A carnivore’s supermarket tour is much more appetising

Waitrose, esteemed bastion of Middle England, long-term supporter of British producers, is tilting towards vegans. And quite right too. As we know – some of us more acutely than others – their numbers are on the rise.

According to a spokesman for the supermarket: “We get a lot of interest from customers who may have recently started following a vegan diet or are having vegan days in the week and are looking for more information.”

They don’t say exactly who these full-time/ part-time vegans are but, judging by the typical Waitrose customer, they are probably the millennial kids of loyal shoppers popping up at Waitrose to see what the fuss is about, when they are more usually seen stalking the aisles of Aldi.

Waitrose needs these folk. They are the future. So they have organised “vegan store tours” in 100 of their branches. Besides the quite unutterable tedium of such a concept (“Now ladies and gentlemen, we enter the pulses section…”), it does beg the question of what other tours the store should be engaging in.

Because each time a supermarket such as Waitrose embraces a vegan with a warm and loving hug and takes them by the hand, the rest of us – the meat eaters, the cheese consumers, the yogurt slurpers, the milk drinkers – wonder what it was that we did wrong. Why can’t we get a tour for our special dietary needs?

It’s great to educate vegans and veggies about where they can find their chickpeas and their quinoa and how they can mix them with some chopped cucumber, tomatoes, olive oil and vegan cheese to make a tasty, healthy lunch, but what about carnivore tutorials? If anything, there is more misinformation around about meat – its impact on health, or the ethics of its production – than about so-called plant-based diets.

Waitrose’s long-term meat suppliers are some of the finest in the country. Their welfare standards are the best in the world. Their provenance is both interesting and transparent.

So why not take us by the hand to the meat counter and show us the outdoorreared pork, the chickens culled from less intensive poultry farms, the Aberdeen Angus beef from Scottish Borders farmers who love their cattle like members of the family (albeit knowing they will meet a swift but still sticky end)?

Why not lead us gently to the cheese counter where you’ll find an array of dairy products that would shame a Frenchman? And then how about some culinary lessons down by the granola department – a little education about how non-vegan honey and cow’s milk yogurt can bring a sparkle to your breakfast table?

I often think that the vegan argument will be good for the whole as it makes some of us think more carefully about what we consume. Perhaps it will encourage some shoppers to spend more on better quality produce or to eat meat less often. It’s similar to what happened when organic food was all the rage in the late 1990s – it helped to improve the conventional farming sector.

I would like to go on a vegan tour. But I’d like it to be a fair and general education with a detour around the meat section. Oh and we can pop by the eggs – those beautiful Clarence Court numbers, for example. Educate us Waitrose, but do it fairly. Windmills that tilt too far can teeter over and collapse.