What do you do when a vegan friend comes over for dinner? Panic first, probably. After all, how can you make a meal out of lettuce and carrots? But these days of stress are numbered. Perhaps you’ve already noticed – more and more people are becoming vegan or vegetarian. Supermarket shelves and even the pasty favourite Greggs are offering more vegetarian and vegan options. The numbers back up the trend too – according to the Vegan Society, demand for meat-free food increased tenfold in 2017.
In this week’s cover article, Jenny McCartney notes the identity politics that has – perhaps inevitably – piggybacked this dietary change. The first victim of the war between carnivores and vegans (or more strictly, omnivores and herbivores) was William Sitwell, then-Editor of the Waitrose magazine, for some badly judged emails to a vegan freelance contributor. Then came the battle over the Greggs vegan roll. But do the vegans have a point? Jenny writes about why she finds their arguments persuasive in this week’s cover – and joins us on the podcast, together with Dominika Piasecka, a spokesperson for the Vegan Society (who say they coined the very term, ‘vegan’, in 1944!) Tune in for the anti-dote to Twitter hysteria surrounding the subject:
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