Veganism has gone mainstream, so it’s easy to forget what life used to be like for us plant-munchers.
In restaurants we had to endure awkward conversations with bewildered waiters, who would disappear to the kitchen and return saying they could do us the salad with the cheese picked out and the dressing left off. We’d go home hungry.
Now virtually all chain restaurants and cafes offer delicious vegan options and we can dine almost as happily as everyone else – and McDonald’s is about to join the party.
The fast food chain will be rolling out its first fully vegan meal on 2 January – a year on from the much-hyped launch of Greggs’ vegan sausage roll and just in time for the annual Veganuary gimmick.
As the burger giant becomes the latest brand to try to seduce vegans into its restaurants with a carefully-targeted product, you might think it wouldn’t have a hope in hell. Vegans in McDonald’s? No chance!
But despite criticism of the chain over animal suffering, as outlined in a report by World Animal Protection, the seduction will succeed.
Why? Because a lot of vegans believe that spending money at chains like McDonald’s will ‘show a demand’ for plant-based products and bring an end to the slaughter and exploitation of animals.
On social media, vegans post photographs of overflowing supermarket baskets or restaurant tables groaning under the weight of vegan meals, proudly boasting that they’re showing the demand for these dishes, and changing the world.
And when the likes of KFC and Burger King launch plant-based products, they are, astonishingly, given uncritical publicity by vegan publications.
Once McDonald’s launches its plant-based meal, lots of vegans will undoubtedly pour through the doors, believing that by handing money to cow slaughterers they will somehow help bring the slaughtering of cows to an end.
Likewise, when Burger King launched its plant-based Impossible Whopper, many vegans said that it would encourage meat-eaters to stop eating meat – but that’s not what happened.
As José Cil, CEO of Burger King’s parent company, Restaurant Brands International, said: ‘We aren’t seeing guests swap the original Whopper for the Impossible Whopper… it’s attracting new guests.’
In other words, meat-eaters continue to buy beef burgers and they still account for most of Burger King’s profits.The only difference is that vegans and vegetarians have started to come through the doors, too.
That sound you can hear is burger bosses laughing all the way to the bank.
It was the same story at Greggs. When the bakery giant launched its vegan sausage roll, it enjoyed a 58 per cent rise in profits and a surge in customer numbers, but if it had just been Greggs regulars who switched from meat to the plant-based sausage roll, profits would have stayed much the same.
Vegans aren’t changing the world by buying plant-based products from big chains, they’re just making animal slaughterers even richer.
And this successful seduction from big business has left many small, independent vegan businesses struggling to stay afloat.
They can’t compete with the hype of Greggs or KFC, so they watch on broken-hearted as vegans stampede to bankroll animal slaughter.
As veganism becomes increasingly trendy, I suspect that a lot of vegans are secretly ‘vegan for the trendiness’ or ‘vegan for the consumerism’
This all comes down to why you are vegan.
Some in the community say they are ‘vegan for the animals’, or ‘vegan for the environment’ or ‘vegan for health’. If you fall into any of those camps, I can’t see why you’d eat in a McDonald’s.
As veganism becomes increasingly trendy, I suspect that a lot of vegans are secretly ‘vegan for the trendiness’ or ‘vegan for the consumerism’.
If you are either of those, then sure, go and eat a vegan meal in McDonald’s if you’d like to.
But if you are vegan because you want animal exploitation to actually end, and if you hope that a fairer society for animals could lead to a fairer society for people, then handing money to McDonald’s, a company that exploits humans as well as animals, would be heretical.
Lots of vegans say they are activists, but their ‘activism’ is just tapping credit cards against the contactless machines of big corporations.
That isn’t activism, it’s capitalism – and talk of ‘ethical capitalism’ is as laughable as the meat industry’s claims of ‘humane slaughter’.
I’m not lovin’ it…
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