Charity says plain and fruit scones have been dairy-free for years, but can be ‘enjoyed with butter or cream’
The National Trust has long prided itself on its famous scones. There is even a blog dedicated to them, along with a “scone of the month” feature.
And with more than 3m sold every year, including those served with cream teas at its 300-plus tearooms, they are seen as an integral part of the National Trust day out.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Poll shows young people willing to make big lifestyle changes but baulk at smaller gestures
They are willing to have smaller families, stop using cars and – albeit in smaller numbers – go vegan for the planet, but abandoning single-use plastics and growing a few more plants could be a step too far.
Across Europe, according to a seven-country survey, it seems young people are more willing than older generations to make big lifestyle changes that would help combat the climate crisis – but are less convinced by smaller gestures.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Trading standards body warns shoppers with severe allergies could face ‘tragic consequences’
More than a third of foods labelled vegan contained animal products, research has found, prompting experts to warn shoppers with severe allergies they face potentially “tragic consequences”.
Forensic scientists found traces of egg or milk in an array of goods that were labelled as vegan or plant-based, with trading standards bosses calling for legal protection to stop consumers being “exploited by unethical food businesses”.
Continue reading...The popular chocolate and peanut butter treat is one of two new ‘plant based’ offerings from the chocolatier in the next two months
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are getting the vegan treatment.
The Hershey Company said on Tuesday that Reese’s plant-based peanut butter cups, which go on sale this month, will be its first vegan chocolates sold nationally. A second plant-based offering, Hershey’s plant-based extra creamy with almonds and sea salt, will follow in April.
Continue reading...Researchers find no such link for women, suggesting connection between diet and bowel cancer is clearer for men
Eating a plant-based diet rich in vegetables, whole grains, nuts and legumes can reduce the risk of bowel cancer in men by more than a fifth, according to research.
A large study that involved 79,952 US-based men found that those who ate the largest amounts of healthy plant-based foods had a 22% lower risk of bowel cancer compared with those who ate the least.
Continue reading...Man says state prison failed to provide adequate diet, in appeal joined by former psychiatric patient
Switzerland has been challenged at the European court of human rights over a failure to provide adequate vegan diets to a prisoner and a patient at the psychiatric ward of a hospital, in a case that could lead to veganism being interpreted as a protected characteristic under the right of freedom of conscience across geographic Europe.
The court, which is part of the Council of Europe and not the EU, this week formally asked its member state Switzerland to respond to the two complaints that Swiss state institutions had failed to provide a totally vegan diet to two applicants while they were in prison and in a hospital psychiatric unit respectively.
Continue reading...From plant-eating bodybuilders to role models like Lewis Hamilton, so-called ‘hegans’ are turning gender stereotypes on their head
It was a Sunday afternoon in the late 1980s and the house was filled with the fatty scent of roast lamb. I absentmindedly enquired about the origins of lunch and my brother pointed at the mewing sheep in the field adjacent to our house. I was a five-year-old boy, and I decided on the spot to become the first vegetarian in my family.
My parents, while broadly supportive, were understandably bemused – and concerned. It was a less enlightened time, and my lack of dietary protein was a constant worry. They assuaged this by occasionally feeding me Chicken McNuggets under the not entirely misplaced logic that they weren’t really meat. After I’d cottoned on, I would sheepishly order a cheeseburger “without the burger” whenever we went to McDonald’s.
Continue reading...Simply avoiding meat and dairy isn’t going to cut it if you still turn to ultra-processed foods
Did you change what you ate or drank for January? The start of the year is an annual cue for a Pandora’s box of diet demons to be released; from meal replacements and super-keto diets to slimming teas. Alongside these trends live the regular and more ethical health-conscious messages of dry January and Veganuary, both of which have grown in popularity and have a much cleaner public image. Despite that, they are still not perfect. So this year I’d like to propose another idea that hopefully has longer staying power: call it the “real food revolution”.
The premise of Veganuary is simple: use the pivotal month of January to make a big change to your diet, your health and the planet’s health by cutting out animal products. Veganuary is a not-for-profit charitable company that provides recipes and motivational emails to help you give up meat and dairy products for just one month, with, ideally, positive effects on your waistline and your carbon footprint. Overall, they do a great job, and there is plenty of evidence to support the efficacy of reducing animal-based foods for our health and our planet’s survival. We now know that agriculture is responsible for about 25% of global heating and the single most important action we as individuals can do to help address the climate crisis is not to give up cars, but to eat less meat.
Continue reading...From London to San Francisco, haute cuisine is joining the food revolution. Michelin-starred chefs explain they’re going meat-free
Alexis Gauthier used to sell 20kg of foie gras a week. Now the chef, whose London-based restaurant became entirely vegan in 2021, only sells a plant-based version. Since becoming vegan, he admits, Gauthier Soho has “lost a lot of customers, sadly”. But he says he has gained even more new diners, all looking for something different and sustainable and prepared to pay the price.
Gauthier is not the only chef to abandon the animal produce traditionally associated with fine dining. While the number of meat-free menus has been burgeoning for some time in lower- and mid-priced restaurants, now a growing number of the world’s top chefs are starting to put plants centre stage.
Continue reading...Going vegan has never been more popular – but some people who try it and then decide to reintroduce animal products face shocking treatment
In 2015, Freya Robinson decided to go vegan. For more than a year, the 28-year-old from East Sussex did not consume a single animal product. Then, in 2016, on a family holiday in Bulgaria, she passed a steak restaurant and something inside her switched. “I walked in and ordered the biggest steak I could have and completely inhaled it,” she says. After finishing it, she ordered another.
For the previous year, Robinson had been suffering from various health problems – low energy levels, brain fog, painful periods and dull skin – which she now believes were the result of her diet. She says her decline was gradual and almost went unnoticed. “Because it’s not an instant depletion, you don’t suddenly feel bad the next day, it’s months down the line. It’s very, very slow.” In just over a year, the balanced plant-based food she cooked daily from scratch, using organic vegetables from the farm she works on, and legumes and nuts vital for protein, had, she felt, taken a toll on her body.
Continue reading...Migraines disappeared after man started diet that included lots of dark-green leafy vegetables, study shows
Health experts are calling for more research into diet and migraines after doctors revealed a patient who had suffered severe and debilitating headaches for more than a decade completely eliminated them after adopting a plant-based diet.
He had tried prescribed medication, yoga and meditation, and cut out potential trigger foods in an effort to reduce the severity and frequency of his severe headaches – but nothing worked. The migraines made it almost impossible to perform his job, he said.
Continue reading...Marco Pierre White is championing Redefine Meat’s products, but do they live up to the hype?
Across four capitals – London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Tel Aviv – a new meat was born, containing precisely no animal. The London champion of the company, Redefine Meat, is the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White. At Mr White’s in Leicester Square, chefs, investors and barbecue and burger connoisseurs – as well as former winners of MasterChef – gathered to taste it.
The tone of the event was set by the offering of a pipette of “blood” – “Doesn’t it taste like blood, though?” asked an excited waiter. Well, yes. But memo from the world of carnivore: blood is more something we put up with than something we actively want to drink.
Continue reading...Mayfair hotel says it respects Daniel Humm’s plant-based vision but it ‘is not the path we wish to follow’
The five-star Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair has lost its chef after it rejected his vision for an all-vegan menu at his restaurant.
Daniel Humm, 45, will leave Davies and Brook at the end of the year after talks with management about transforming the kitchen in his London restaurant at Claridge’s hotel to serve only plant-based dishes.
Continue reading...The 34 outlets catering to students at four universities will offer only a single meat option four days a week
Students at universities in Berlin will from this winter swap currywurst and schnitzel for seeds and pulses, as campus canteens in the German capital make heavy cuts to their meat and fish options.
The 34 canteens and cafes catering to Berlin’s sizeable student population at four different universities will offer from October a menu that is 68% vegan, 28% vegetarian, and 2% fish-based, with a single meat option offered four days a week.
Continue reading...If cellular agriculture is going to improve on the industrial system it is displacing, it needs to grow without passing the cost on to workers, consumers and the environment
Americans will eat about 2bn chicken nuggets this year, give or take a few hundred million. This deep-fried staple is a way of profiting off the bits that are left after the breast, legs and wings are lopped off the 9 billion or so factory-farmed chickens slaughtered in the US every year. Like much else that is ubiquitous in contemporary life, the production of nuggets is controlled by a small group of massive companies that are responsible for a litany of social and ecological harms. And, like many of the commodities produced by this system, they are of dubious quality, cheap, appealing and easy to consume. Nuggets are not even primarily meat, but mostly fat and assorted viscera – including epithelium, bone, nerve and connective tissue – made palatable through ultra-processing. As the political economists Raj Patel and Jason Moore have argued, they are a homogenised, bite-size avatar of how capitalism extracts as much value as possible from human and nonhuman life and labour.
But if chicken nuggets are emblematic of modern capitalism, then they are ripe for disruption. Perhaps their most promising challenger is a radically different sort of meat: edible tissue grown in vitro from animal stem cells, a process called cellular agriculture. The sales pitch for the technology is classic Silicon Valley: unseat an obsolete technology – in this case, animals – and do well by doing good.
Continue reading...If politicians are serious about change, they need to incentivise it, say scientists and writers
The UK business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, is considering a “full vegan diet” to help tackle climate change, saying people will need to make lifestyle changes if the government is to meet its new emissions target of a 78% reduction on 1990 levels by 2035.
But how much difference would it make if everyone turned to a plant-based diet? Experts say that changing the way we eat is necessary for the future of the planet but that government policy is needed alongside this. If politicians are serious about wanting diet changes, they also need to incentivise it, scientists and writers add.
Continue reading...Concerns over carbon emissions and food crises are fuelling a move away from meat consumption as a symbol of wealth
The window of a KFC in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou hosts the image of a familiar mound of golden nuggets. But this overflowing bucket sporting Colonel Sanders’ smiling face is slightly different. The bucket is green and the nuggets within it are completely meat free.
Over the last couple of years, after many years of rising meat consumption by China’s expanding middle classes for whom eating pork every day was a luxurious sign of new financial comforts, the green shoots of a vegan meat revolution have begun to sprout. Although China still consumes 28% of the world’s meat, including half of all pork, and boasts a meat market valued at $86bn (£62bn), plant-based meat substitutes are slowing carving out a place for themselves among a new generation of consumers increasingly alarmed by food crises such as coronavirus and African swine fever.
Continue reading...While China pushes for more industrialised farms, Buddhist monks urge now-sedentary nomads to embrace vegetarianism
Former free-roaming nomads now mostly resettled in rows of sun-baked block houses in Tibet are facing a struggle for their identity, their spiritual and cultural practices – and even their stomachs.
These yak-tending herders have always eaten meat. In addition to the milk, butter and cheese they derived from yaks, meat was a necessity in their harsh lives.
But a movement spurred by Tibetan Buddhist monks in the region over the past two decades has increasingly urged now sedentary nomads to practise vegetarianism, to pay a “life ransom” for the release of animals destined for the slaughterhouse, and to abandon the slaughter of their own animals because they have settled down.
Continue reading...Biggest ever survey finds two-thirds of people think climate change is a global emergency
The biggest ever opinion poll on climate change has found two-thirds of people think it is a “global emergency”.
The survey shows people across the world support climate action and gives politicians a clear mandate to take the major action needed, according to the UN organisation that carried out the poll.
Continue reading...Halfway through Veganuary and running out of ideas? Here are some reader suggestions of comforting but easy meals to add to your repertoire
This cake has passed the vigorous “visiting non-vegan children” test with flying colours. Preheat the oven to 180C. In a bowl, stir together 375g (1½ cups) plain flour, 190g (¾ cup) sugar, 2 tsp baking powder, ¼ tsp salt, 1½ tbsp poppy seeds and 125g (½ cup) almond meal (or finely chopped almonds). Add 190g soy milk, 2 tsp orange extract, the zest of 1 orange, 60g (¼ cup) olive oil and egg substitute equal to 1 egg, then stir together gently until just mixed. Pour into a lightly oiled 20cm (8in) cake pan and bake for 25-30 min, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Make an orange icing using icing sugar and some of the orange’s juice, then spread over the cooled cake. Simon Perry, cyber-sales trainer, New South Wales, Australia
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