The Quiet Revolution In Food…
There’s a revolution happening so quietly that you might have missed it, but it bears all the characteristics of a major trend waiting in the wings, primed and ready to burst out into the mainstream. The trouble is, it’s a bit like the Ugly Duckling in Andersen’s tale – it still has a few grey tail feathers that are holding it back.
Vegetarianism (and it’s close sibling, Veganism) isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, but attitudes to them are now starting to evolve rapidly. For decades, proponents of meat-free diets feel they have existed on the periphery of society, their products tucked away at the back of health food stores and their image inextricably tied to anti-vivisection lobbying and activism, hunt saboteuring and animal rights activism … but a new era of vegetarianism is emerging.
As usual with major shifts in cultural perception, there isn’t a single factor that’s driving this, but lots of disparate drivers that are collectively creating a groundswell that’s lifting ‘meat-free’ into the mainstream. Some of these are new and some have been around for a while, but they include: the spiralling price of meat; public (and media) concerns about food safety and the way cheap meat is produced on industrial scales; increasing interest in food and cooking as a leisure activity rather than just a way to survive, which in turn is opening our eyes to new tastes, flavours and textures; the (v) option on restaurant menus often being chosen as the ‘light’ option; the globalisation of demand for animal protein; increasing lack of skill amongst younger people in cooking meat (and fish in particular)… the list goes on.
The other push-factor in all of this is coming from plant-based food producers, who have woken up to the idea that people won’t simply buy their products for idealogical reasons, but also want to be treated as consumers … they want to be excited by food, inspired by the potential that plant-based options have to delight them and excite their senses. And manufacturers are responding, with products, concepts and packaging that recognises this. The comment from one visitor to this year’s VegFest, held at Kensington Olympia recently, was that it felt like vegetarian and vegan products had come out of the closet – they seemed newly proud of what they were and had found new language to describe themselves … “Flavourtarian, not vegetarian”, “wholesome, delicious and sustainable”, “rawlicious”.
The revolution may just be getting going, but it’s increasingly clear that for meat-free to become mainstream it needs to further shift the emphasis away from simply leading with ‘meat-free’ messaging to celebrating the benefits of plant-based alternatives, and delighting in delivering tastes and experience that mainstream consumers desire for what they are (rather than what they’re not). The battle for animal rights and welfare isn’t over, but changing consumer attitudes to meat may be helped through making plant-based alternatives more exciting and relevant.
*This blog post was written in 2014 and is included here to help track the ways in which the market (and the wider consumer and social context) has evolved over the past 10 years