City Council Goes Vegan, Hardly Anyone Eats Meal and Guests Go Hungry: 'Significant Food Waste'
Well, here’s a surprise: People don’t like vegan food. Yes, even woke people.
Take the City Council of Cambridge in England. Yes, a university town — and one of the two in the U.K. that everyone knows about, so you better believe it’s bewoked.
According to The Times of London, the council voted last year to start phasing out meat and dairy dishes at its events to avert that dastardly “climate crisis,” instead offering vegan alternatives. The city plans to fully phase out meat and dairy at its events by 2026.
Well, the proof of the tofu pudding is in the eating, and this went — predictably.
“At the first civic event since the vote, a council report has revealed the vegan menu went down so badly that almost all of the food remained uneaten and had to be thrown away causing ‘significant food waste,'” The Times reported Monday.
“It noted that only one in ten attendees tried the vegan options and some guests were left hungry because there was ‘an insufficient amount of food available that people wanted to eat.'”
And those who ate the vegan food told the council they felt “under pressure to eat what they wouldn’t normally choose” due to posters around the dishes with scare statistics about carbon emissions from beef and lamb production.
The event was for Remembrance Sunday — a U.K. commemoration of those who served in the two World Wars, held the second Sunday in November.
The council spent about $717 to serve 80 guests sandwiches and cakes, half-vegan, half-normal-people food.
While the report claimed the vegan food looked “very fresh, good quality and visually appealing,” it said there was “extremely low uptake of plant-based food options: under 10 per cent of people tried these options whilst the vegetarian options and meat/dairy options were all eaten.”
“The low uptake of the plant-based options resulted in an insufficient amount of food available at the event that people wanted to eat,” the report continued. “Unfortunately the leftover plant-based food had to be disposed of.”
Environmentalism! Saving the planet! Cut those greenhouse gases! Thank ye heavens, Greta Thunberg can breathe a bit easier because Cambridge wasted a few hundred bucks on vegan food nobody wanted to eat except to virtue-signal.
So, what’s Cambridge going to do? Cut the amount of vegan food at the next event to only 25 percent — and still go fully vegan by 2026, because in three years this stuff will all seem less gross to us.
“We cannot force people to eat food they do not want to eat, the task [for] us is to make it so good people want to eat it without being told,” said Richard Swift, a Labour Party council member.
However, Green Party member Hannah Copley vigorously disagrees; at a meeting earlier in January, she said the council had intentionally set the vegan food “up to fail” by “othering” the cuisine.
People eat vegan alternatives to regular dishes because they have moral qualms with consuming animal products, however, so the whole point is the “othering” of the cuisine. It’s to force the left’s values upon your taste buds. Of course that’s “othering” a food, to use Copley’s preposterous terminology. How could it not be?
And that’s why these attempts to force us to all eat plant-based meat substitutes are non-starters.
As The New York Times noted in an article in November, even global industry behemoth Beyond Meat — which produces fake animal flesh for the likes of Carl’s Jr., Starbucks and Subway — had seen its stock lose 83 percent over the course of the past year as growth has remained flat.
A popular vegan restaurant southwest of London made worldwide headlines last year, too, when it announced that vegan food simply wasn’t popular enough to be economically sustainable — and that it was putting meat and dairy items on the menu as well.
“The only other option was to close permanently,” the restaurateurs behind the Mango Tree in Taunton wrote in a viral Facebook post last year. “Ethics extend to the jobs and welfare of our wonderful team, to whom we owe a great deal, and another chance.”
Yes, I’m sure there’s a market for vegan food. It just isn’t for all of us. In fact, most of us.
As Justin Cook, the U.S. consumer products research leader at Deloitte, told The New York Times, while plant-based meat substitutes were all the rage for a while, we may have found the plateau in terms of the number of people willing to give them a try.
“The category had been growing at double-digit for a long time and was expected to continue, but what we saw this year is that the number of consumers who were buying it did not increase,” he said.
Well, the number willing to consume it had better increase in a hurry in Cambridge.
Otherwise, nobody’s going to be eating a thing at city events come 2026 — no matter how much of it the city buys and ends up throwing away.
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