Meat eaters more likely to buy plant-based foods not marketed as vegan
Changing labels is a low-cost way for promoting healthy and environmentally sustainable meals across social groups, study finds
I like mushrooms. I eat mushrooms. I even go and buy mushrooms and cook and eat them. The mushrooms I buy are not marked as vegan. So, there we have it, proof perfect of the contention. I know that the marking – or not as it were – is correct too. For if the mushrooms were in fact vegan then they’d tell me in one of those certainties of the universe.
Sounds like I’m not alone in leaving on the supermarket shelf anything labelled ‘vegan’.
Never look at vegan food.
But I normally just cook myself Rubbish Bin Stew. This saves me the bother of thinking.
I don’t have a problem with vegan food exactly, mushrooms as you say, baked beans I would think are vegan, there must be plenty of other examples of food that just happens not to contain animal products. I think that the ones to be avoided are ones that would normally contain eggs or dairy products but don’t. I would also add that the case for a vegan diet being good for the environment has never been made. It is just asserted and then treated as if it’s the truth. Since CO2 and methane have turned out not to be the problem that they were claimed to be back in the 1980s, that assertion is weaker still since that was mostly what it was based on.
I wouldn’t buy something labelled vegan in much the same way as I wouldn’t knowingly go into a gay pub even if I were thirsty. This has nothing whatsoever to do with hate, well no more than perhaps just that tiny bit. It’s the feeling of being a fish out of water which used to be called being ill at ease but is now HATE.
The biggest ill that all this meat free nonsense has inflicted upon the general public, is that the Reduced to Clear shelves are full of this stuff. I am constantly having to pay full price for my tea these days !
Not sure about this. I don’t mind buying stuff labelled vegan if it’s something I would buy anyway like Marmite or crisps. The label I avoid is ‘plant based’, which I discovered translates to ‘inedible sludge’.
I do sometimes wonder if i can remember when McDonald’s/ t’ chippy fried in beef tallow. Probably i can’t . Have to go to a Michelin starred restaurant now to reminisce.
We keep four crooks in our backyard. Free range, scratching happily around all day, very happy, Very good layers, possibly due to their diet, eat about anything, grain, plants, scraps, bugs, snails,. They really enjoy meat…something I mention when giving away fresh eggs to visitors. The vegatarians never object to how the eggs are made. We only have a couple of vegetarian friends, and they are not overly devout,
My main reason for avoiding vegan products, which I suspect is that of many others, is that a lot of the stuff prominently marked “Vegan” is a damn-site more expensive than the ordinary stuff.
oi! Mushrooms aren’t plants.
As a vegan, I only buy the stuff marketed as such, or as “plant based”, when I want something that you can cook quickly under the grill or in the frying pan. It’s never all that good, and although I’ve not eaten meat for over 50 years, I doubt if they taste much like real meat burgers or sausages. Overall, I’m glad about the recent increase in vegan food, because it makes shopping a bit easier and certainly does with eating out. And putting “Vegan” or somesuch on stuff that’s never contained meat or dairy is a smart move, because it saves me time, and mums buying for their kids home from Uni will know without checking ingredients. The bubble will burst, of course, but hopefully something in that category will remain.
Just confirms the hypothesis that vegans eat out of the middle of the store. Overprocessed, long-life, stuffed full of chemicals and preservatives textured soybean stalks and rapeseed leaves. Compost, in essence.
Face it, all those hundreds of iterations on grillable vegan slices taste like garbage because, by and large, they are.
Gregg’s vegan sausage rolls are a reasonable approximation of the meat ones. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if that is a good or bad thing.
Rather amusing when the local supermarket got cleaned out in 2020 starting with toilet paper and disinfectant then moving quite quickly to leave only two areas which remained full. They were:
– Vegetarian food
– Swimming pool chemicals (10kg of poolchlorine makes a lot of White King)
Sam: perhaps the residue that weren’t hitherto household items will move to the ‘Free From’ section (free from animal), which now seems to be well established in supermarkets.
The whole plant based meat thing appears to be built on an assumption that there are plenty of meat eaters who want to quit but who need a crutch to help wean them off. Sort of like nicotine patches or other sorts of products to help one quit smoking. The difference is that there really are smokers who want to quit and who will buy something that may help them do so. I’m skeptical that there are that many meat eaters who want help in quitting – vegan or not.
Having experimented a lot, in an effort to manage Mrs BiG’s vegetarian phase, you can make a decent approximation of a burger, at least something pleasant enough to eat, with textured soy protein, egg, some very strong miso, vegetable shortening, and kidney beans.
Young spelt grain (Grünkern, assume something equivalent available in Englandland) is also quite tasty as a “burger” basis, but rather carby than proteiny.
Both oodles better than any supermarket sliced vegan. But I guess most people want 5 minute fridge to plate convenience, so buy those grey things that look and taste like reconstituted cardboard, and can be served next to two veg smothered in Bisto (also vegan, and always has been).
Fungi are (genetically) slightly closer to animal than vegetable. How do vegans feel about that?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0nidfeLfKa/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Rather neatly sums up my approach
Morrisons labels their froazen veg as Vegan – are vegans stupid?
I doubt meat eaters have stopped buying them
If my food is meant to not have animal stuff in it – veg, fruit, rice, etc. then feel free to mark it as vegan.
I don’t care. I take about the same notice of that as I do of the % of RDA label for fat/carbs/fun etc. ie none.
Put that label on something that is meant to have animal products in it – sausages, meat, dairy, etc – then I’m going nowhere near it.
Neighbour of ours is always complemented by her veggie and vegan friends about how good her cooking is and they can’t come round often enough. She told us her secret a while back. She cooks the veggie vegan patties and stuff in the grease left in the pan after cooking meat. Too much effort to clean it and start again.
Seems even vegans like meat…
@Chris,
Fungi are actually neither plant nor animal. They’re the Third Option that rose from the single-cellular stage.
Or actually the First, with the vegetable/animal distinction coming in (much) later, and possibly deriving from…, depending on how one views things and interprets the available fossil and genetic data.
The species with the fruiting bodies we know as “mushrooms” are generally almost entirely vegetarian, but the largest fraction of fungal species is positively omnivorous, and a fair number are positively carnivorous, up to the point of being full-on active predators.
It is positively fun to point out to Vegans that roughly 90% of the world’s Evil Nitrates, including ammonia, are actually produced by fungi.. Especially by the species they like to eat…
Anyone convinced of the virtues of a vegan lifestyle should study the eating habits of rabbits to see what is required to extract the maximum nutrition from their diet. To save the curious from reading dry textbooks, it involves coprophagy. Much easier to Google…
Yes, Fungi are in a separate kingdom from animals and plants, but the point I was making is that they are (slightly) more closely related to animals than plants, as confirmed by phylogenetics. One of their main structural polysaccharides is chitin (rather than cellulose), as is also the case in insects.