Caleigh Bodrug understands why her former Western roommates sometimes laugh watching her cheerfully chop and champion vegetables on Instagram.
“They’ll recall how when I moved from Elgin Hall to our place on Richmond Street, I arrived with this enormous box of frozen food full of tater tots, pizzas and Jamaican patties,” said Bodrug, BA’14 (Media, Theory and Production). “I was such a picky eater when I went to university. I was far from being vegan, and I was definitely not a cook.”
Now, she’s both. And more.
In the 10 years since cutting her teeth as a student reporter at Western, Bodrug’s become a social media sensation as the founder of PlantYou, sharing her plant-based recipes with more than 11 million followers across her social media channels. She’s also the author of two New York Times best-selling cookbooks, and a frequent guest on top-performing podcasts and daytime talk shows.
She’s on a mission to help people “eat healthier, save money and reduce food waste.”
From ‘Western U’ to PlantYou
Bodrug’s journey towards adopting a plant-based diet began while working in radio in North Bay, Ont., in 2015, when red and processed meats were declared carcinogens by the World Health Organization.
“That was particularly shocking to me because my father is a stage 2 colon cancer survivor. I watched him go through surgery and chemotherapy, but nobody ever mentioned that diet could have played a role. He’d gone right back to eating the way he had before, with animal products in every meal.”
Her family was motivated to make dietary changes from their home in Barrie, Ont., while Bodrug, “in a 500-square-foot basement apartment three hours away,” taught herself how to cook.
“I was starting from square one and saw it as an interesting opportunity to start blogging about my shift to plant-based eating, documenting my journey, sharing my meals,” she said.
She found most plant-based recipes were complex and required a lot of specialty grocery items. Bodrug took a simpler approach. Her growing audience on her blog, Facebook and Instagram responded to her basic ingredients, colourful images and easy-to-digest format, hungry for more.
“There was a real appetite for super simple, healthy, plant-predominant meals and I knew from my experience, there weren’t a ton of resources out there,” Bodrug said.
In 2016, she returned closer to home to work in corporate communications. Her reach on social media continued to grow.
“I would come home and work all night and on the weekends. I saw how it could become a full-time thing.”
That opportunity came in 2019, when Bodrug launched a subscription-based meal planner (now the PlantYou app), with recipes and shopping lists for $7.99 USD ($11 CDN) a month.
Six months later, she had enough subscribers to quit her job. Three months after that, a New York literary agent contacted her with a proposition.
“She asked me if I had ever considered writing a cookbook,” Bodrug said. “I hadn’t, but I told her, ‘I’d love to!’”
When they landed a publisher, Bodrug panicked.
“I felt sick to my stomach. I had only ever taken photos with a cell phone and had never written a proper recipe in my life. I felt like the biggest fraud in the world.”
But she bought a full camera kit and dove right in.
With the loyal support of her followers, PlantYou: 140+ Ridiculously Easy, Amazingly Delicious Plant-Based Oil-Free Recipes became an instant bestseller.
“As we move toward becoming a more climate-friendly world, we need to move toward eating more plants. But, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It might mean trying ‘meatless Mondays’ or having a smaller serving of meat on your plate. My message is, take it one meal at a time.”
Scrappy Cooking
As a vegan food blogger, Bodrug said she always considered herself to be aware about food waste and its impact on the environment, but some “shocking statistics” heightened her efforts.
“I learned 30 to 40 per cent of all food in Canada ends up in landfills and that food waste actually contributes more emissions than the entire airline industry,” she said. “On top of that, we know the average family in Canada is throwing out about $1,700 worth of unused groceries per year, so it makes sense to reduce the food we’re wasting,” she said.
As she looked for more ways to waste less food, she discovered others were too.
“I recorded an impromptu 30-second clip showing how you can transform orange peels into candy reminiscent of gummy worms and signed off for a couple of hours. I came back a few hours later and found the video had been viewed one million times.”
It became the first episode in her Scrappy Cooking series, and the inspiration for her latest best-selling cookbook, PlantYou: Scrappy Cooking.
Living with loss, finding resilience
In 2022, while Bodrug’s professional life soared, her personal life plummeted.
One week after signing her second book deal, her mom was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive stage 4 cancer.
At first, Bodrug felt unsure she could fulfill her commitment to write and launch the book. But her mother employed her to “pull up her big girl pants and get to work.” She did, grateful for a job that allowed her to spend time with her mom.
“Sometimes I felt like I was living a double life. I’d be posting videos where I was holding up broccoli saying, ‘don’t throw out the stems,’ while sitting with my mom at chemo,” Bodrug said.
She kept the news of her mom’s illness off social media until after her death earlier this year.
“I wanted to keep my page a source of joy for people and it wasn’t something I wanted to talk about publicly every day, especially to an audience of millions of people who have a lot of opinions about health,” she said.
Launching a book while losing her mom was hard, but Bodrug found resilience and a renewed empathy.
“I hid what was going on for the better part of two years while maintaining this persona online. It’s made me think differently about how we view, not just content creators, but the people we meet in everyday exchanges. You never know the burden they might be bearing.”
