The great carniwars

As January — the month of penitence and tax returns — grinds towards its close, it would be foolish to imagine we can go back to a life of thoughtlessly eating, drinking and making merry. Dry January might give way to Wet February, as grateful drinkers furtively crack open the rioja, but the intense passions aroused by Veganuary now seem set to continue all year round.

Veganism — the shunning of meat, fish and all dairy products — was once regarded as a harmless but inconvenient hobby. Vegans got used to the mild panic they triggered at other people’s houses if the host hadn’t been pre-warned: the alarmed mouthing of ‘They’re vegan’ and the desperate rooting in the fridge for something, anything. They were humble and apologetic as they tucked into odd, hastily composed little meals of oven chips, hummus and those mushrooms found at the back of the vegetable drawer.

Back then, carnivores and herbivores rubbed along peaceably enough on the UK dietary savannah, with the carnivores, secure in their status as the meat-eating majority, often clumsily accommodating the herbivores’ dietary requirements while reserving the right to bore them with ‘humorous’ barbs about Hitler being a vegetarian. Now tension is growing between the two camps, with each thinking the worst of the other. It’s like Brexit — only with knives and forks.

The first decisive volley in the Food Wars was fired last autumn when the former Waitrose Food editor William Sitwell responded to a pitch from Selene Nelson, a vegan food writer, in a style that was perhaps meant to be comic but came across as oddly snippy: ‘How about a series on killing vegans, one by one? Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy?’ He followed it with another email, saying: ‘I like the idea of a column called The Honest Vegan; a millennial’s diary of earnest endeavour and bacon sandwiches…’