Stand up to the vegan terrorists

By food writer ROSE PRINCE who’s suffered the bile of extremists

WE ARE told it is a lifestyle that can save the planet, that it will protect harmless animals and keep us fashionably thin at the same time.

No wonder veganism is popular with the young and impressionable, or that there’s a growing roster of celebrity backers, from Ricky Gervais to Will.i.am, all keen to show their idealistic credentials.

As shoppers peer at the vegan ranges now proliferating the shelves, however, they should ask themselves this: how can we square all that compassion with the vegan hate-mob intent on bullying anyone brave enough to disagree?

The latest victim is food writer William Sitwell, forced out of his job as editor of Waitrose Food magazine because he dared to mock them. According to Waitrose, Sitwell had ‘gone too far’ in a teasing email to a freelance journalist, which spoke about ‘killing vegans’ and exposing their hypocrisy.

Waitrose says he ‘stepped aside’ but if, as most suspect, he was forced out, it was a cowardly decision and one which is troubling on many levels. For a start, while vegans are not the only group of politically correct campaigners to browbeat business owners through online aggression, they are among the nastiest.

I know this because I have been on the receiving end when writing about the meat industry. I have received death threats, for example, which is not unusual if you try to bring any sense of perspective to animal welfare.

When I wrote a common-sense article about game birds, one angry letter was smeared with human excrement. Mark Dixon, head chef of a Norfolk pub, knows all about their methods after he put foie gras on a Valentine’s Day menu. He and his staff received an estimated 5,000 angry messages, including 200 death threats. This is vegan terrorism.

It is a measure of the people responsible for the loss of Sitwell’s job that he was told, ‘I hope you die of anal cancer, you retard’ in an email, and that an Instagram photo of his newborn son received a death threat.

Such vile behaviour is not the only reason to speak out. There are also major problems with the vegan model that need exposing – and I say this as someone committed to eating less meat and only from animals treated humanely.

Try as you might, you cannot grow food sustainably without the help of animals.

Even mushrooms, a favourite vegan staple, need to grow on manure, which is usually collected from industrial chicken farms.

It is impossible to enrich soil properly without animal muck. Plant-based compost is not effective enough.

The only alternative fertilisers involve chemically-based nitrogen-potassium compounds, produced with the help of fossil fuels, or mining what remains of an already depleted store of underground potash.

This is a classic case of debate being closed down by bullies who are not interested to hear anything that does not fit with their beliefs. Sitwell believes in free speech, he dares to defy a bien-pensant consensus about the food industry and, fatally, he has a sense of humour.

I have known him for more than 25 years and count him as a friend. When the then editor of the newly formed Waitrose Food Illustrated – as the magazine was then called – was looking for a deputy, I suggested William. Under his editorship, it has been head and shoulders above the competition.

And it is with Waitrose, a normally likeable chain, that my main criticism lies. In caving in to vegan militants, Waitrose is on its knees to angry (probably irondeprived) activists for no good reason. And they are insulting the great majority of their own customers in the process – the very people who are willing to pay more for organic, humanely reared meat, free range eggs and sustainably caught fish.

By pure coincidence, I was shopping in Waitrose on the day that the news of Sitwell’s ‘crime’ first broke. I glanced at the counter displaying the new vegan range but no one else was bothering to stop and browse the rainbow vegetable stew or hoisin jackfruit parcels.

I moved on. In fact, I am moving on from Waitrose as a whole and boycotting the chain.

It could have stuck this one out. It should have defended an excellent editor and faced down the mob. Waitrose chose instead to capitulate, just like other oncegreat businesses now running scared of social media.

It is shameful and should concern us all.