Underestimate the threat from vegans at your peril
If you dislike a food, dislike it intensely, vow never to eat it or have any thing to do with it and refuse to feed it to your children, here’s a question: why insist that any alternative has to look as much like the food you hate as possible and also, if possible, replica te the texture and chewiness or include beetroot to look like blood?
If enthusiasts for this extreme diet don’t want to eat meat, good luck to them with a less varied diet than nutritionists recommend, one that frequently has to be supplemented by mineral and vitamin pills.
But if you can’t stand the thought of a meat burger, why try to ensure that a vegetable one should look and taste the same? Surely a food that didn’t remind you of meat would be preferable?
But what does the nonbeliever know of what at times seems more like a religious conversion than a dietary preference, apart from the fact that, while comprising a tiny minority of the population, vegans have attracted a remarkable amount of attention in the past year or two.
The latest fig ur essuggest that about 1 per cent of the population claim to be vegans. That’s against about 73 per cent who eat meat regularly and another 14 p er cent who eat it occasionally, the so-called flexitarians – not forgetting vegetarians who don’t eat meat but will eat other animal products such as butter.
But it’s the 1 per cent we have heard so much about with their claims of mass ill-treatment and cruelty to animals given as a main reason for being vegan. There is also inc re as
ing criticism of livestock production’s contribution to carbon emissions and climate change.
Against that, farmers and the meat trade can point to the fact that, when any country’s living standards and incomes rise, meat eating and consumption of dairy products increase. No population lives almost entirely on rice or manioc because they like it, but because it’s all they have or can afford. The massive increase in meat eating in China in the past 30 years is an example.
Therefore, surely British farmers producing beef or lamb in a post-brexit world of new tariffs and taxes and import or export em bargoes, when and if we ever get to that happy stage, might have to worry about the finances of doing so, but not that demand for what they produce will decline or disappear.
Well, up to a point. Pig production in Scotland is up at present, but that production is and always has be encyclical. Con sumpti on of the ubiquitous chicken, staple of every supermarket meat department, is still increasing. But beef and lamb production has declined steadily in recent years.
And if the advice “Follow the money” means anything, then a more telling factor than vegans trumpeting their righteousness is investment by businesses large and small in the vegan market.
Gr eggs, for instance, attracted good-natured ribbing for its vegans ausage roll. But that product helped the comp any increase profits. Pret a Manger, supplier of freshly prepared sandwiches, organic coffee and much else to those in a hurry, recently bought a rival called Eat and plans to turn most of its 90 or so outlets vegan or veggie.
Even Burger King in America, where average meat consumption is more than an astonishing220lbp er head annually, produces a veggie burger. Giant food companies such as Uni lever are investing in vegetarian products that look – see opening paragraph – like meat. Supermarkets carry an increasing number of vegan products.
There is only ever one reason why big business invest sand neither ethics, moral sort he good of humanity are it. They invest because they see profit ahead and a recent financial report suggested that world sales of vegan burger sand other such foods could top £100 billion – that’s billion – by 2030.
Present world trade in meat is estimated at about £1 trillion. That’s a lot of meat and Scotland’s share of that market is tiny. But what we do produce as beef, lamb, pig and chicken is vital to the future of more than 10,000 farmers. If big business investment is any pointer, vegans are more of a threat to our livestock industry than we thought.