How an ice cream showed up vegans’ food intolerance
As anyone who has madly and miserably comfortscoffed an enormous box of chocolates (after having had a McDonald’s) knows all too well, food isn’t just food. It’s also a vast umbrella under which crouch all sorts of quirks, neuroses, needs and emotions.
So it’s no surprise, really, that choice of diet has become for many people, in an age of plenty, the front-line in their battle with themselves and the world. How else to explain the stratospheric rise of intolerances to gluten, dairy and carbs?
The biggest food intolerance sweeping society now goes under the heading of ethics: veganism. The refusal to eat honey, eggs and cheese out of solidarity with bees, chickens and cows used to be niche; to s me, it calls up slightly dishevelled people eating unmentionably horrible food in dingy little cafés in places like Cambridge.
But just as the more extreme elements of the Left have moved mainstream, so has once-fringe veganism. I’ve noticed that more than one good friend shuns butter and milk these days; I even found Quorn “ham” in the fridge of an otherwise sensible chum last week. And then there was the whole conversation I overheard on the tube the other day about “vegan wine”.
But could we be heading towards peak vegan? The telltale sign, of course, is a spat on social media over something so tiny and innocent that it’s hard to believe it even registered, let alone sparked the
thousands of retweets and comments that it did.
The story went like this. A woman tweeted how she “pulled up to my driveway to find a little girl crying, she didn’t have money for the ice cream van like her friends did so I gave her enough money to get herself a nice big ice cream with sauce, sprinkles and a Flake. She was so happy (and soon had ice cream round her mouth)”.
How nice. Well, not for the man who, having spied on her Twitter profile that the woman was a vegan, went on to lambast her for her hypocrisy – the ice cream, of course, came from a cow. (The man describes himself on Twitter as a “spiritual but completely non-religious vegan”).
There are some reasonable arguments for veganism, particularly if you’re an animal lover. But spats like the above show how quickly the dietary ethics of spoiled moderns forget the well-being of chickens and cows, and become, instead, fixated on the destruction of everyone else’s fun. Join with me in praying, in a “spiritual but completely non-religious” way, for it all to be over soon.