I Think I’m Turning a Bit Veganish
For the past 2 years, I have mistakenly been receiving someone else’s Domino’s pizza receipts via email, but from the other side of the world. This someone has a similar name to me in that he is also called Jerry, but he lives in Glebe, New South Wales in Australia. I assume he misspelt his email address, putting mine instead of his, which means I have been able to inspect his antipodean eating habits in forensic detail, especially when it comes to his choice of pizza toppings.
I can report that over the last 12 months he has gone from a regular pulled chicken and chorizo kinda-guy to a vegan one, complete with 3 vegan friends, according to last Friday’s receipt. Despite him living 10,646 miles away and having never met him, I can see that he slowly but steadily changed his diet over the last year into a vegan one and, you know what? I feel happy for him. Proud, even.
But is it really a good idea? Should we all be following Ozzy Jerry’s meat-free journey?
A quick chat with the UK’s leading supermarkets revealed that the vegan trend is skyrocketing over here. Sainsbury’s press office told me that they saw a 63% increase in year on year sales of their vegan products since January 2019. Tesco and Morrisons report similar rises. Bristol is now considered the vegan capital of Europe (remember that place? It’s a continent that we used to be part of). The west country city was found to have more Google searches relating to veganism than anywhere else in the world. So it probably will not be a surprise to learn that three out of four of Bristol’s MPs say they are either totally vegetarian or vegan.
Let me pause you there, to give you a short, personal aside. Stick with it as it is relevant. I am a musician and played afro-style guitar for a Bristol-based band called FNAAZ back in the 90s. We had a vegan rhythm guitarist, Tim Llewellyn, and we used to play a few festivals in Spain every summer. This was wonderful for the rest of the band who were omnivores, but a nightmare for poor Tim. When eating out, he would patiently explain in broken Spanish that he did not eat any meat or dairy produce. The waiters would always smile and nod enthusiastically saying “No problemo” before waltzing off to the kitchen. Twenty mins later, they would bring out his dish of beautifully presented salad with a flourish, but completed with slices of chorizo and bacon - helpfully pressed to one side of his plate like they were on a kind of crockery naughty-step.
Back in the day, nobody really got vegan food, but skip forward 25 years, and it is now hard to find a restaurant that does not cater to vegans. Usually advertising it with a big, prime coloured ‘V’ next to the relevant menu items.
The world has thankfully changed. Global food production is responsible for around a quarter of our greenhouse gases, and we have had to change. There is no escaping the clear proof that we must reduce our meat and dairy consumption, or else the fan is going to be completely covered in odoriferous animal waste products.
Just look at the maths if you have any doubts. When we feed a soya bean diet to a cow, you can only get back about 10% of that nutrition as edible muscle in beef, plus it comes with a hefty dose of methane in the form of bovine farts. Beef farming and soya production are also deforestation’s prime motivators.
There is a one-liner on how to know if the person you are talking with is a vegan. The answer is, you do not have to ask them, as they’ll soon tell you. But what do scientists and nutritionists say about the benefits of veganism?
Apparently, research suggests that any improved health benefits are not wholly due to a reduction in amounts of animal protein consumed but are more to do with reduced consumption of processed foods and harmful ingredients, like added sugar. Most of the studies on vegan diets usually compare them against the junk food heavy Western diet, NOT the Mediterranean diet for instance, which is generally accepted as the healthiest and one that most of the people I know, follow.
If there was a book called The Coolest Things You Can Do To Help the Planet and You, it would say the latest thinking is to make a gradual change to eating more plant-based foods. There is no need for us to go all the whole hog or the whole haricot bean.
It is all about proportional change. We just need to, like Australian Jerry, sometimes start choosing veggie or vegan options instead of meat. If we all choose a plant-based meal twice a week, for instance, it will trigger external changes, a measurable reduction in demand for meat products, but also this will help trigger internal changes. You will become healthier by eating less processed foods and as a direct consequence of that, most probably happier, too. My motto is to eat well and prosper, now where did I put my tofu knife?
Written by Jerry Short
Jerry is a freelance writer, who has worked as a wildlife film producer for the BBC, a journalist, a musician and a narrator. He has a lifelong interest in science, has been stalked by lions, swum with sharks and is addicted to watching cookery programmes and is definitely a "foodie". His heroes are Douglas Adams and Charles Darwin.