Me, not laughing while eating carrots.
Is veganism pushing vegetarianism off the menu?
I’m sitting on a plane, forlornly forking through my pre-ordered vegetarian meal of an over-cooked grain and tasteless vegetables. For dessert there’s a tiny plastic compartment of tinned fruit – no syrup, of course. Instead of a chocolate treat, which I see fellow passengers biting into, paired with sips from a miniature bottle of wine, I’ve got an energy bar. In the place of a few inches of cheddar cheese, there’s nothing. If you are a vegetarian like me, you will be familiar with this dull eating experience.
The rise of veganism has been a huge culinary trend in recent years. I was one of the first to celebrate it. I wrote a vegan cookbook ‘V is for Vegan’ (also available on this site ) in 2015, one of the earliest big-budget vegan cookbooks to be published in the UK. I’ve hosted several vegan supper clubs. But while the rise of Veganism has meant that eating out is increasingly painless for those of us who don’t eat meat, things have now gone to another extreme.
Vegetarians and vegans are now being lumped together – and us vegetarians are getting fed up. Consumer champion Martin Lewis tweeted about this subject recently, ‘so many restaurants have vegan options not vegetarian. I understand it’s the lowest/highest common denominator but actually far more people are veggie.’
Unlike vegans, who won’t eat anything derived from an animal, including milk and eggs, vegetarians like me still prefer our vegetables served with butter, cheese and lashings of cream. But in restaurants now vegan dishes are prioritised over merely vegetarian ones, while new food businesses tend to focus on vegan fast food. One of the most famous vegetarian restaurants Mildred’s has gone full-on vegan. For instance if you order a veggie burger in your local pub, inevitably it will come with vegan cheese rather than real cheese. It’s difficult to source good vegan cheese.
For those of us who can’t or won’t go all the way, the options are grim.
This shift is taking place despite the fact YouGov polling last year showed 5-7% of the UK population is vegetarian, yet a mere 2-3% is vegan.
I spoke to chef Henry Dimbleby, former owner of the Leon chain of restaurants and government food tsar who resigned last month in protest at current food policy. Earlier this month his book ‘Ravenous, how to get ourselves and our planet into shape‘ (Profile Books) was published. ‘Restaurants will tend to go direct to a vegan option,’ he agrees. ’Part of this is economic – you don’t have to expand the menu and you’ll cover both bases. Leon tended to serve vegan dishes, although we still have the popular halloumi wrap on the menu.’
In Henry’s experience of researching his book, meat eating ‘ was the issue that most divided focus groups’.
When food establishments offer only vegan options rather than both veggie and vegan, it is difficult for old-style vegetarians who don’t want to be deprived of whole food groups. Vegan diets can be as much about losing weight as saving the planet, which means a vegan option will often have fewer calories than vegetarian options. (YouGov has found that vegans are twice as likely to be choosing their plant-based diet for health reasons.)
On a tour of Zurich last year, I visited the vegan factory of meat alternative start-up ‘Eat Planted’. The founders, all of whom eat meat, admitted to me that their replacement, made from peas, tastes of nothing. It’s a plain protein base that must be flavoured with heavy sauces and spices in order to be edible. Their promo material talks of ‘biostructuring’ and ‘biotechnology’. Er, not exactly mouth-watering. I want real food; as food writer Michael Pollan says, I don’t want to eat anything my great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise.
In 2022, Eat Planted celebrated a new round of financing worth 70 million Swiss francs (around £62 million). Vegan food is big business. Gone is the traditional food cycle of growing, farming, harvesting, chopping and cooking. The vegan diet has become industrialised.
Many vegetarians like me put fresh seasonal food at the centre of our diet, which is driven by a love of vegetables and pulses. I’m lactose-tolerant, even lactose-keen. That may be hypocritical: after all, animals are often cruelly exploited for their milk to create cheese, butter and cream. But this food, based on time-honoured traditional methods, is at least authentic.
Sometimes it seems vegans are almost more judgemental of vegetarians than they are of meat-eaters. You can’t half-arse this, they think. But, whisper it, many of the radical vegans I knew in the early noughties have now reverted to eating meat. The new puritanism is harder to keep up.
I’ve been a vegetarian for over 40 years. Let’s be frank, a vegan diet can be hard to sustain over the long term – and maybe a bit joyless. So, restaurants, when devising your menus, don’t forget about those of us who are meat-free but still enjoy buttery, salty, rich, fried, even sinful food.
This piece was published in The Sunday Times.
Amen! This is something which has been bugging me for ages and I thought it was just me. I now pack my own food for plane journeys as the food is so depressing (which also means I don’t have the annoyance of having my meal served 40 mins before being offered a drink to go with it).
I have been vegetarian for 37 years and enjoy my choices – which include real cheese (without rennet), cream, milk, butter etc. I don’t wish to eat the vegan substitutes any more than I wish to eat lard in pastry or meat stock in soup.
Absofuckinlutely
i love when the cows attempt to breath but their guts just spill out of their necks instead.
Nuuuur, mah cream :((((
Vegetarians are cowards and animal abusers
Rebecca, you may as well be eating lard in pastry and meat stock in soup if you’re vegetarian for the animals. Millions of animals die in the egg and diary industries. Day old male chicks are macerated because they cannot lay eggs. Calves are taken away from their mother’s within hours of being born. They are either shot in the head, sent to veal farms or grow up to be artificially insemination, have their young taken from them, and milked until they’re ‘spent’ and killed for cheap meat. Plant-made butter, milk and cheese can actually taste the same as the dairy versions. You need to be more open-minded and try new things.
But they don’t. I’ve made vegan butter from scratch and it just isn’t the same. Milk, I’m fine with vegan versions
Paying people to breed, confine, exploit and kill sentient beings is immoral and should be opposed by anyone with a conscience. If you buy milk you’re paying for cows to be abused in “rape racks” and then slaughtered when their bodies are too exhausted to produce milk. If you buy eggs you’re paying for male chicks to be blended alive.
I definitely understand the struggle to give up cheese (it’s easier than it seems though!), but luckily as adult mammals we don’t need breast milk anymore -especially not the breast milk of other mammal species.
For anyone curious about the ethical concerns around dairy, check out this video by Earthling Ed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZsm2_TdFa0&ab_channel=EarthlingEd
You can’t be serious 😭
You can’t be serious with this 😭
Dumb article.
Nobody, literally nobody is vegan “for their health” or “for the planet”.
You might mean “plant-based”. Veganism is far more than just what we eat.
And really, what is the point of “vegetarianism”? It still means you are literally paying someone to torture and kill animals.
All these vegans, with the same tired arguments about milk and cheese, yawn, I think they love being all high and mighty rather than wanting to save animals. I have been a vegetarian for 23 years and love cheese! I’m not veggie for health or for the animals, simply don’t like the smell or taste of meat or seafood.
It’s certainly right that vegetarians should not be lumped in with vegans.
Anybody who insists that they are vegetarian and need their cheese and cream in 2023 is unfortunately much closer to meat eaters than vegans.
“That may be hypocritical: after all, animals are often cruelly exploited for their milk to create cheese, butter and cream. But this food, based on time-honoured traditional methods, is at least authentic.”
How is this ok for you? You won’t eat the meat but don’t mind the cruelty? In the name of “authenticity”? I can’t understand this stance at all.
I don’t like ultra processed foods.
I have been vegetarian for over 40 years and find that in many restaurants the options are mostly vegan and consist of fake meat or fake chicken. Why the hell anyone who doesn’t eat meat for whatever reason wants to eat fake meat is beyond me.
Meat disgusts me. I did a fake meat test in January and some of them were so similar I wanted to vomit
Because many people like the taste but don’t want to eat murdered animals. Pretty simple.
Not all vegans love fake meat. In fact, those of us who have been vegan for a long time (forty years in my case) don’t like fake meat products. I won’t stand for substandard vegan products and you can’t judge vegan restaurants by aeroplane standards!
I’m in love with vegetables. No need for fake meat
Vegetarian = confused vegan.
All these vegans, with the same tired arguments about milk and cheese, yawn, I think they love being all high and mighty rather than wanting to save animals. I have been a vegetarian for 23 years and love cheese! I’m not veggie for health or for the animals, simply don’t like the smell or taste of meat or seafood.
Vegetarians enable the killing and torture of animals, so no sympathy for your lack of forcefully taken breast milk.
I can understand that vegetarians are not always in it because they care for animals and that’s ok, most people don’t. And vegetarians, consciously or by accident, are doing their small part for the animals.
But they will also know full well the uphill struggle one faces when one doesn’t eat meat. Kicking down like that on those that do even more for the planet and the animals is really a stretch. I am flabbergasted.
It wasn’t and hasn’t been difficult for me not to eat meat. I haven’t touched it for over 40 years. The idea repulses me
How is that a reply to this comment? In fact most of your replies have managed to completely fail to engage with the points presented, though this shouldn’t surprise me after reading your nonsensical article.
I really don’t understand fake meat. I mean I’m uneducated in the health benefits of vegetarian/vegan diets vs omnivorous diets I’ll admit but if you’re doing it for ethical reasons, you’re looking at a fake corpse anyway. Someone went out of their way to replicate the end results of the violence you’re protesting so you can lie to your taste buds. That just seems odd.
Most vegans I know prefer to eat real foods like veggies and pulses, just like vegetarians. Chefs just cook fake meat because they are too lazy to cook decent food for any non meat eaters. Both vegans and vegetarians deserve joyful food. It saddens me to hear a vegetarian insulting vegans with exactly the same language and arguments that some people use to attack vegetarians.