This. Don’t build vegan meals with meat replacements. Build vegan meals that never had or wanted meat. Cheaper, better for you, and made with ingredients you can get at the shitty neighborhood grocer. My partner and I started doing meat free Fridays for Lent as we’re both recovering Catholics, and we decided it was a fun challenge to keep it up and try to do it with all raw ingredients. I’ve learned a ton about south Asian and east Asian cooking, eaten a lot of truly excellent veg* food, saved buckets of money and now I have a healthy respect for beans and lentils.