Best Vegan Food Resources That Are Actually Useful
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Search vegan resources and you’ll get ten thousand results, most of which are somebody’s affiliate page dressed up as advice.
These are the eight I genuinely use, and roughly how often I use them.
I’ve bookmarked and abandoned a lot of sites over the years. These 8 have survived the cull, mostly because they answer a specific question rather than being generally inspiring. Late night recipe hunting sharpens your standards.
Nothing here is filler and nobody paid to be on this list.
🥦 1. Simple Vegan Bytes For Everyday Vegan Living
I’ll keep this short, since you’re already here. Simple Vegan Bytes exists because I wanted the site I couldn’t find when I started:
- Quick and healthy recipes for busy weeknights (think 15-minute bowls, creamy pasta dishes, and one-pan comfort food)
- Nutrition tips that simplify plant-based eating without overwhelm
- Lifestyle guides on everything from stocking a vegan pantry to finding unusual protein sources
No lectures, no ingredients you have to order online, no recipes that take two hours on a Wednesday.
🌱 2. Nutritionfacts.Org For Evidence-Based Guidance
NutritionFacts.org is where I go when someone sends me a scary headline about soy. Dr Greger’s team turns dense studies into short videos, and everything cites its source.
Good for B12, soy, iron and heart health, which is most of what people worry about.
One fair caveat: it’s run by an advocate, so it leans in a direction. The citations are real and worth clicking through, and I’d read it alongside a mainstream source rather than instead of one.
🌱 3. Cronometer App For Tracking Nutrition
Most food trackers count calories and stop. That’s useless for the question vegans actually have, which is whether you’re short on something.
Cronometer tracks around 80 micronutrients, and its database is verified rather than crowdsourced, which matters more than it sounds. It handles fortified plant milks and supplements properly too.
My advice: track for one honest week, find your gaps, then stop. I did this once, discovered I was miles short on iodine, fixed it, and haven’t opened the app since. It’s a diagnostic, not a lifestyle. Useful when you’re still transitioning.
👩🍳 4. YouTube For Recipe Inspiration
Watching someone cook beats reading a recipe when the technique is the bit you’re unsure about. Three channels I’d actually recommend:
- Pick Up Limes: calm, nutrition-led, run by an actual dietitian. Best for everyday cooking
- Rainbow Plant Life: more ambitious, properly explained technique. Best when you’re cooking for other people
- Cheap Lazy Vegan: fast, cheap, no styling. Best for a Tuesday when you can’t be bothered
Between them they cover most moods, which is the real reason a recipe rut happens.
👩🍳 5. Minimalist Baker For Simple Recipes
Minimalist Baker works to a constraint: 10 ingredients, one bowl, or 30 minutes. Pick one. That discipline is why the recipes actually get made.
The Everyday Vegan section is the one to bookmark. If you’d rather have something on the shelf, The Complete Plant-Based Cookbook and Oh She Glows are the two I still cook from.
👩🍳 6. Forks Over Knives For Meal Plans And Motivation
Forks Over Knives started as a documentary and turned into a whole operation. The meal planner is the genuinely useful part, because it builds the shopping list for you and that’s the step where most meal planning dies.
Worth knowing it’s whole-food plant-based, so it’s oil-free and low fat by design. Great if that suits you, slightly restrictive if you just want dinner.
🌱 7. Organic Staples On Thrive Market
Thrive Market is a membership store for organic pantry staples: quinoa, nut butters, chia seeds, snacks. Often cheaper than a health food shop, especially in bulk.
Genuinely useful if you live somewhere the local supermarket has one sad shelf of vegan products. Do the maths on the membership fee first though, because it only pays off if you order regularly.
🌱 8. Instagram For Daily Inspiration
Instagram is mostly a time sink, with one genuine use: seeing a plate of food at five in the afternoon and knowing what dinner is.
A few to follow:
- @vegnews: new products and news, useful for knowing what’s just launched
- @bestofvegan: recipes from creators worldwide, good for getting out of a cuisine rut
- @plantyou: simple recipe graphics you can actually follow from a screenshot
One warning: do not compare your Tuesday dinner to a styled photo. Nobody’s real cooking looks like that, including the people posting it.
✅ The Bottom Line
If you only take three: NutritionFacts when you’re worried about something, Cronometer for one week to find your gaps, and one YouTube channel whose cooking you’d actually eat.
The rest is optional. Collecting resources is not the same as cooking dinner, and I say that as someone with 200 bookmarked recipes I’ve never made. 😅
🛒 The Few Things Worth Owning
Most of this post is free. These are the paid bits I would still buy again.
- The Complete Plant-Based Cookbook: the one I still cook from most.
- Oh She Glows: the other one. Between them, most moods are covered.
- Chia seeds: the pantry staple Thrive is genuinely cheaper on in bulk.
- A B12 supplement: the thing NutritionFacts will tell you to take, so save yourself the video.
- Vegan protein powder: if Cronometer shows you are short, this is the fastest fix.
📚 More Vegan Tips
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