The Future of Vegan Food
“Why is eating meat with abandon getting a thumbs-up on every point on the political spectrum?” asks vegetarian and former vegan Alicia Kennedy, author of No Meat Required, The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating (Beacon Press, 2023).
Ms. Kennedy champions a system of community-based agriculture that embraces food justice and yields whole, plant-based food in abundance. “I’ll keep imagining a different world, one where everyone has fruit overflowing on their table, the leisure to cook their family dinner, the money to purchase ingredients that were grown with care by workers paid a fair wage to do so.”
Are any vegans not completely on board with this beautiful vision?
Many, it turns out.
Although Nina Guilbeault, author of The Good Eater: A Vegan’s Search for the Future of Food, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024), practices Ms. Kennedy’s model of sustainable eating, she finds its widespread implementation problematic. That’s because farmers must confront “the constraints of the growing season and the difficulty of scaling a labor-intensive operation.”
Understandably, animal rights activists tend to want sweeping change now. The number of animals tortured and killed by Big Meat and Dairy is staggering. Ms. Guilbeault has called factory farming “the last socially acceptable moral atrocity.”
Will tech meat come to the rescue? Entrepreneurs chasing profits from rapidly evolving fake meat technologies believe their products will reduce the consumption of animals and slow climate change. They may ultimately be proven right, but community-based, whole food agriculture is not high on their agenda.
Ms. Guilbeault concludes that both approaches to securing a meatless future – regenerative agriculture and “techno-optimism” -- play important roles. “I think it’s possible for the techno-optimist and regenerative visions to co-exist, but only if they recognize their common enemy – factory farming – and the enduring problems of industrialization. Instead of reinforcing false dichotomies, why not work together to brainstorm how to weave regenerative farming practices into the techno-optimistic futures of food?”
To help us make sense of all of this, we have a truly amazing resource at our fingertips. The internet provides access to news, creative recipes, the latest perspectives of vegan thought leaders, evidence-based research, and more. We might not be able to single-handedly determine the future of food, but we can eat wisely and do our part for our health, animals and the planet.
