Quick! The apocalypse is coming. Have you got the essentials? First aid kit? Torch? Enough toilet roll to build a pyramid? (It is, after all, going to be pretty scary.) Now… did you remember the vegan cheese?
Experts have made a case that in the event of the End of Days, it would be important for such dietary needs to be taken into consideration. “In psychological shock, they need to have things they are familiar with and comfortable with,” said Professor Tim Lang of the Centre for Food Policy at City, St George’s, University of London. “They [the population] have just experienced new things – explosions, energy outages – and you don’t want… vegetarians and vegans to have to eat meat.”
The reaction was… not mixed. LBC got involved, as did the readership of some newspapers. “If there’s a crisis, there’s no room for lifestyle choices,” said one commenter. “In an actual apocalypse, their lifestyle choices would be out of the window, all of these so-called vegans would be munching on stray dogs and cats,” said another.
But you know what, Professor Lang is absolutely right.
I’m not going to deny that it would be hard for a vegan to stick to pulses when the only thing on offer is something that no longer has one. We are absolutely drawn to the idea that the moment it all goes a bit Cormac McCarthy, the first thing we will do is switch ourselves on to a diet of all sorts of exotic animal proteins.
Pop culture is terrific at creating visceral scenes of desperate people driven to eat all sorts as society breaks down: dogs (High Rise); turtles, possums and rattlesnakes (The Walking Dead); and Bonnie Langford (that weird episode of Doctor Who based on High Rise).
And we know from far bleaker times how hunger will very much drive people to seize on anything they can. Famously, during the Paris siege of 1870, the zoo was raided and virtually everything within – including two elephants named Castor and Pollux – ended up on the Christmas Day menu.
In the UK of 2025, we have more or less forgotten what real hunger is like, and we have not had to endure a food supply catastrophe. Hopefully, we never will, and the KFC crisis of 2018, when people bombarded police phone lines in response to local stores running out of stock, will remain the worst it gets.
Now, menu cards on tables: I’m vegetarian, but I could never be vegan. For some reason, some people get very upset about provisions being made for vegans. I remember Piers Morgan being performatively sick on live television after eating a vegan sausage roll, later tweeting, “Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns” – as if someone had made him eat it.
Perhaps it’s that cliche: “How do you know someone is a vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you”. But even this needs some interrogation. I believe it’s true in most cases, but what is rarely thought about is why it’s true. And I think, cheeringly, it’s tied to Britishness.
See, for the most part on these isles, what’s the first thing we do if we meet someone new and we’re inclined to be hospitable? We offer them a cup of tea. And then the follow-up question: do they want milk? And at that point, any animal product-based ethical concerns will naturally make their way into the conversation. It’s simply natural on an island where milk plays a key role in icebreaking. And that’s where the stereotype comes from.
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I find this sort of thing fascinating. I remember reading once that even George Orwell – who once wrote that “we are more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil” – conceded that some stereotypes are true, and that, for example, Italians could not have a conversation without using their hands. But why should that be the case?
Well, when you look into it, it’s because Italy is a country of many dialects, some of which differ greatly. It could be difficult for people, even when separated only by a few miles of idyllic vineyard, to understand each other’s words. Hand gestures, therefore, worked as a language that could be comprehended all the way from Monza to Marsala.
Which brings us back to the post-apocalyptic vegan, and why it is quite right that they are provided for. Because, what is it that distinguishes us from the animals we use and consume? Our choices.
However, in the event of any true catastrophe, most of those things that we choose to define us will go. You might love a particular football club with all your heart, but it will be hard to see much point in that when the fixture list is indefinitely cancelled, for example.
However savage and bleak things get, being able to maintain our ability to choose what we put into our stomachs is fundamental. No longer giving a vegan a chance to remain so would strip them of something that is essential to them at a time when that would be more important to them than ever.
So I’m going to stick up for my more hardcore animal lovers. Let’s try and make sure there is a bit of tofu put aside for the end times. Making provision would allow people to still have the choice to be who they are, and in so doing, to remain human.
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