No quitten we're whelan on to chitchat 11

I saw the original Tweet but didn't see James Rebanks reply til now. It's good to see someone with a high profile like him question the latest condescending BS from the anti-livestock crowd.

I thought that guy Padraic Fogarty was a bit more informed but this statement is like something John Gibbons would say about cows: "Sheep farming fails on every metric - environmental, economic and social, especially on open hill land".

Maybe it's dawning on these lads that people aren't listening and they're ramping up the rants.

Politicians are fickle and will follow what their supporters (business and voters) want. You could argue that's what they're supposed to do, apart from the big business influence/lobbying 😀

I get a sense the initial hype of virtue-signalling from eating plant-based food to apparently save the plant is dying out. Apart from the luvies in the media, the rest of the western world seems to have tried vegan food and unless you become a convert, you move on. I'm no fan of Rod Liddle (Eamon Dunphy knew what he was up to!) but he makes a decent point here: https://archive.md/2023.06.25-002038/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/great-vegan-rollout-halted-salty-sugary-ultra-processed-tracks-comment-rh3fjqg3k#selection-917.12-917.192

Once there's no votes in it, and no big business lobbying for it, it'll drop down the list of items politicians think will make them look good.

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25-June-2023

Of the many products in my local supermarket that make me swerve away instinctively, none occasions me to do so with as much rapidity as those that advertise themselves as “plant-based”. Yes, not even “gluten-free”. I have nothing against eating plants and eat rather more of them than I do of meat; it is the glib ubiquity of the term, usually accompanied by a photograph of a sunny meadow or something, that makes me wary. Have a look inside and you’ll see some brown, compacted fungus-and-kale slurry formed into a patty, having been doused with salt and sugar. Yum.

The speed with which all the supermarkets took up “plant-based” rubbish (as opposed to, y’know, plants) struck me as being faddish top-down virtue-signalling and thus to be avoided at all costs. It kind of shouted out: “You are being had, you sad dupe.” Just because your burger doesn’t contain the shredded gristle from a pig’s nutsack, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s good for you, even if it is, for obvious nutsack-related reasons, better for the pig. This was bandwagon-clambering of the most egregious kind — and aimed at who, precisely?

It would seem that an awful lot of you share my aversion, because the supposed great vegan rollout has been halted in its tracks. Last week one of the biggest suppliers of vegan products in the UK, Meatless Farms, briefly went into administration. It was not alone in feeling the chill wind of the anti-vegan counter-revolution.

The Yorkshire sausage-maker Heck slashed the number of its vegan products from ten to two because nobody was buying them. Nestlé removed its “Garden Gourmet” range (yeah, right. Sounds better than “rehydrated soya protein boiled in a huge metal vat” range, though), which was introduced only a year ago. Innocent has binned its dairy-free range of sickly and fattening smoothies, and Pret has closed all but two of its “veggie” outlets. Vegan bars, restaurants and cafés are similarly shutting up shop.

Some of this, I dare say, is a consequence of the cost of living crisis, which tends to support my thesis that veganism is a very bourgeois, First World concern and when money’s too tight to mention is seen as a frippery to be jettisoned at the first available opportunity. Some of it, though, may be a consequence of a dawning realisation of the very points I made in my first paragraphs — that no matter how pretty the drawing of a meadow on the carton, the food inside may not actually be very good for you.

A recent French study found a direct and strong correlation between the avoidance of what it called animal-based food and a much greater intake of ultra-processed food (UPF). An awful lot of what lurks in the Hipster Pointy Beard Guardian Reader Tosspot aisle of your supermarket is UPF and, as other studies have shown, even more laden with salt and sugar than many of the UPF meat products on offer.

Then again, the sudden and very steep decline in vegan food may also be because we have now tried it — having been hectored into doing so by the food police — and have decided that it’s awful. Unlike Piers Morgan, I rather enjoyed the Greggs vegan sausage roll I bought a few years ago on a kind of do-gooding, save-the-planet whim, and would eat one again were I not eschewing pastry as part of a forlorn attempt to look as thin as I was when I was 22. But the rest of the UPF vegan crap I’ve tried has been truly dreadful.

So, all that may be somewhere in the mix. But there is another reason so many vegan outlets are in trouble, exemplified in a comment by a restaurant owner quoted in The Times last week: “The great thing about running a restaurant with a mainstream menu and vegan menu is that everyone can eat whatever they want,” he said. “Remove that option and you’re halving your customers.”

No, mate, no. A vegan-only restaurant is not halving the number of potential customers. It is reducing them to a handful. And that, I think, is the point. Somehow, amid the brouhaha about how we were all going vegan and how great that would be for the planet, the food industry got swept along and in the process kind of lost its marbles. Estimates of the number of vegans in the UK range from 1 to 2 per cent of the population, and, sadly, that many people cannot possibly repay the benevolent overtures from Nestlé, Pret, Heck and indeed Meatless Farms.

The market was always close to being non-existent: it was a chimera, an illusion. As with so much of what gets labelled as being part of the “culture wars”, there are 100 people on the non-vegan side of the fence being badgered by just one or two people on the other side — who are rather short of amino acids in their diets and will be needing hip replacement operations quite soon.

Doing a few hours in pre-school every day gives them a great start. It eases the way into big school as they're used to getting ready and going out every morning.

Must have been hard on our mothers trying to get us from playing at home every day straight into big school. I remember several lads (always seemed to be boys) running out of the classroom and heading for the school gate when they started in junior infants. One lad actually made it home, over a mile away, and walked into his mother in the kitchen. Not sure how the teacher didn't miss him. My mother told me I did plenty bawling when I started too!

The big change now seems to be getting them to pre-school, and onto big school then isn't such a jump.

Best of luck with the next arrival anyway.