Where will the joyless rise of vegetarian-only ghettos end?
To anyone who has not eaten at Farmacy, the illiterate vegan restaurant in Notting Hill, a vegan diet may seem appealing. I do not like to give advice – I don’t take it myself – but I beg you not to eat there, unless you want to eat fake pizza and drink fake hot chocolate inside a restaurant decorated as the inside of a Fortnum & Mason hamper – but with no ham in it.
You may well do, if you are mad. A press release tells me that 14 per cent of British people have embraced the no-cow diet in 2018 and are,
at therefore, potential victims – I mean clients – of Farmacy. How many will abandon the diet in disgust remains unsaid, because press releases are rarely prophetic.
I am not against veganism – I am against almost nothing – but I didn’t know that our narcissistic society had become so fragmented that some vegetarians, particularly those on the property rental market, now want to live in vegetarian ghettos where they feel their food choices will be “respected”. The same press release confides that to be a
n wh affe post smart do blushe t bu truthful anyth Septemb w vegetarian or a vegan is no longer a lifestyle choice but a “belief ” – how self-important – and, therefore, “sharing a kitchen with others who eat animal products can be an issue”.
I have been a restaurant critic for seven years, and the vegan restaurants among my reviews are the most joyless I have ever experienced. The children moaned in Farmacy when they realised that the “hot chocolate” contained no milk, no sugar or – imagine this – no chocolate. The pizza had no cheese, no dough and no life.
The vegan pop-up restaurant Bunyadi managed to be both painful (you sit in a tree) and very boring, even though everyone was eating naked (the other twist). Nuts and berries mostly, like big birds. Even the staff were nude, except for a fig leaf for hygiene, which may have been plastic. I didn’t really look.
People seeking rooms to rent in vegetarian-only households – and there are many available in Harrow, Waltham Forest, Newham, Hackney and Redbridge, according to a map decorated with a photograph of a pumpkin – should ask themselves what exactly they are hoping for in this vegetarian-only utopia.
The road from vegetablerelated “belief system” to a closed society is a short one.