I live in a community house founded on the values of environmentalism and conservation. Each year, we have to complete a project based on those values, and this year, I went vegan on campus. This meant that any time I used my university's meal plan, on or off campus, I only chose vegan food. I am already a vegetarian because the meat industry in the U.S. is atrocious (and, because meat takes more water to produce than crops do, and we need to do what we can to save water), so I didn't think it would be too difficult to eliminate all animal foods.

I couldn't have been more incorrect.

I chose to eat at cafeteria in the student center, because I would could easily get all meals there and still arrive to class on time. Also, Smith dining hall only had fruit and salad to offer usually because there was almost never any soy milk for cereal and everything else was made with cheese, milk, or meat.

Unfortunately, I survived on Quaker oatmeal cups and fruit every morning, sometimes with a cup of soy milk if it was available. The only hot vegan foods for breakfast were fried potatoes, hash-browns and the flavorless rubber labeled "oatmeal." I averaged 301 calories and 11 g protein for breakfast.

Granted, I have never been much of a breakfast eater at school. I love my bed as much as the next person, so attempting to get out early on a chilly morning doesn't leave much time for food. Lunch, when I'm at school, is the meal I depend on.

This month, I hated lunch.

There were one or two vegan side dishes available every day, not including french fries (which I rarely ate until this project) and the white pasta with marinara that was an option every afternoon. Sometimes there were veggie dumplings or the vegetable sushi in the Outtakes section, and a curried rice & lentil soup from time to time. Besides that, I occasionally saw the tasteless jasmine rice, the Indian-style curry stews, the tofu steak with a texture akin to that of Jell-o, and stuffed peppers.

Basically, anything else that could have been vegan was topped with a mountain of cheese. To give you a better picture of what I mean, one day I was excited to see humus with pita and various veggies being served, until stepped closer and saw shredded cheese topping the humus.The humus was ruined for vegans and non-vegans alike. I averaged 420 calories and 12 grams of protein for lunch.

I ate out much more for dinner than I ever have before. Looking through the notebook I used to keep track of everything offered and everything I ate, I see that I bought a lot of food and made the leftovers last for another one or two nights. Some nights I didn't even eat anything.

This makes the average difficult to calculate, because, for example, one night I ordered Chinese food, the next I picked up chipotle, then I ate those leftovers for one night each then didn't eat dinner the next two nights in a row. One night I ate pistachios from the campus convenience store.

With the average 721 calories from breakfast and lunch each day, then anywhere from 0-500 calories each night, at most, I ate about 1221 calories in a day, which is just over the minimum required to function like a normal adult human.

I actually quit after three weeks instead of the intended four because I was incredibly sick one weekend, thought I was getting better over that week, then my sickness returned with a vengeance the next weekend. I was tired every day, my moods swung between extremes on a regular basis, and the dark circles under my eyes still have not faded.

Eating vegan on a budget is difficult, but there are many nutritional vegan foods that can be bought in bulk for cheap. Nutrition is important for students to perform well academically, so why aren't schools trying to make food that suits the varying diets of their student body? Students already reach for junk foods when they need a pick-me-up, and at my university, vegan students--of which I only know one--can still eat almost all the junk food available.