…and eat it! I’ll have ALL the vegan cake — yours too!

‘The Joy of being Vegan’ is featured in today’s Independent. READ IT. We’re on the rise! Good article aside from this bit “Vegans eat all the foods meat-eaters eat — except meat, poultry, fish, cow’s milk, yoghurt, cheese and honey”. Wow. I guess therefore that vegans DON’T actually ‘eat all the foods meat-eaters eat’, in fact we eat HUMMUS everyday, for every meal! Actually no we don’t but that’s the kind of ignorance I’ve come to expect. We’re not ‘extremists’ either, so there!

“The transformation of veganism from oddball movement to the fringe of the mainstream has taken 60 years. Its progress to the mainstream is likely to be much quicker.” hhhhmmm Maybe. I’m not disputing the fact that there are roughly between 600,000 and one million vegans in the UK or the fact that the meat-free market in 2004 was worth £626 million but I would like to dispute this notion of mainstream veganism. Don’t get me wrong I would love to see more and more people tilting towards vegan preferences but if personal experience is anything to go by I’d say we’re still a long way off. I think the main problem facing the rise of veganism is the public attitude. The vegan diet is not an extreme diet and it certainly doesn’t lack vitamins, nutrients or taste for that matter! We don’t need your B12 supplements either. All hail the breakfast cereal.

Gillian McKeith and the growth of health awareness has quite obviously helped the vegan cause but being vegan isn’t just about ’staying slim’ you know. Adrian Ling, the managing director of Plamil Foods reckons “as veganism has grown, understanding of it has grown”. This is true, but only to a certain extent. The stereotypical hippy vegan image, the ‘dreadlock burger’ and the daily intake of lentils is still very much common-place. I get so annoyed by vegetarian options in restaurants centred around cheese and eggs! I certainly hope the growing interest in veganism will continue and people become more and more aware of animal welfare and animal cruelty-free lifestyles. Being vegan is EASY and all you ‘I’d go vegan but I like cheese and chocolate too much’ vegetarians need to wake up and veganise!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Veganism and tagged as animal rights. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.