You know you’ve arrived when professors start thinking about how to look after you during a major emergency. As a vegan, I was thrilled to read in the Times this week that Professor Tim Lang, a professor of food policy, has told the government that us meat-dodgers must be catered for in any ‘food apocalypse’.
Speaking at the Hay Festival, Lang said that if a cyber attack or military strike from Russia destroyed Britain’s ‘vulnerable’ food chain, the contents of ration packs would need to bring comfort to a shaken public. We’d all be ‘in psychological shock’, he explained, so we’d need to have food that we’re ‘familiar and comfortable with’. In the face of ‘explosions’ and ‘energy outages’ he wouldn’t want vegans to ‘have to eat meat’. Well, if mushroom burgers are on the menu as the mushroom cloud goes up, then I’m feeling better about Armageddon already.
Once you’ve decided to stop supporting all that brutality, there can be no turning back
Lang’s remarks are just the latest step in veganism’s move to the mainstream. Over the past seven years a plant-based revolution has put what was once a fringe lifestyle much more centre stage. Supermarket shelves and restaurant menus offer plenty of vegan options, and awareness is growing about the horrors of factory farming, the negative effect that the meat industry has on the climate and how eating processed meat is bad for our health.
The numbers reflect all this: in 2014, vegans made up just 0.25 per cent of the UK population, but a study found that 6.4 per cent of UK adults plan to follow a vegan diet this year – that’s an estimated 3.4 million people, including the 2.1 per cent who were already vegan.
Obviously, this has rather unnerved meat and milk bosses. The industry body Dairy UK has spent many years and lots of money trying to ban plant milk companies from using the word ‘milk’ in their marketing, and meat companies desperately want to ban the use of ‘sausage’ or ‘burger’ terms on plant-based products. Goodness, someone’s feeling threatened!
But it’s not just companies that turn into snowflakes when they hear the word ‘vegan’. As the media has covered the topic more, Piers Morgan has repeatedly goaded vegans, partly because he knows that they can be easily riled but more because he understands that lots of meat eaters feel so guilty about eating animals that they’ll cackle with relief when he mocks those bloody vegans who unsettle them.
Let’s be real: aside from the factory farm and slaughterhouse bosses who make money from the meat racket, the only reason to be even remotely threatened by vegans is that secretly you know we’re right. If you ask anyone whether they’re opposed to cruelty to animals they’ll say yes, but the fact is that every time you buy meat or dairy, you’re supporting horrific cruelty to animals.
The facts are simple: more than 92 billion land animals are killed each year for their meat, usually at a tiny fraction of their natural lifespan. Around 85 per cent of the UK’s farmed animals endure their truncated lives in horrific factory farms. Most pigs are killed in gas chambers. Many male chicks are tossed into grinders by the egg industry and dairy cows have their babies torn from them after birth.
Once you’ve decided to stop supporting all that brutality, there can be no turning back, even during a major disaster. So thank you, Professor Lang, for including vegans in your plans for when it all inevitably goes tits up. I’d still basically prefer it if the world didn’t end, but if I can toast a catastrophe with a glass of oat milk, maybe it won’t all be as bad as I thought.
Comments