The real reason you hate vegans

Just when it seemed as though January in Britain couldn’t get any bleaker, along came ‘Veganuary’. Cue loads of puny, blue-haired wokerati spending this month preaching about how we should give up on two of man’s greatest pleasures – meat and cheese.

If you’ve been finding it irritating, you’re not alone. In surveys of public opinion, vegans are hated more than any other group, with the exception of drug addicts. So when a chef tells the newspapers that he’s banned vegans from his restaurant, or a magazine editor jokes that they should be killed, do you feel justified in allowing a smirk of amusement to cross your face? After all, in an era when we are supposed to have obliterated all our prejudices, despising vegans still feels deliciously permissible. Indeed, there’s so much vegan loathing that social scientists are rushing to dissect it. 

So, in the spirit of enquiry, and with a bit of data to inform us, let’s take a timely look at how hatred of vegans became the last bastion of prejudice we are still allowed to enjoy.