Why vegan food isn't always the most sustainable or healthy choice in 2022
Not so long ago buying a cup of coffee meant two choices: with milk or without. Now the barista reels off a list of options that sounds more like the contents of my kitchen store cupboard: will that be soy, oat, coconut, pea, rice, cashew or almond in your americano?
Supermarkets have whole aisles of meat and dairy-free alternatives, and it’s no wonder. Unilever, the manufacturing giant that produces Hellmann’s mayonnaise (with vegan options available), believes the global plant-based meat market alone will be worth worth $35.4bn by 2027.
It’s moving upmarket, too: east London’s vegan cheesemonger La Fauxmagerie is doing a roaring trade in non-dairy “cheeze”, with names like Fetamorphosis, Masquephoney and Bluffala, and prices starting at about a fiver for a 100g slice. Rudy’s Vegan Butchers in Islington has plant-based versions of pastrami, pork ribs, black pudding and turkey slices and opened a branch in Selfridges on Oxford Street in 2021.
In many ways, this boom seems like a good thing, offering more choice for our long-term vegan friends, but also the opportunity for us omnivores to move effortlessly to a less animal-dependent diet.
There are compelling arguments that intensively farming animals is bad for the planet, and that we should be eating less meat and dairy if we are to combat global warming. A special report on climate change, released in 2019 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), includes a policy recommendation to reduce meat consumption.
Then there are health arguments. Meat and dairy are undeniably good sources of protein and other nutrients, but the NHS recommends cutting down on red meat and processed meat, because of the connection with bowel cancer. Saturated fat, abundant in some meat and cheese, is also linked to cardiovascular disease.
If you're looking to cut down on your intake of animal products as part of your meals, here are some tips on how to move towards a more eco-friendly diet.
How to eat more sustainably in 2022
Is vegan food the best option?
Omnivores often complain that plant-based substitutes taste disgusting and amount to heavily processed Franken-food – pale imitations of the real thing.
And, yes, you’ll be disappointed if you expect a seitan fillet to taste the same as a well hung rib of beef. But there are some impressive versions. I’ve had a vegan “sausage burger” made by Moving Mountains (available in Sainsbury’s and Waitrose) that tastes at least as good as a cheap sausage. I’d choose that burger over one made from a poorly farmed animal.
But leaving aside the taste – after all, sales suggest plenty of people do like them – are the new vegan substitutes really the answer to our health and climate woes, especially when most – soy, jackfruit, coconut – have to be imported? Or are we being sold a (soy-based, lab-grown, cruelty-free) turkey?
In terms of our bodies, the nub of the problem was summed up by Dr Małgorzata Desmond of University College London and the Children’s Memorial Health Institute, Warsaw, when she said: “Just eating plant-based diets is no guarantee of health, we still need to select healthy foods.”
This is echoed by Andrea Rymer, a dietician at the Vegan Society, “We already consume too much salt and saturated fat,” she says. “And not enough fruit and vegetables. Some of this is coming through into the vegan food industry and a lot of ultra processed foods (UPFs) are being produced.”
UPFs, she adds, “don’t hold a high nutritional value, and a lot can contain too much fat, too much salt and a lot of free sugars”. Better sources of vegan protein, she says, include beans, chickpeas, nuts, lentils, hemp seeds and soy protein such as tofu. But vegans who have chosen the diet for ethical or climate reasons, and still enjoy the taste and texture of meat dairy, will find plant-based copies plug the gap.
Gunter Kuhnle, professor of food and nutritional sciences at the University of Reading, is more focused on nutritional balance than levels of processing. “The problem is that when something becomes popular, a fashion, people don’t think about it properly. A lot of people believe that if you can buy something, it is safe – people eat replacement products without checking the differences.” Milk is a case in point.
“Drinking soy milk is not the same as drinking cow’s milk – if you’re reliant on milk for most of your calcium or protein and switch to a plant-based drink, you could run into problems. The fatty acid content is different, and it contains isoflavins that can interfere with your hormone system, and can be an issue for people with thyroid problems.”
It is abundantly clear that animal farming has an environmental cost, as does feeding the globe’s burgeoning population. But not all animal farming is equal, says Richard Young, policy director of the Sustainable Food Trust and a pasture-fed cattle farmer.
He points out that animals which eat exclusively grass, which grows abundantly in the UK, need no imported soy or grain. And crucially, he says, figures for methane emissions from animals, blamed as a contributor to global warming, “are inflated, because unlike carbon dioxide which stays in the atmosphere permanently, methane breaks down in 10 years”.
Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at the University of Oxford, agrees that “we have been overestimating the damage done by steady methane emissions by a factor of three to four”. But he is measured about the value of pasture rearing cattle, pointing out that leaving aside the animal welfare issues, methane from indoor-reared animals is more feasible to capture and control.
Steady emissions of methane are not a concern, but the significant and worrying rise in methane emissions globally is very worrying, he says. Mostly, though, this is thought to be due not to animal farming but to “unconventional gas extraction – fracking.”
While there is a strong argument for redistributing meat and dairy consumption, so we guzzle less in the developed world and more goes to protein-deprived populations, if we were to eliminate altogether world farming of ruminants – methane-producing sheep, goats and cows – then he estimates this would shave just 0.1 per cent from total global temperature inflation, estimated to hit 1.5C by 2050.
It’s relatively insignificant compared with the damage done by CO2 from burning fossil fuels. As Allen says: “We have all these debates about going vegan, meanwhile fossil fuel emissions are driving up global temperatures by 0.2C a decade.”
It’s complicated, but one thing is clear: vegan food is here to stay, and we need to be asking more questions, whether it’s about the burger in our bun or the nut milk in our cappuccino. Although the queue in the coffee shop may not thank you.
An omnivore’s guide to a meat-free diet
Tofu
Tofu has a long history in Asian cookery. It’s made by grinding soy beans with water to make milk, and then coagulating the milk either with gypsum (calcium sulphate) or magnesium chloride. It’s possible to make at home, with no more equipment than a liquidiser.
Environmental concerns
Soy production has surged over the past 70 years, increasing 15-fold. Large-scale intensive soy farming is responsible for the destruction of swathes of South American rainforest and savannah. However, 80 per cent of the world’s soy harvest is used for animal feed, so meat eaters bear a heavy responsibility, though only about 35 per cent of what is imported into the UK is destined for feed bins. Widespread farming of genetically modified soy is also a concern for environmentalists.
Health credentials
A typical, firm tofu has 1.2g saturated fat per 100g, much less than a rump steak (5g) but more than a skinless chicken breast (0.5g). Soy contains all the nine amino acids necessary to form a complete protein, like meat and dairy, but has lower levels of one of the amino acids.
Seitan
Pronounced “say-tan”, this is wheat gluten, which has been used for centuries in Asia as a meat substitute. It is made by combining flour, yeast and water, resting the mixture and then washing it to remove the starch until only a gluten mass remains, which is then baked or steamed to solidify it.
You can make it at home (it’s a good science experiment with kids), but results tend to be spongy. Commercial versions used in meat analogues can have a stranded texture, spookily like chicken breast. Manufacturers are not forthcoming about how they achieve this result, but it may be to do with the acid/alkali level in the process.
Environmental concerns
Large-scale wheat farming is a monoculture, not providing biodiversity, and heavy use of nitrogen fertilisers can result in the release of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than CO2.
Health credentials
Seitan contains no fat or fibre, and a fair amount of protein (about 20g per 100g, compared with chicken’s 30g), but unlike meat and dairy it isn’t a complete protein. Eating it with beans will complete the protein.
Plant-based milk alternatives
Methods for making plant-based milk alternatives vary according to the base product, be it rice, nut, oat or soy, but generally involve using super-powered blenders to purée it with water.
Cow’s milk contains lactose, a kind of sugar, so sweeteners are often added. If the ingredients list includes rice but not sugar, the rice may have been fermented. This breaks down the carbohydrate into maltose, another kind of sugar, but one that doesn’t need listing.
Environmental concerns
Concerns include farming methods, with soy production (see tofu), and irrigation of almond orchards in California, the world’s biggest producer, considered to be a contributory factor in the state’s drought issue. A report by Which? in 2021 showed cow’s milk to be the worst offender in terms of carbon emissions, although European cow’s milk scored better than the worldwide average.
For water, both almond and rice milk were bigger users than European milk, with soy and oat the lowest. But much depends on the source: don’t assume that the almonds in the milk are Californian – Rude Health sources its almonds from Sicily, with a far lower water footprint.
Health credentials
Cow’s milk has more protein than any of the plant-based milk alternatives, at about 4g per 100ml. The only ones that come close are soy and the higher protein pea milks, at about 3.3g (Alpro produce a protein boosted soy milk at 5g). Calcium levels are low unless the substitute is fortified, but plant milks win out on saturated fat – all significantly less than cow’s milk. Soy milk contains high levels of plant oestrogen, which may tinker with our bodies’ hormone levels.
Meat 'analogues'
How these are made remains a mystery to most consumers, with the vegan “meat” manufacturers like Beyond Meat and the Mighty Mushrooms Co tight-lipped on the subject. Most qualify as Ultra Processed Food, although Prof Kuhnle insists that this is “a red herring” and we should focus on nutrition levels instead. “The processes don’t sound appetising, but then neither are slaughterhouses,” he says.
Beyond Meat’s main ingredients are water, pea protein, rapeseed oil and coconut oil, along with stabilisers and emulsifiers. It says: “Using heating, cooling and pressure, we create the fibrous texture of meat from plant-based proteins.
Then, we mix in fats, minerals, fruit and vegetable-based colours, natural flavours, and carbohydrates to replicate the appearance, juiciness, and flavour of meat.” Peter Corcoran of the Mighty Mushrooms Co, will only say that the products in the range contain at least 75 per cent mushrooms along with stabilisers and “natural flavourings”.
Health credentials
Check the nutrition labels, paying special attention to salt levels. Don’t assume the product has more protein or less saturated fat than meat.
Environmental concerns
Depends upon the ingredients, but there will be a cost to the manufacturing process. Choose products that are transparent about the source of soy, pea protein and coconut oil.
This article is kept updated with the latest advice and information.