[The] number of vegans in the United States jumped from 1 percent in 2014 to 6 percent in 2017, while an estimated one in three Americans now identify as “flexitarians,” with potentially even more embracing a “reducetarian” lifestyle — the growing number of vegan dining options at chain restaurants makes perfect sense.
Come on, come all.
Bags of white powder seized as part of a “huge drugs bust” at London’s Gatwick Airport actually contained vegan cake ingredients, the British Transport Police said.
This is my favorite kind of vegan story. I, too, am addicted to cake.
Wild images. I want to see more of this.
A perfect little photo.
And I loved this comment from Reddit user Ibar-Twigs in the comment section:
When I was a kid I used to love going to this woodland nearby (urban UK so this was a big deal). There was a wildlife trust clubhouse/cafe with a bunch of British wildlife exhibits telling you about local birds and such. The last exhibit was a sort of fairy door with a sign on it saying “Open if you dare and see the world’s most dangerous animal” or something along those lines. Open up the door and behold… A mirror. That really stuck with me and my young, impressionable mind.
Via Kottke:
A nudge is:
“any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives”
Essentially, making slightly difficult things easier.
I think vegan food is the same way, and why it’s been so exciting to go to restaurants that offer delicious options. It’s all about ease of access.
You can see it’s effect here with bike lanes in Washington, DC:
The researchers interviewed 2,283 cyclists using the bike lanes and found out that nearly ten percent of the users would have taken another mode of transportation if the bike lane hadn’t existed and around one percent of the interviewed said they would not have taken the trip at all. (NATCO)
This is why we must elect officials to government that give programs like these an opportunity. They could change how we live our lives, whether traveling or eating, and each step is a step in the right direction.
From Mike Isaac at the NYTimes:
At 9:30 on most weeknights, Ricky Lopez, the head chef and owner of Top Round Roast Beef in San Francisco, stacks up dozens of hot beef sandwiches and sides of curly fries to serve hungry diners.
He also breads chicken cutlets for another of his restaurants, Red Ribbon Fried Chicken. He flips beef patties on the grill for a third, TR Burgers and Wings. And he mixes frozen custard for a dessert shop he runs, Ice Cream Custard.
Of Mr. Lopez’s four operations, three are “virtual restaurants” with no physical storefronts, tables or chairs. They exist only inside a mobile app, Uber Eats, the on-demand meal delivery service owned by Uber.
I think this is the future. Pizza and Chinese food opened the door to Americans experiencing delivery, and now everyone is hopping in.
Food delivery apps like Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub are starting to reshape the $863 billion American restaurant industry. As more people order food to eat at home, and as delivery becomes faster and more convenient, the apps are changing the very essence of what it means to operate a restaurant.
[…]
The shift has popularized two types of digital culinary establishments. One is “virtual restaurants,” which are attached to real-life restaurants like Mr. Lopez’s Top Round but make different cuisines specifically for the delivery apps. The other is “ghost kitchens,” which have no retail presence and essentially serve as a meal preparation hub for delivery orders.
As cities get denser and costs rise, I wonder if participating in delivery will be a necessity for every restaurant that isn’t 30 dollars a plate.
Yet even as delivery apps create new kinds of restaurants, they are hurting some traditional establishments, which already contend with high operating expenses and brutal competition. Restaurants that use delivery apps like Uber Eats and Grubhub pay commissions of 15 percent to as much as 30 percent on every order. While digital establishments save on overhead, small independent eateries with narrow profit margins can ill afford those fees.
I could see a future where this leads to restaurants unionizing.
After he offered delivery through the apps in 2016, his business teetered. Two of his five pizzerias, which together had generated annual profits of $50,000 to $100,000, lost as much as $40,000 a year as customers who had ordered directly from Escape From New York switched to the apps. That forced Mr. Geffner to pay the commissions.
“We saw a direct correlation between the delivery services and the reduction of our income,” Mr. Geffner said. “It was like death by a thousand cuts.”
The way technology is approaching food obviously has room for lots of improvement. I’m sure we’ll be talking a lot more about this in the next decade—for better or worse.
Ethan Brown being interviewed by Nilay Patel (in bold):
You are describing how to replace meat. Making it so that your expectations of cooking and eating a Beyond Meat Burger are exactly the same as your expectations of a hamburger patty. Is that the right goal? Is it that people need hamburgers that are exactly like hamburgers of the past or is it we have to change our food supply?
My mother asks me that question a lot. She’s like “Why are you so focused on perfectly replicating animal protein? Why don’t you just build a new source of protein for the front of the plate that people get really excited about?” I think we ought to earn that right. We have to prove that we can do this because the only thing that I know with absolute certainty about the consumer is that the consumer loves meat. You know most of us do. Around 94 percent of the population here in United States. And so that’s a really clear target for me.
I often have conversations with non-vegans who ask why vegan products try to replicate non-vegan foods. The short and simple is because that’s the easiest way to become part of people’s lives, in ways they’re already familiar and have a base-level expectation. Anything that’s around 1:1 for replacing parts of a recipe is the ideal product for most of America.
It’s hard enough to get people to try a slight variation in something they’re already familiar with. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to get most of America to purchase a new protein that they’ve never heard of before.
Beyond is doing the right thing.
From Steve Cuozzo:
Beware the Vegan-in-Chief.
The 2020 Democratic presidential pool includes not one, but two, meatless wonders.Booker, at least, says that he would never try to force his animal-free diet regimen down America’s throat.[…]
“Everybody should eat what they want to . . . The last thing we want is government telling us what to eat,” the Democratic senator from New Jersey said in February.
But I’m scared. The 97% of Americans who aren’t vegan (according to a 2018 Gallup poll) should be, too.Who’s Booker kidding that he or Gabbard wouldn’t turn the Land of the Free into the Land of Chia Seeds?
A gentle reminder for when you meet someone like Steve Cuozzo out in the wild, please remind them that 1 in 4 deaths in America come from heart disease.
From Alex Trembath at OneZero:
I can’t help but notice that when fake meat was the purview of food utopians and visionary chefs, thought leaders were enthusiastically in favor of it. But as soon as fake meat hit the plastic trays at Burger King, they were fretting about how over-processed it was.
[…]
I believe that the problem with fake meat isn’t so much that it is ultra-processed as that it is mass produced. The conflation of exclusivity and goodness is actually endemic to large swaths of food culture. “Myths about superior taste and nutrition,” food scholar S. Margot Finn observed […], “mostly help the middle classes distance themselves from the poor.”
I think people also make a natural connection between exclusivity and quality because the journey to get to the place allows for better storytelling and a natural inclination to making that journey quote-unquote worth it.
In his book The Wizard and the Prophet, historian Charles Mann identifies the size and scale of a technological systems, not the technology itself, as the root of a certain kind of environmental opposition.
I understand this though. Look at Monsanto. It’s easy to not trust any food company who has that much skin in the game.
Obviously base classism doesn’t sell, and any food systems capable of feeding over seven billion people are going to be large-scale in some degree. That’s why critics of fake meat and other food reformers rely on vague epithets like “processed.” Food processing, after all, is a category so wide as to defy useful definition.
[…]
Certainly, food products loaded with excess sugar, sodium, preservatives, saturated fat, and exotic ingredients could more easily be labelled “ultra-processed” than foods that contain, well, lower portions of those ingredients. But that’s exactly the problem. It’s not clear to me, nor, seemingly, anyone else, where to draw the line between unprocessed and processed foods.
I do think we need to have a conversation about “processed” foods, but we need a spectrum to help us understand it’s relation as a net-positive or net-negative from the standard that it’s (often) replacing.
And the choice, ultimately, isn’t between large-scale mass-produced and small-scale non-mass-produced. It is between mass production that is more sustainable, healthier, and more humane — and mass production that is less so.
Bingo.
But when we find fault with a clearly beneficial innovation slotting neatly into modern food systems, perhaps the problem isn’t with the system, but with our own idealized vision for what an equitable, healthy, appealing food system should look like. Surely there are excesses and failures with the status quo, in the arenas of nutrition, corporate governance, worker rights, treatment of animals, and more. But while we work to actively address those issues, we might consider whether the systems we have designed over generations to feed billions of humans aren’t doing a relatively good job at that task already. After all, global hunger and undernourishment have been trending downward for decades, an achievement we should surely take into account.
From Gary He for Eater:
The first weekend of the 2019 Iowa State Fair had it all: a butter cow, a craft beer tent, mutton bustin’, a Slipknot museum, and 20 candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination. Iowa is the home of the first nominating contests that will eventually determine the nominee from both parties, and the food-on-a-stick bonanza is the stage on which candidates vie for the hearts of Iowa voters and attention of the news media.
I’m not sure why I found these photos so funny. The headline really nails it. And I’m happy to hear the Iowa State Fair had some vegan options.
Cory Booker, the New Jersey senator who is famously vegan, tracked down a fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a stick. “Can we settle the Democratic primary by how many of these you can eat?” he said. “I think I could take the field.”
I’d seen a few things online mention that this would be a tough spot for Cory Booker with the turkey legs and corn dog traditions, and—as a vegan—I’ve been in the same barren situation: scant options and a lot of meat. What he found sounds good to me though.
I can’t imagine it’ll be a large part of this election, though it does make me wonder if a candidate’s diet could play a role in electability the way religion used to. (Think: JFK and Catholicism.) Now, many people are as strict with their diets as middle America has been with its religion.