After Veganuary, what’s the future of food without meat and dairy?

The movement has grown exponentially in the past five years – but, asks Lizzie Rivera, is the way all vegan food is produced as ethical as the eater might think?

Beyond Burger was one of the first alt-meat brands to emerge (Beyond Burger)

Today officially marks the end of Veganuary, a month of leafy greens, avocados and almond milk plus Subway’s meatless meatball marinara, KFC’s Quorn chicken burger and, of course, Gregg’s infamous vegan sausage roll.

So, what comes next? Well, around 50 per cent of those that took part will continue to follow a vegan diet – for a while longer, at least.

The rest will, possibly, turn their dreams of a crispy bacon sandwich into a reality this morning.

But now is also the time to turn our attention to the true impact of our diet choices.

While veganism has many virtues – including undoubtable benefits to animal rights, health and the environment – vegan foods can also have drawbacks because of the way they are produced.

No matter what big brands would have you believe, imported and plastic-wrapped veganism isn’t a silver bullet about to solve our environmental crisis – we need to make informed decisions about our food choices.

Vegan alternatives: Headline issues

Avocados and almond milk are two examples of the unintended consequences of our tendency to become obsessed with certain foods.

Global demand for avocados has long been linked to high use of agricultural chemicals and pine tree forests being cut down. The demand has created unprecedented strain on farmers, especially in Mexico and California.

In a similar vein, it takes around 130 pints of water to produce one glass of almond milk, and yet the majority of almonds are cultivated in drought-stricken California.

Mexico is one of the world’s largest producers of avocados – and it’s feeling the stress (Getty)

Then there’s palm oil, linked to the destruction of rainforests and, most notably, orangutan populations.

More than half of the vegan brands investigated by Ethical Consumer magazine last year use palm oil, including Tivall (owned by Nestlé), The Vegetarian Butcher (owned by Unilever) and Quorn.

Soya is just as problematic. Around a third of the world’s soya is grown in Brazil, where it is linked to the deforestation of the Amazon and the Brazilian Cerrado, the most biodiverse savannah on earth.

Ethical Consumer says current attempts to reduce deforestation and certify responsible soya production are piecemeal. The magazine recommends looking for products made with soya from outside of Brazil. This can prove to be a difficult task as a significant amount of soya-based products do not readily reveal their source.

The KFC vegan chicken burger was launched at the beginning of January (KFC)

The question of genetically modified crops also needs to be considered. Impossible Foods, for example, uses US soya, but it is GM. Studies have shown that GM soya requires more herbicides than non-GM soya, causing greater damage to ecosystems.

And in 2015, the first major global assessment on soils revealed intensive cropping and ploughing – of plants such as soya – lead to 25 to 40 billion tons of topsoil being eroded every year.

More recent research supports their claim that further loss of productive soils will severely damage food production and food security, amplify food-price volatility, and potentially plunge millions of people into hunger and poverty.

Soya as an ingredient is further complicated because of its link to animal agriculture. Most soya from Brazil – around 90 per cent – is used to fatten up intensively reared farm animals. Meat is therefore also inextricably linked to deforestation.

As such, vegan burgers, for example, almost certainly have a lower footprint than meat equivalents. While a vegan product may not compare well on nutrition to a factory-farmed product, corporate development and communications manager at Quorn Foods, Tess Kelly, believes the switch is important.

She says: “We need to normalise some of these new dietary patterns because they’re valid and they’re doing an immense amount of good.

“The KFC vegan burger is a great example of something that maybe has been seen as controversial but has really helped to leverage the behavioural change we all need to address this climate emergency.”

The future of food

The UK launched more plant-based products than any other nation in 2018 and last year nearly a quarter of all food launches were labelled vegan, according to Mintel reports.

The more mainstream veganism becomes, the more the movement is appealing to investors and corporations, some of whom also have their hand in animal and unsustainable agriculture. This poses another problem for people who are choosing vegan foods for ethical reasons and are unknowingly lining the pockets of people and companies that don’t share their ethics.

To make palm oil, huge swathes of rainforests are cleared and chopped down – like this one in Bawa, Indonesia (EPA)

At last month’s Oxford Real Farming Conference, the debate between real and processed foods took centre stage, with journalists George Monbiot and Joanna Blythman presenting very different visions for the future of food.

George Monbiot, a vegan, began by comparing farmers to typewriters in the age of computers. As he sets out in his Channel 4 documentary Apocalypse Cow, there is no place for animals in our diets when we are evolving the technology to create food from microbes in the air or lab-grown meat.

His futuristic vision involves plant-based food created in carbon-neutral factories. It is shipped across the globe while farmland is rewilded and nature is left to its own devices.

For Joanna Blythman, this future of fake foods “demands our subservience rather than our participation”, with power and profits inevitably remaining in the hands of relatively few food giants.

She wants to see more support for independent farmers and a resurgence of “whole” unprocessed foods.

Blythman also charts the rise in diabetes and obesity alongside a rise in processed foods, and argues that a lot of vegan foods are not always as healthy as they appear to be.

She says: “A nutritionally deficient diet is to me a non-starter.”

Proteins extracted from pea and wheat or found in jackfruit tend to be a lot lower in complete proteins, for example, and don’t contain all our essential amino acids. Milk alternatives are largely water and have to be fortified with vitamins. Plus, processed vegan foods can be very high in salt.

Discovering a better veganism

So, what is the path towards a more ethical, sustainable and healthier veganism?

“We need to make sure people are empowered with the right information,” says Quorn’s Kelly.

“How we help people understand the nutritional and environmental choices of their food is absolutely critical and it’s going to need to be a collaborative effort.”

Quorn has been working with the Carbon Trust for the past 10 years and is beginning to publicly publish the carbon footprint of each of its products.

But this is just one metric to take into consideration. It doesn’t tell the whole story of a product’s impact on people and the planet’s ecosystem as a whole.

Carbon reporting is complex and, with lots of different numbers flying around, can be confusing for consumers wanting to do the “right” thing. A recent report ranks coffee, palm oil and olive oil as having higher greenhouse gas emissions than eggs, milk and wild fish, for example – so what’s an environmentally conscious eater to do?

While vegan alternatives can’t be discounted as a positive and tasty step, it’s probably wise to read the small print. Aside from that, the simplest way to eat in line with your values is to eat more “whole” foods – vegetables, fruit, nuts, grains, and pulses – especially if they’re organically grown and in season.