The Menu: Make the change — introduce a few vegan tendencies to your eating habits
Virginia O'Gara of My Goodness
When La Daughter was younger, veganism really got her goat. You can’t even roast vegans, she’d sputter, they’re full of vegetables. I could never fathom the root of her animus.
She eats more fruit than a small zoo. Pasta is the only cure for hunger. Sushi is good food. She makes matcha bubble tea, photographs every dish and, despite her industrial-scale nonchalance, her social conscience fires on all cylinders.
So far, so very TikTok, and all symptoms to suggest incipient full blown veganism.
But, a singular creature with an extremely independent mind, she also relishes a good steak, a fine stew. Perhaps, she is actually a future president of the Irish Farmers Association, which melts down every time someone mentions Meatless Monday.
I am a recovering vegetarian, formerly meat-free for more than 15 years. My last professional cooking job was head chef of a vegetarian restaurant where eating was highly politicised. I was surrounded by vegetarians; vegans were a far rarer breed, different. Certain vegans regarded vegetarians as ‘soft’; certain vegetarians harboured secret guilt that they weren’t vegans.
Vegans were vegetarianism’s fundamentalists, hardcore evangelists taking ethical concerns to their ultimate conclusion, forsaking all animal-derived foodstuffs and produce, including dairy, eggs, and honey. They also shunned animal byproducts: clothing, footwear, and products tested on animals. No leather shoes, even de rigueur Doc Martins, no leather jackets. Many vegetarians, while appreciating the logic, found it too extreme; some even suggested vegans were self-hating vegetarians who never liked food in the first place.
In 2006, Britain had an estimated 150,000 vegans; today the figure is 3.5m. Some 6% of the US now identifies as vegan while in China, a staggering 50m people have turned vegan. While vegans of my era were exercised by animal welfare, this millennial-driven surge is about personal health and, above of all, climate change.
A 2018 paper found every individual’s carbon footprint would be reduced by 73% if they stopped eating meat and dairy. Water consumption footprints would be halved and global farmland use could be reduced by 75%; no more evisceration of the Amazon rainforests — planet earth’s ‘lungs’ — to farm beef cattle. The global food system produces one quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases — picture the impact of a vegan world? The biggest conundrum about climate change is we know the solutions; the problem is they require such radical change. Yet, surely, change we must?
Cheese, my one true religion, is the reason I could never turn vegan. But I can choose to eat Irish Farmhouse Cheese, avoiding industrial stuff with a larger carbon footprint and inferior taste. I still want to eat meat but am happy to eat much less and savour it more, ideally premium product bought directly from the farmer or an independent butcher who sources directly from farms.
When the IFA throws a hissy fit about reducing meat or dairy consumption, it is really agitating on behalf of powerful vested interests in agri-biz, a system in which too many Irish farmers are little more than indentured slaves, struggling to survive even as the sector produces massive profits. A farming organisation for all farmers, would instead seek a return to greater diversification on farms, where alongside livestock, we returned to producing more of our own fruit, vegetables, and grain, instead of importing 80% of requirements to a country recently marketed as the ‘Food Island’.
At home, several meat-free nights a week will, on top of the aforementioned environmental benefits, also open a whole new culinary world — cooking meat is very straightforward but I only truly learned to cook when faced with the challenge of producing delicious food without meat or even ‘fake meat’ substitutes (which often have an equally ridiculous carbon footprint and always an inferior flavour to the real thing).
Most of us fear change, especially when it is forced upon us. But change is entirely what you make it, positive or negative, and the best way is to begin with small, slow steps and then build up to becoming … a carnivore with pronounced vegan tendencies?
Considering the thrust of the main column, it might seem bizarre to wish well the Irish team at the World Butcher’s Event — the ‘butcher’s olympics’ — in Paris at the end of the month, where Laois craft butcher Mark Williams, from Laois, pits his carnivorous sextet, including Ger O’Callaghan, from Leap, Co Cork, up against 15 other teams from around the globe. But if you want to eat meat in far more sustainable fashion, then the best place to buy it is from a member outlet of the Independent Craft Butchers of Ireland, whose head honcho, butcher Dave Long, will guide the team.
Tipperary-based wife and husband and wife team Shannon Forrest and chef Declan Malone produce excellent condiments under their Rivesci brand and Cashew Chilli Crush with Irish rapeseed oil is a mighty addition to all manner of simple, quick dishes to add that extra elevation. But what I’ve been very much enjoying is the more discreet yet equally addictive Smoked Chilli Oil, again made with Irish rapeseed oil and a deserved 2024 Blas na hÉireann Supreme Champion award-winner. A mere teaspoon can be utterly transformative, especially good with scrambled eggs and toast and a cracking grace note for cheese on toast.
