Disclaimer: This blog is not a comment on being vegan at all. It is just an account of impact of the growing popularity of vegan-ism on people with other dietary preferences. Am all for reducing or altogether ending all forms of cruelty against animals.
Just look around and you will find it hard to miss a general rise in vegan-ism over the last few years. Grocery/provision stores stock a lot more plant based options in their freezers, vegan milk alternatives are occupying refrigerators more than ever, vegan leather is advertised as a conscious upholstery option; to name a few.
I just did some random Google searches around the vegan-ism from a dietary preference point of view and the trends discovered by various surveys and market research exercises.
Summaries of the top few results go like this:
According to The Vegan Society, average annual growth in global food and beverage launches with vegan and plant-based claims grew 21% and 58% between 2015 -19 respectively.1
The Good Food Institute reports that sales for plant-based foods in 2021have grown three times faster than those for non-plant based foods. The vegan market value has increased from $14.4 billion in 2020 to $15.77 billion in 2021.2
Cutting the long story short, it is fair to state that the popularity of vegan-ism as a dietary preference is increasing with every passing day and the trend seems to be headed only one way.
This article is an account of how this trend has affected me as an individual over the last few years and would most likely affect others like me.
I have been a vegetarian throughout my life. Breaking it further for the developed world, this means only vegetables and milk products. No fish and no eggs. It is no secret how hard travelling through the first world can be for me and others with similar dietary habits.
With vegan-ism on the rise, it would be easy to assume that things would get better for me. But would they? Would I be better off in a more vegan world?
The answer is not that straight forward unfortunately.
See, before being vegan became popular, there was a short period when being vegetarian started to trend. We would hear an odd voice in a family of non-vegetarians who said that he/she didn’t eat meat. May be this was the reason that most eateries had a customary representative vegetarian option. If it is a pizza place, you had a one pizza with vegetables on it in addition to the margarita. If it is a burger place you had one burger with say a chickpeas and mushrooms patty for example.
I was so naive when I began to imagine that as a result of this vegan trend doing the rounds, I might be presented with a few more options in addition to just the one customary alternative. Unfortunately that is not how things have transpired.
What seems to have happened is, now the eateries are serving up a lot more options with plant based meat on their menu. You have burgers with plant based beef, chicken, duck, you name it. As these plant based meat options are technically vegetarian, the eateries are no longer obliged to retain the “pure” vegetarian (ex: chickpea and mushroom) burger for example on their menu. When you ask them about it, they are quick to point you to all the juicy plant based meat alternatives.
What could be the problem with this, you might ask. Let me explain.
To someone like me who has always been a vegetarian, there are certain tastes and food textures that I have never experienced in my entire life and am not used them.
For example, I have never tasted beef. So a plant based beef burger patty which is designed to taste and feel as much like actual beef patty as possible, to me presents taste and texture that I don’t recognise. Vegetarians are fine with exploring new tastes like a new fruit or a new type of rice on another country but once you know that this new texture is because it is fake beef, it is repelling. From the first bite, it feels so foreign that I find it hard to swallow.
Yes, you may argue that with the plant based option, I will experience no guilt of slaughtering a living being for my food but, unlike someone who has adopted the vegan lifestyle recently and was a meat eater before, I never had the guilt to begin with. Ever.
What is worse now is that every bite now reminds me of how meat tastes. You have to be a vegetarian to understand what am saying here.
There are a number of food establishments who have taken vegetarian options off their menu and have replaced them with fake meat.
What I fear is, that, this is just the beginning. The problem is likely to accentuate and make the life of a vegetarian a lot harder, especially in the predominantly meat eating part of the world. Sometimes I wonder whether we were marginally better off when the world was dominated by real meat eaters. We at least had our one option to pick happily.
What are your thoughts? Do let me know in the comments below.
1: https://www.vegansociety.com/news/media/statistics/worldwide
