How dairy-dodgers became the latest cash cow
As one gastropub is ridiculed for £28 cauliflower steaks, says dairy-dodgers have become a cash cow
Cauliflower steak for two, Madame? Certainly, that will be £28 please. Or it is if you’re the vegan dining at a Young’s pub in north London. For the same price, a carnivorous couple on the next table could gobble up two Aberdeen Angus steaks.
The offer has caused outrage, though it’s only available during Veganuary – an innovation just five years old, which has proved increasingly popular. More than 300,000 people have signed up to take part this year, cutting all animal products from their diet throughout January, while over the past two years veganism in the UK has boomed by 700 per cent. There is major change afoot and supermarkets, restaurants and manufacturers are responding accordingly with new dairy-free ranges, such as M&S’S Plant Kitchen, and menus running beyond January.
As a vegan, I’m all for it – but there is a downside. Because, increasingly, Veganuary appears to be a case of “show me a moral health crusade, and I’ll show you a way to make money”. Vegans are in danger of being taken for a very lucrative ride. Our options are limited, so we’re much more likely to pay up without complaining.
Here’s five ways being vegan costs more – and why it really shouldn’t.
Snacks
Plenty of stores now sell veganfriendly sandwiches and snack bars – but the meat-free versions, packed with soy “meat” substitutes and cheap vegetables like carrot, generally cost more than actual meat. If vegans were getting braised Jerusalem artichoke, sprinkled with gold leaf on a bed of coddled baby asparagus, then, yes, of course it should cost more than egg mayonnaise. But hiked-up prices for grated raw beetroot and a spoon of hummus?
At Boots, the breakfast sandwich, featuring actual bacon and sausage, is £2.50. The vegan alternative, with vegan sausage and tomato, thuds in at £3.15. Similarly, Cadbury’s brunch chocolate chip bars are 99p for six – but vegan Nakd lemon drizzle bars cost £2.49 for four.
Plant milks and cheeses
It’s impossible to go vegan without swapping dairy milk for plant milk. With a choice of oat, coconut, soya, almond, cashew, hazelnut, pea and rice milk, it should be simple. Less easy, however, is affording it. The cost is often down to the manufacturing process, and nuts are never cheap. But should a litre of oat milk from Planet Organic really cost £2.50, compared to £1.15 for organic dairy milk? It’s not as though each oat has to be individually milked. Artisan cheese, too, is often made from nuts – at Planet Organic, 130g of smoked cashew “brie” costs £9.50. Asda’s extra special Cornish brie, made
with dairy is £1.82 for 180g. There’s artisan-made, and there’s Dick Turpin.
Restaurant menus
Plenty of restaurants, from Wetherspoons to Michelin-starred venues, offer vegan menus – but for most, there’s very little price difference, despite the fact that meat costs more than vegetables and fruit. Of course, even moaning vegans are happy to pay for careful preparation of ingredients and great service, but when there’s a negligible change in cost whether it’s steak tartare or mushrooms and rice, it’s hard not to feel we’re being ripped off. At All Bar One, a lunch of feta, peppers and carrot salad costs the same as chicken quesadillas.
Splitting the bill
Being vegan means you get ripped off by your friends, too. Eating out in these austere days means bill-splitting, but only the most pernickety add up who had what. Far easier to split it six ways, unless you’re the schmuck who had the vegan garlic bread and the small salad, while everyone else had sea bass, duck and lobster. Like most of us who want to keep our friends, I lack the brass neck to say “but mine only came to £7”, and I pay up – but I wince, knowing the chips were just £3 – and not the £25 I suddenly seem to be forking out for someone else’s slap-up steak dinner.
Ready meals
In the past year, supermarkets have stepped up the vegan ready meals – from “mushroom mince” (£1.50 for 250g at Sainsbury’s, compared to £1 for 300g of whole mushrooms) to fancy sourdough pizza (£4 at M&S which charges just £3.50 for the ,normal kind). There are entire ranges, such as Tesco’s Wicked Kitchen and Waitrose Vegan, full of innovative and healthy dishes. They are not, however, cheap. At Tesco, an Old El Paso burrito kit costs £3.19 for 620g, while a fancy Wicked Kitchen “naked burrito” costs £3.50 for 400g.
No vegan would complain about a world where dairy-free food is mainstream. It’s a lush, sparkling oasis after years in the dried-soya-protein wilderness. We don’t, however, have a higher income than non-vegans. And the bandwagon-jumpers who see a temporary Veganuary menu as a dairy-free cash cow are exploiting our good intentions. It’s time to let veg be veg – and stop pricing it as though it’s been massaged with beer while listening to classical music on its journey to our plates.
Flic Everett