Suzanne Harrington: Vegans and The Great British Bake Off

I don’t know about you, but normally I avoid telly. Can’t bear it, with its stupid people and its stupid programmes, its mindless jibber-jabber and shouty ads. I only ever watch football – muting the half-time hot air - or the occasional documentary about weirdos.

There is however one glorious exception – The Great British Bake Off. For 10 weeks every autumn, our household pivots on protracted emoting over combinations of sugar, fat and flour in a tent. Tuesday evenings become temporarily sacred, as we perch on the sofa, tea and factory biscuits at the ready, and watch sponge rising, riveted. We root for and bond with the bakers, even the annoying ones, because we love them all. How could you not?

If you’re a vegan is how. Not all vegans, but the kind of vegans who get stuck into other vegans and call them out for not being vegan enough. Some poor teenage baker has already had to delete her Facebook page because of two things: she is the Bake Off’s first vegan contestant, and she has a horse called Winnie. These two things, according to the Taliban end of veganism, are incompatible. You cannot be vegan and ride horses. She has been trolled before she ever gets to ice a sticky bun.

Turns out this 19-year-old has been rounded upon by sanctimonious hair-splitters online who have told her she must refer to herself as plant-based but not vegan, because vegans don’t ride. Actually, they do. You should see me every Friday, galumphing along the highways, having bribed my friend’s carthorse first with a massage and pedicure, followed by apples and horse muesli and a nice mud bath afterwards in his giant field. I’d happily swap lives with him.

What is not vegan is greyhound racing, turning racehorses into tins of dog food, squirting cosmetics into bunnies’ eyes, hunting, shooting, fishing, or making any animal suffer for any reason whatsoever. Like factory farming them, killing them, eating them, nicking their milk. Absolutely not vegan. But having a horse called Winnie whom you love and take care of?

Come on, Taliban vegans. Stop it now. While the Bake Off Horsegate may well be a storm in a media cup, it does nothing to advance the idea that for the sake of the planet, the animals and ourselves, we need to stop eating them and mistreating them. But to lump soppy horse lovers like Winnie’s owner in the same category as factory farmers or bullfighters or whatever just alienates everyone else. And it’s not like we vegans are that popular in the first place – we seem to make people defensive just by existing. But that’s another story.

So, vegan horse-riding baker, go storm the Bake Off tent with your butterless eggless recipes. Vegan baking is a superpower.

Those of us who love baking, love horses, and love all animals will be eagerly taking notes; sugar and spice and all things nice, although hopefully not Type 2 diabetes by week nine.