I stopped eating meat in 1987 after a bout of food poisoning in India – where, by coincidence, I’d also been reading Gandhi’s autobiography. In it he recounts his experiments as a young would-be revolutionary, forcing himself to break his strict Brahmin religious taboo and eat meat, attempting to emulate the English who held such power over his motherland.
Why was I eating meat, I thought? And so, I stopped. There were the ethics, as well as the health and environmental impacts. Plus, raised by a Hindu mother who was also a professional cookery writer, the rich diversity of pure vegan and vegetarian cuisine was normal to me: dozens of varieties of daal alone. Cauliflower transformed into the light airy perfection of aloo gobi, tossed with lemon juice and coriander in a karahi – the Indian equivalent of a wok.
As a young career woman learning to cook, I developed a fondness for cookbooks by early vegetarian counter-cultural heroines, notably Rose Elliot and the female-led Moosewood Collective. The Cranks Recipe Book was the source of my first dinner party, complete with mushroom pie and apple crumble. I also loved its stodgy comfort food side – homity pie at their Carnaby Street restaurant, which was essentially potatoes and cheese in pastry.
As London became more adventurous, with ever growing numbers of ethnic cuisines, being vegetarian was never a problem. My particular favourite has for years been the Ethiopian vegan stall at the Southbank Centre food market, offering a rainbow plate of delicately spiced salads, lentils and sliced fermented pancakes.
But last year, I realised the fight for proper vegetarian and vegan food would have to be refought: at a fancy dinner hosted by a major cultural institution, the hosts boasted of serving everyone a pure green vegan menu. It offered unintentionally raw aubergine slices in nasty orange breadcrumbs. It was truly terrible. I pointed out to several trustees that an Indian wedding caterer would have supplied a high quality vegan meal for that number of guests at a fraction of the cost.
At this year’s dinner the same caterers were, shockingly, hired back and produced a beige main course of a scoop of mashed potato and what looked like sliced triangles of turnip, designed to mimic pork and crackling. The menu promised “sunflower seed ‘butter’ on request”. Er, that’s margarine.
I blame this strange state of affairs on the rise of highly processed “vegan” foods over the past five years. Vegan sausage rolls in a cheap and cheerful high street bakery chain, for example, or high-sugar vegan cakes in coffee shops. While superficially celebrating eco-choices, the connection to natural ingredients, so core to traditional vegetarianism and veganism, has been broken. And in catering, egg- and dairy-eating vegetarians are being erased in favour of a veganism that claims the moral high ground but seems more interested in aping meat products with highly processed substitutes, presumably partly down to new fashion-driven converts.
The menu for a literary prize black tie dinner made my heart sink. Cauliflower steaks with cauliflower puree. What? I asked for some proper protein. They said they could do me a poached egg. It seems we are back in the days of “We can do you an omelette.”
Friends exchange horror stories of rubbery vegan “cheese” and fake burgers blooded with beetroot for an authentic look. In one hotel the vegetarian breakfast included a sausage that oozed disconcertingly like pork. I had to ask my meat-eating colleague to test it. He couldn’t tell if it was meat or not. These are the new vegan sausages that younger people want, the waitress told me.
That day I became a protestor for “real” vegetarian rights. Because I want a veggie sausage that looks and tastes like vegetables. That sausage was to vegan cookery what porn is to genuine love-making. A capitalist abomination. And like porn’s impact, this new highly processed “plant-based” eating is destroying people’s normal relationships with real food.
It’s also, yes, racist. An insult to the many delicious and ancient vegetarian and vegan cuisines of the world, particularly in Asia and Africa. I say no to fake beef burgers, to jackfruit as a meat substitute and “heirloom” beetroot being promoted above its abilities. I say show respect to true vegetarians and vegans alike. But don’t force all the former to become the latter. Give me egg and dairy liberty – or at least a well-flavoured daal – or give me death.
This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2023 issue. Subscribe now.
