Why do vegans love junk food?

Recent research has revealed what many of us suspected: that fake meat is highly processed and contains junk such as exotic emulsifiers, stabilizers, flavor enhancers and artificial colorings, all of which are designed to make them feel, taste and look like the real thing. Often, they are loaded with salt, sugar and fat. Many Americans become vegan (or vegetarian) precisely because they want to cut down on this stuff, but end up with even higher blood pressure and blood sugar levels.

Lots of my friends’ offspring are vegan for “save the planet” reasons — but they subsist on chips, cola, and fake burgers, not even realizing that avocado farming is killing off the rainforest. Facon (“This isn’t Bacon!” — no kidding!), chicken and cheeze substitutes are hellish. Meat-substitute nuggets, given to kids by hessian-clad parents, are packed with garbage.

As a feminist born in 1962, I have been surrounded by vegetarians (and, in more recent decades, vegans), throughout my adult life. While it is both a lefty position and a stereotypical, Greenham Common type “women save the planet” thing — it is also an anti-machismo schtick. One book published in 1990, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory, by Carol J. Adams, argued that behind every forkful of meat is the death of an animal, and that this cloaks the violence inherent to meat-eating, “to protect the conscience of the meat eater and render the idea of individual animals as immaterial to everyone’s selfish desires.”

I got it, but I didn’t buy it. I figured that I was doing enough to make the world a better place, campaigning to end male violence against women and girls. I would occasionally join forces with the animal liberationists by joining their protests outside fur coat shops, in exchange for their attendance at protests outside local porn cinemas or strip joints.

But the main issue for me was that the fake meat and dairy products that were becoming popular by the late 1980s tasted like cardboard with the flavor extracted. The local health food store (staffed by humorless, overly earnest activists) would sell blocks of fake cheese that looked like stuff for grouting bathrooms, and jars of cashew nut butter that needed a drill and a hardhat to get into.

Today, while actual junk food is looked down upon because it is eaten by the working classes, vegan junk food is extremely popular. Everyone knows a diet of sweet, carbonated drinks, chips, and processed food is bad, and parents that take their kids to McDonald’s for a treat are considered slightly more dangerous than Fred and Rosemary West. I heard a middle-class couple (out for what they described as their “special fortnightly treat”), saying that a woman, who came in at least twice a week to feed her kids, was nothing short of a child abuser and should be reported to social services forthwith. One of them remarked, “Can’t she cook soup from scratch?”

Of course, it’s a different matter when upper–middle–class posers eat vegan junk food, which is somehow seen as very on-message and not unhealthy at all. But why on earth would it be? Think about vegan sausage rolls (stuffed with oil, salt and sugar), cakes without dairy that need twice as much sweetener to mask the horrible cotton wool taste, and dreadful vegan “cheese,” packed with something I really don’t want to know about.

The flavor of these products is indistinguishable from that of really cheap, nasty meat, packed with additives and fillers. As soon as I could afford to, I stopped buying factory-farmed animals, cut down my consumption of meat, and only bought free range. It tastes better, and allows me a clear conscience. If anybody suggests jackfruit — with its lack of flavor and weird texture — as a meat substitute, I tell them I’d rather eat a tomato salad. And the “smashed avocado on sourdough” craze, which has ruined high street cafés, has also contributed to deforestation and degradation in central and southern Mexican forests.

But never let it be said that I’m resistant to innovation. Two or three years ago, I was introduced to oat milk by a friend who doesn’t like the taste of dairy. She challenged me to try it, and I was sold. I haven’t had cow’s milk since. Occasional junk food is fine, but if you are going to become vegan, at least learn to cook. I can recommend some divine South Indian recipes. Give me a cauliflower and coconut curry over a tasteless soy burger any day.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.