I don't have time to cook vegan
Short answer: Vegan cooking isn't slower, staple meals land in 15–20 minutes, and tinned beans skip the raw-meat hygiene faff. Plenty of it is just assembly.
Illustrative prep-to-plate times for the staples in this answer. No raw-meat hygiene dance, and most of it is assembly, not cookery.
The objection
“I work full time. I don’t have hours to spend chopping vegetables and following fiddly recipes. Vegan food is a faff I can’t fit in.”
The answer
The image is of someone spiralising courgettes for an hour. The reality is a tin of beans and some pasta.
Speed is not where animal food wins. A tomato-and-bean pasta, a chickpea curry from a jar of sauce, a stir-fry with frozen veg and tofu, beans on toast, a lentil dhal: these are 15-to-20-minute meals, and several are faster than cooking and resting a piece of meat. You’re also skipping the bit that does eat time and attention, the raw-meat hygiene dance of separate boards, careful temperatures and scrubbing down surfaces. Beans come pre-cooked in a tin.
The real time-savers are pantry-led. Tinned pulses, frozen veg, microwave rice, jarred sauces, pre-pressed tofu, none of it needs prep, and most weeknight vegan cooking is just assembly (BBC Good Food’s “easy” range is built entirely around this). Want it faster still? Supermarket ready meals, frozen plant burgers, and the same takeaways you already use now carry vegan options.
And if you’ve genuinely got no time at all, batch one pot of chilli or dhal on Sunday and you’ve got four dinners that reheat in three minutes.
The objection does land in one place: learning anything new costs time up front, and finding your three or four go-to meals takes a couple of weeks. After that, vegan cooking is no slower than what you do now, and often quicker. The NHS lays out balanced plant-based eating plainly, and none of it requires you to become a chef.