Meat Even a Vegan Can Love
When an older neighbor took aside Dustin Hoffman’s character in the 1967 film “The Graduate” for a piece of advice, the man said: “Just one word. Are you listening? “Plastics.” If that advice were given to a college graduate today, the magic word might be: “Plants.” Fast-food companies in the United States are experimenting with meat alternatives on their menus. And customers are responding.
KFC tested a plant-based “chicken” in late August at an Atlanta outlet and it was so popular that the restaurant sold as many plantbased boneless wings and nuggets in a day as it would sell of its popular popcorn chicken in a week.
“It’s confusing, but it’s also delicious,” KFC tweeted the day it introduced Beyond Fried Chicken, created with the company Beyond Meat.
The push to eat less meat is spurred by environmental and health concerns.
“Our target customers for this product were flexitarians looking to incorporate plant-based choices into their diets,” KFC told The Times.
The Times columnist Farhad Manjoo says that most of us ignore how our meat-based diets contribute to climate change, and even the fires in the Amazon. Land there, he wrote, is being burned to clear it for cattle ranching and soy farming, the majority of which goes into animal feed for livestock like fast-food chicken.
Abstaining from animal products — living as a vegan — is grounded in science and is the best way to combat warming, Mr. Manjoo wrote. Vegans are often the butt of jokes and scorn in the media.
“I want to urge you to give vegans a chance — to love and to celebrate them instead of ridiculing them,” he wrote.
On issues like industrial farming and its cruelty to animals, and the environmental toll of meat, “vegans are irrefutably on the right side of history,” he added.
Vegans say it is time they get a little love.
Summer Anne Burton, the editor of a vegan-focused magazine called Tenderly, told Mr. Manjoo that some things have gotten better, like the quality of vegan cheese, but attitudes have been slow to change.
“Even people who are really radical and progressive in lots of areas of their lives still seem really suspicious, frustrated and annoyed by the idea of someone being vegan,” Ms. Burton said.
Kate Kavanaugh was a strict vegetarian for more than a decade, out of a love for animals and the environment.
She said she became a butcher for the same reasons.
Ms. Kavanaugh, 30, is one of a small group of former vegetarians and vegans who became butchers to try to change the American food system, offering meat from animals bred on grassland and treated well, with conservation as a goal.
“I’m basically in this to turn the conventional meat industry on its head,” Ms. Kavanaugh told The Times.
Janice Schindler, 28, was a vegan for five years and is now the general manager of a butcher shop in New York. Her shift to an animal-free lifestyle began in high school when she was a member of the National FFA Organization (Future Farmers of America) in California, and she cared for a baby lamb as it grew into an adolescent.
“Nothing prepared me for the emotional earthquake of selling that lamb for meat,” she told The Times. “His name was Frederick.”
She went back to eating meat in college after learning that the soybean and corn farming practices that were behind her vegan diet were bad for the environment as well.
“I felt I was being lied to as a consumer every time I’d go into Trader Joe’s and see a fake farm on the package of a G.M.O. soy burger,” she told The Times. “I knew it was up to me to find an alternative food system.”