There’s nothing vegans love more than to share photos of food. We are basically “meat porn” dudes but with nut-based cheeses and less gout. If it exists, you have definitely seen an artfully wonky photo of it on Instagram accompanied by a graphic caption and a salivating emoji.
Veganism has come on in leaps and bounds in the past few years, particularly outside of businesses catering specifically for vegans. Its rising popularity has brought affordable supermarket own-brand meat substitutes, an oat milk rush to rival the Texas oil boom and, famously, the Greggs sausage roll. But this revolution has yet to hit the mainstream dessert market. It’s not that there are no options available – there is an entire line of vegan Ben & Jerry’s, for example. But when it comes to eating out, we are often catapulted back to the dark days of 2009, when the only vegan option on most menus was, “jacket potato with beans, please – no butter”.
A string of underwhelming vegan desserts has recently gone viral as social media users share stories of paltry pudding substitutes in restaurants – including a glass of ice with a cherry on top, “Happy Birthday” written directly on to a plate in dairy-free ganache and – worst of all – a single slice of banana with a birthday candle on top.
Fruit is, without a doubt, the most offensive vegan dessert. There is no greater torture than being sat at a table with 15 other people tucking into slabs of chocolate fudge cake while you work on a bowl of semi-defrosted melon chunks or a dollop of sorbet. A friend of mine went to a wedding last year to be served “some sort of blackcurrant curd that looked and tasted like the inside of a bouncy ball”.
The thing is, it doesn’t take much to make vegans happy. My favourite dessert is a slice of Co-op apple pie (an accidentally vegan product) dumped in a bowl of Alpro custard (total price: £2-£3). So please, I beg: give us ice-cream, custard, a plate of biscuits at least. But fruit, truly, is worse than no dessert at all.
