Creating A Compassionate, Vegan Kitchen For Every Lifestyle
Vegan cooking accommodates many different kinds of lifestyles, ranging between urban small space living, to suburban living, to a more remote, rural lifestyle. Creating a compassionate kitchen can work around all kinds of space, budgets and natural environments. The limit is your imagination.
Vegan, compassionate kitchens exist in time as well as space. When you are designing or redesigning a vegan kitchen, you also have to account for your time and your schedule. Do you work from home, do hybrid work, or go to the office? Do you have clients who come to your home? Do you have children or pets? All of these factors can influence your approach to a vegan lifestyle. If you are setting out to design the vegan kitchen of your dreams, you may be facing problems posed by your desire to eat healthy vegan food, and how this interacts with your work schedule, accessibility to vegan groceries, and the people you live with.
Making a plan for vegan kitchen redesign could start with asking a few questions about your lifestyle, such as:
How can my vegan kitchen better serve a compassionate, non-toxic, cruelty-free lifestyle?
Who am I cooking for?
What are the constraints of my schedule?
Where can I source vegan food?
What are my storage needs?
How can I incorporate homegrown food?
What are my space limitations?
Where is my kitchen located and how does this affect the other people living in the house?
What is the personal aesthetic I want to bring to my kitchen?
Answering a few of these questions could help you identify the ways in which your vegan kitchen should serve your particular lifestyle.
Vegan Kitchen Design: Form And Function
Form fits function in green interior design and vegan kitchen design. Vegan cooking design is a considered process that is efficient and cuts out the negative externalities of traditional design processes, such as toxic materials and products manufactured in cruel industrial processes. Vegan interior design and green interior design is a process of discovering how to live mindfully and peacefully and create spaces that reflect your commitment to non-violent, vegan living.
While every project is unique, you may find that you share certain characteristics with people who live a similar lifestyle. If you are envisaging a vegan kitchen for your lifestyle, evaluating your lifestyle could help you make better plans. Vegan cooking design can serve every kind of lifestyle. The following are a few examples of the way vegan cooking design can adapt to your lifestyle:
Urban Work From Home Professional or Creative Professional
If you live and work in a small space, you are intimately familiar with the positive and more challenging aspects of living in your space. Work may overlap with domestic activities, so cooking noises and odors might impact work or affect the presentation of the space. On the flipside, your food prep can happen at any time of the day so you may be able to commit to time intensive food prep and more complex meals. Your vegan kitchen design will need to use storage efficiently to work around the space constraints of a small urban apartment. Sound insulation and innovative storage, such as hanging shelves, and a separated fridge and freezer might be part of your vegan kitchen design plan.
Suburban Work From Home Family
If your lifestyle is mostly work from home and you have kids or animals, your vegan kitchen has to withstand a lot of activity. It has to be a safe, non-toxic space for everyone in the family. It may also be a space for gathering and dining. Pantries for food preparation and cool storage, mud rooms for children and gardeners who are coming in from outdoors can make the activities of food preparation and dining more organized. Separate rooms also accommodate for storing grains and preparing vegan food. A kitchen with demarcated food prep areas makes the kitchen more accessible for play and dining. A partial separation and open plan design can work well for families with young children who want to keep an eye on children playing. There are many kinds of beautiful, non-toxic, cruelty-free countertops that you can use instead of using petrochemical based finishings or materials produced in cruel processes. This makes the compassionate kitchen safer for kids and animals as well as bringing peace of mind that materials are sourced responsibly and peacefully.
Rural or Desert Retreat for Family, Couple, Vacation Home or Wellness
If you live in a more remote area, or if you run an intentional community or rural retreat, you will be familiar with the challenges of obtaining a reliable supply of healthy, cruelty-free vegan food. You may be growing food or need to source food from stores that cater to vegans. Your kitchen could be adjacent to a mudroom or area for seed starts and gardening supplies, as well as storage and processing activities, such as drying fruit or veg. You may find yourself growing and processing seasonal food and storing it or freezing it for later. This requires a lot of space, and an organized kitchen that could have access to an outdoor garden or herb garden, refrigeration and freezing capacity for large amounts of food. If you live in a climate with low water supplies, your home may have a grey water element and you could be processing water to reuse in the home or use on plants. You may also want to take advantage of the aesthetic potential of living in a beautiful, natural environment. This could involve creating additional windows and light sources to integrate the space into the landscape.
Urban or Suburban Office Worker
If your job requires you to be out during the day at an office, you will need to design a vegan kitchen where you can cook quickly and efficiently. Your storage should be extremely well organized so you can reach for supplies easily. You may need space for vegan cooking gadgets like a blender, a slow cooker or an air fryer. These tools will help you do advance prep, cook slowly while you are at work, or cook quickly if you return from work late. Placing outlets conveniently for electronic devices, easily accessible storage and large countertop space could make your kitchen more user friendly. You may also want your kitchen to be a calming, aesthetically unified space in which clutter is managed and you can move easily through the space. Small kitchen garden plants or even a hydroponic system could be part of your plan to eat sustainably and efficiently.
Attainable Vegan Design
Whatever your space constraints, lifestyle, or budget, there are many design upgrades that can completely transform your relationship to vegan cooking. At Earth Science Design, we work with clients nationally and internationally, all of whom face unique vegan design problems and who are ready to work towards innovative solutions that don’t rely on traditional, toxic materials, or prefabricated kitchen design. We connect our clients to suppliers and contractors who can help them realize their design vision. We have been researching the science of green interior design and vegan cooking design for over ten years. There are a wealth of solutions that can solve many complex lifestyle problems using materials and green installation practices that would have been inaccessible even a few years ago. If you want to create a vegan, compassionate kitchen in line with your personal aesthetics, these dreams are within reach. We consult with clients at our offices in San Diego, CA, and Bozeman, MT, or remotely, as desired. Please contact us to learn more about our vegan kitchen design services.s
