of easy to make foods like boxed mac and cheese and things like that. I didn't know how to cook. I did what I could to stop eating red meat. The other part of it that was challenging is that I am Japanese and Mexican, but culturally my family is more Mexican. So the food that we eat is Mexican, a lot of it. Then also there's the cultural aspect of food sharing, which is a sign of affection. If you are denying someone's food, you're basically denying their affection toward you and that can be offensive. So that was interesting to navigate. Then the last part of it is that my family really thought I was this radical hippie. They did not know how God had cursed them with this hippie child. It's so funny now because that was 17, 18 years ago, and my parents are really proud to talk about plant based. They're like, “Oh, my daughter has been doing this forever. This is like old news. Now we know everything you want to tell us.” It's just such a huge change and that's how I know that there's been this cultural shift around plant based eating because of how my parents respond now, versus back then.
Elizabeth: [00:08:39] I had a similar experience, I went vegetarian as a kid like at 13, and meat was everything, meat was every meal. When I went vegetarian, I'm one of seven children, so it was ‘if you're not going to eat what I make, then you're not going to eat, you know, or you figure it out.’ But nobody was going to make like seven dinners. It was kind of the same thing and now my dad is vegan. He went vegan for health like six years ago, and it changed his entire existence and saved his life. So they're very, very aware and their fridge and everything is stocked with plant based everything. But if you were to go back in time and predict this, there's no way. It's very cool to see it shift within your own family as well as the world. How and why did you start Plant-Based on a Budget? Because it's been around for a while.
Toni: [00:09:29] I cannot believe it's been nine years now. Originally, the motivation behind it was that my family was really suffering from all types of diet related health issues. I had an aunt who had multiple amputations before it took her life because of type two diabetes. I had a 40 year old uncle who had a heart attack. My grandpa helped raise me, died of complications in a triple bypass surgery, and so just all over the place there was suffering. It's really hard to feel like you have got the answer, but the direction to go in to reclaim your health is not taken seriously. What I heard often was that it's way too expensive to eat healthy. It's way too expensive to eat plant based like that is just not. I can't go to Whole Foods, I can't go to the Co-op. It's too expensive. So at the time, in my early 20s, I was living under the poverty line. I shared a one bedroom with two other people in my room, bunk beds and everything. So I did not have a lot of money. I didn’t have a car. It was just not easy, but it was doable. You could shop at Wal-Mart and you could shop at WinCo. There are these big grocery stores that are very inexpensive that you can still shop at and eat plant based. So, what I started doing was compiling family friendly recipes that my family would enjoy, and getting them Plant-Based on a Budget. I invited my friends to do it with me. So they were sharing their inexpensive meals that were pretty easy to make. Usually you used the ingredients that you had in your pantry, or that you could easily find whenever you were grocery shopping. So no vegan specialty products. Soon after that, it became apparent that this was a huge concern within the vegan community and also just people who want to eat healthier and more plant based. Even now I've surveyed my audience. About sixty five percent are veg curious, they are still eating meat or dairy but want to incorporate more plant based dishes into their lives.
Elizabeth: [00:11:49] Wow and even now there is always this myth that it can be really expensive if you eat a certain way. Right? But we hear that a lot too ‘Oh, it's so expensive to go plant based.’ So when you started, what was the weekly budget that you told people they could be vegan on? Has it changed?
Toni: [00:12:09] Yes, yes and yes. So the way I plant based on a budget started with just recipes. I listened to my audience when they told me, “Hey, Tony, I see all your recipes and I'm trying to put them together, but I'm buying pasta and stuff to make tacos and stuff to make soup, and they're not really going together. So, I'm buying all these ingredients and then I have all these ingredients left over.” So what I did was, I took that feedback and created a meal plan, and at the time there was something called the Snap Challenge. This showed how you could use your government assistance, check for food money and I went with their allotment and I tried to really dramatically decrease what I would be spending so that they had extra money. So I chose twenty five dollars per week for breakfast, lunch and dinner for seven days. It was quite a challenge, I won't lie, to find stuff. Then I created some additional options, if maybe you had a little bit of extra food money and you wanted to enhance your meal. So they were basic meals, but I showed you how you could do it for twenty five dollars a week and have them be easy meals that you're familiar with, like pasta, cereal, soups, tacos and things like that. But that all went together so that you would use 100 percent of your groceries.
Elizabeth: [00:13:38] But that's just incredible. Twenty five dollars a week and people were doing it, right?
Toni: [00:13:43] So when I put it out to my community at that time, I said, “Hey Facebook, I'm thinking about doing this challenge. Would anyone do it with me?” Thousands of people responded, saying that they would. So I called it the Plant-Based on a Budget meal plan challenge, and that's what I still do every year. Between the 26th of December to the 3rd of January, I market the Plant-Based on a Budget meal plan challenge, and I now host it with my friend Michelle Cain. We have thousands of people every year doing this and we do videos with them, we have support groups and we walk them through it. It's so inspiring because some people don't know how to cook. They've never really done grocery shopping for healthy food. They don't know what plant based is. Sometimes I'm asked, is canned corn the same as frozen corn? Are canned tomatoes plant-based? There's just some confusion, I think. I think people have the best intentions and want to be healthy. It's just so much effort to feel comfortable in the kitchen, cooking, buying groceries, putting something together that your family would like, and this takes all that work away from them.
Elizabeth: [00:15:02] Absolutely. It just makes it so doable. What's the budget now when you do it?
Toni: [00:15:08] For my recent cookbook Plant-Based on a Budget, I did a thirty dollar budget.
Elizabeth: [00:15:12] So not much more, right? It gives people a real opportunity to not only eat plant based, but to eat healthy plant based, which I think part of the confusion with, ‘Oh my gosh, it's so expensive to eat vegan.’ A lot of the unhealthy stuff is really expensive, the less healthy options like the more processed type vegan foods. Especially now where there's so much choice out there, which is wonderful. But that's the kind of stuff that is expensive. When people first sign up to do Plant-Based on a Budget. The biggest question is how to start, right? What do you tell people when they say, “I don't know, what do I do?”.
Toni: [00:15:52] Well, first I encourage people to be realistic and to be ok with mistakes. I've made many mistakes. Michelle, my partner, makes mistakes and we continue moving forward. We don't let those mistakes make us give up. I think that that's what happens for so many people trying to be vegetarian. They accidentally maybe have too many drinks and eat some carnitas or something like that. They're like, “Oh, I already ate meat. So I'm not a vegetarian anymore”, but that doesn't have to be the case. You can continue tomorrow and move forward, trying again at being plant based. So I would say, it's OK to make mistakes. Just keep choosing plant-based meals, keep going forward. After that I would say that meal planning is essential, especially if you don't know what you're doing, because what happens is we have really good intentions, then we go to work. We didn't plan our food and we're so hungry. We don't have groceries at home and we're like, “Oh, let me just go to the fast food drive through really quickly”, and then you make a mistake. So meal plans, carry snacks in your car. You can make some granola. You can buy some granola carried in your car or a protein bar and that'll get you home. Then at home, you would already have something prepped or at least have an idea of something you can easily whip together in 15 or 20 minutes. That will not only save you a lot of time, save you from making a choice you may not want to make, and it'll save you a ton of money. Meal planning makes you shop with intention and helps you keep your fridge stocked with things you're going to use.
Elizabeth: [00:17:38] What do you say to people who go through your experience? Even if they're just going through it for a month, the experience that you had as a kid. Whether it's their husband and children or their parents where there's family resistance.
Toni: [00:17:53] It is a challenge. I am not going to lie. It can be challenging, but it's really important to have a community outside of those people who are giving you a hard time. I know that for me, especially at different parts of my vegan journey. I've worked as a full time vegan my whole career. I started out in the sanctuary world where I was working really closely with animals, and especially then I felt super defensive. I was on guard. I was seeing horrific cruelties toward animals and when someone challenged me, I was ready to go. But I wasn't changing anybody's mind with that attitude. I was just making them feel more grounded in their position. So now what I do is I say, “You know what? It's OK, that's your choice and my choice”. With that attitude, I will tell you, I have been able to change so many more hearts and minds toward plant based eating. Because when those people watch ‘what the health’ or ‘seaspiracy’ or whatever, they remember that I was a nice vegan. They say, “Oh, I watched this documentary, did you know?” Then I'm like, Oh my gosh, ok, I've been telling you this for 10 years. But OK, all right. I don't make them feel bad. I just say, “Yeah, that's a powerful documentary. What an inspiring thing to start making your life different and changing your food habits.” That attitude of being friendly and welcoming and inclusive has changed everything about my activism approach.
Elizabeth: [00:19:35] I had that lesson as well, even when we started Species Unite. My original intention was, everybody needs to know what's happening to animals. Very few people actually can hear and you're just shutting people out, right? When we shifted, which happened pretty quickly, to being more focused on solutions and the future of food and plant based, it's a much different energy. Of course, everything happening to animals is devastating and I would love to be screaming from the rooftops all the time about it. But to get people who aren't even looking at plant based or going vegan as an option to say, “Hey, no, you know what, on Mondays, we're not going to eat meat. Or it'll be really healthy if we have this instead of that, even if it's just a few meals a week.” That's where real change happens.
Toni: [00:20:28] If we could all reduce our meat, if everybody reduced their meat consumption, that would be amazing for animals and the planet.
Elizabeth: [00:20:34] So just for people who don't know, you and Michelle Cain are partners in a lot of the work you do and you are the friendliest vegans. I watched a bunch of videos and I thought, Wow, they're so nice. It's a world you want to be in and be a part of and it's a great resource for people who are doing this challenge with us. I want them all to know about it and you did a cookbook with Michelle ‘The friendly vegan?’ So when you decided to become the nicest vegan on the planet, is that where the friendly vegan came from?
Toni: [00:21:05] That was really fun because we got to do a media tour. We came out with that book during the pandemic, which was unfortunate. But we did a lot of virtual television where we got some mainstream segments, and what we talked about was that there are friendly vegans, it is OK. You could be a normal person, going to your church, going to your kid's basketball games, going to and being vegan. It's cool. We were trying to, with that book, change the perception that people have about vegans. Just say you could be a normal friendly person who eats vegan food and who can share really, really tasty food with your non vegan family and community.
Elizabeth: [00:21:50] This is why the vegan world needs people like you and Michelle because it needs better PR and it is shifting. It's shifted a lot in the past 10 years. People know vegans now, so they're like, “Oh, wait, it's my friend down the street who I go running with.” So it's definitely shifting, but they're still above all. So when you get way outside the home, you think, “No, it's not shifting that much. We need you, the whole plant based world needs you because it's a real PR shift what you guys are doing. You didn't cook before all this, right?
Toni: [00:22:22] No, I have actually never cooked meat because I didn't cook when I was younger and when I moved out I became a vegetarian, so I didn't cook. But then what happened was that when I was at that veg club, when I was 20, I made some friends and we created this night, which we called womanly Wednesdays. This was where we did like cooking together and me and my girlfriends would watch a romantic comedy and catch up on each other's lives every Wednesday. I would go to the library, check out books. Sometimes I would photocopy, assign people ingredients and then we would cook it together and that helped me learn how to cook. What flavor is paired well together, but then doing it so often we did it for three years of Wednesdays. It helped me become really comfortable swapping things out. So if I didn't have kale, I could use spinach. If I didn't have these particular spices. Let's see what these spices taste like. Then after a while, I started getting familiar with what pairs well together and how you could make swaps happen. That's why in all my recipes, I want people to change it up based on their personal preferences. Plant-Based on a Budget book and the Friendly Vegan cookbook, I have lines that are specifically for people to make my recipes, their recipes that are good for their families.
Elizabeth: [00:23:51] I was vegetarian for many years, decades before I went vegan. When I was a vegetarian, I ate really just crap. I like bread, cheese and salad, you know, versions of bread and cheese and salad. Then when I went vegan, I would make dinner for people and they were usually not vegan or even vegetarian so I wanted them to like it. I wanted them to say, “Oh my God, this is bacon.” That was kind of what inspired me. So then people would come for dinner and they'd be like, “This is vegan pesto?”. It was really kind of to show off the vegan thing to people, but it worked. Once I started doing that, I fell in love with cooking. When you start cooking plant-based, what I learned was it's all of a sudden as if the world is exponential in what you can do and how much variety there is.
Toni: [00:24:44] I totally agree with that. I had this idea, this misconception, that it would be very limiting for me to become plant-based. I would have to give up cheese and I would have to give up ice cream and I have to give up meat, so all I was left with was salad. But in fact, it was completely different prior to becoming vegetarian. I was really limited, I grew up eating Mexican food, Chinese food, Italian food, but by Italian, I mean spaghetti and macaroni and pizza and some Japanese food. But really, the culture whose cuisines I have tried are very limited. So moving into plant based, I opened myself up to so many new dining experiences. Trying Ethiopian for the first time and lots of different Vietnamese and Thai dishes and Indian dishes. It explored flavors and pairings of ingredients that I had never even thought about putting together, and now I love those types of cuisines.
Elizabeth: [00:25:56] Yeah. Do you still cook meals throughout, like all the time?
Toni: [00:26:00] My husband and I eat all of our meals at home so we don't go out to eat. I would say, truthfully, probably 98 percent of our meals are cooked at home, and I am a big lover of the Instant Pot. It's so easy to just throw in some brown rice. Steam up some vegetables and put on a sauce with a can of beans for protein and be done with it. Our meals are not super fancy unless we have company over, there usually grain, protein, veggies and sauce.
Elizabeth: [00:26:39] Right? Which is kind of the best meal, I think. Toni, thank you so much for this. It is awesome to learn all this from you, and we will definitely be pointing people in your direction this month. So thank you.
Toni: [00:26:51] Thank you so much. I hope that everybody continues on with the challenge and continues to do plant based eating. Just remember that if you make a mistake, keep choosing plant based.
Elizabeth: [00:27:14] To learn more about Toni, about Plant-Based on a Budget, to check out Toni's recipes and meal plans, go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram at, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support Species Unite, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Become a member. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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