To believe that people should stop expecting special treatment for “food preferences” (not allergies) at events?

Do you make wine from scratch? Stock from scratch every time? Do you harvest and grind wheat and corn? Do you make curry from scratch too? In which case I take my hat off to you, but you have to admit it is not common

Agree entirely with this. For me it’s tomatoes, peppers and strawberries. Like you they won’t kill me but the stomach cramps, rash and vomiting are side effects I would rather not deal with.

I can be sure there aren’t hidden things as I cook from scratch 99% of the time. Don’t use baking mixes, and don’t think standard pots of herbs & spices have egg or dairy.

Not sure what eggs and dairy there could possibly be in black coffee or water but ok.

Unless you have checked the ingredients of everything you use in the kitchen and ruled out the ones containing eggs and dairy in them, I can be fairly sure there will be in a fair amount of them. Stock, pasta, baking mixes, nut mixes, many drinks...

but for people who do not limit our diet in any way, you will find that most of the dishes we cook do have at least eggs or dairy

Not in my case - I’d say that only about 1 meal a week has dairy and I can’t remember the last time I cooked with eggs. I’ll actually cook vegan more often than not. So your experience definitely isn’t universal.

I think you've not read the thread. I'm not a vegan, or a vegetarian. I simply know enough about food to be able to identify and cook decent food which happens to be vegan, without buying all sorts of novel ingredients. This, for example, if you leave out the yoghurt. https://ottolenghi.co.uk/pages/recipes/confit-tandoori-chickpeas

Gluten-free food is a different issue and I've said nothing about it.

Are you actually listening to what people are saying? They may have all those things you list in their house, but for people who do not limit our diet in any way, you will find that most of the dishes we cook do have at least eggs or dairy. We do not enlessly scan the list of ingredients in every food in the house to rule out the ones we "cannot" eat, because we eat everything. Catering for a vegan is a massive inconvenience which completely changes the way we can cook, it is not only about makling sure there is no meat in it. You have to check the ingredients of every bloody thing in the cupboard. My vegetable stock is actually not vegan. My cooking wine is not vegan. If you have spent years cooking that way and learning about every single ingredient in your pantry, then you're used to it and it's no extra effort for you. However it is not the same for everyone.

Yes, catering for specific eating needs is a pain in the arse. I will do it for good friends, but I resent having to do it for a generic meal or get-together. In the last one I had only one person who was gluten-intolerant in a group of 12. I had to purchase special flour for the baking and gluten-free pasta for the meal which cost a fortune and which I have never ever used since, so had to end up throwing the rest away, as I did not like the taste as much as the gluten-full versions. I found out last minute that soy sauce was not gluten free (I am sure this is well known for gluten-intolerant people, but as I never have to worry about it I had not even thought about it) and had to dash to the supermarket to get a glute-free one, more expensive and which has remained unused ever since. The stress about having made a mistake and potentially causing harm is massive.

It can be done, but it is a massive inconvenience. I am certainly not offering to host again.

And you can repeat till you're red in the face about how delicious vegan food "can" be, but the reality is that most vegan food provided by catering services is absolute shit and no one eats it. One thing is how the world "should" or "could" be and a very different one how it actually is. The only people who appear to enjoy vegan food are vegans.

What utter nonsense. Bread, flour, oil, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, pulses, grains, rice, most pasta, sugar, herbs, spices - all vegan, all perfectly normal ingredients most of us would have in anyway. Nobody actually needs vegan cheese or milk and not all vegans would want them.

I wouldn't cater for a vegan, it's a special set of everything - cheese, milk, etc. which I won't use after. they can have the vegetarian option or bring something. Fortunately I don't know any vegans.

A similar thing by making certain mainstream products vegan friendly. Rowntree's that is you. They are horrible now. Leave the ingredients alone. If vegans want sweets, there are lesser brands like Bebeto.

Which the majority of vegan food doesn’t contain, I have never cooked with either.

Well, no it isn’t. Humans are omnivores, not carnivores and your risk of various cancers, including bowel cancer is dramatically lower if you don’t eat meat, especially processed meat.

While I'll happily cater for health related/religious restrictions I stopped pandering to fads a long time ago after one too many requests to avoid such-and-such only to see it scoffed with the usual "Ooooo aren't I awful?" smirk

I've always provided a decent mix with choices for all anyway, so now it's up to folk to eat it or not - and funnily enough there are rarely many leftovers

I for one, am sick of people thinking they're more virtuous than I am because they're vegan

Edited too add I find it helps to take no notice, @HangingOver, but then the genuinely committed vegans I know are very reasonable people and it's only the faddists I've had trouble with. Happily they usually move on to some other fad quickly enough, so there's little damage done

Apologies though; I see the comment was from someone else you quoted, but my own approach still stands

I for one, am sick of people thinking they're more virtuous than I am because they're vegan, when they eat rubbish, or quinoa which is currently contributing to swatjes of forect being killed off etc etc etc.

Are you sure that's what they're thinking, though? Maybe that's what you think they're thinking?

@CurlewKate if you mean me, that’s a rather reductive summary of my posts. I find that a lot of food commercially produced and advertised as vegan is UHP but as you say, a vegan diet doesn’t have to be this way. Many cuisines of the world are what Westerners would call vegan, but to Hindus or the Japanese or whoever it’s just how they eat.

But anyone who thinks eating a highly processed Quorn burger is healthier, more virtuous or less of a contribution to global warming than my locally produced lamb kebab is just deluded.

It is!

No, adding nutritional yeast and sulphur powder makes it disgusting.

I weaned my daughter at 4 months

I think part of the problem is that many people associate vegan food with ultra processed stuff like Quorn and other meat substitutes. Some vegans, just like many omnivores, don't have the time/can't afford/can't be bothered to cook delicious and healthy food. And it's certainly true that the latter takes rather more effort than variations on meat and 2 veg.

Vegan food can absolutely be delicious, especially if is of a cuisine that naturally uses less meat than a traditional Western diet. I'm thinking Middle Eastern, Indian, Asian.

I love that people's objection to vegan food is that it is UHT. Bizarre.

Yes, I imagine they are delicious! But don't pretend that they're not UHP foods! I'm completely omnivorous, but eat very healthily. I just don't eat junk food, vegan or not.

I think people are reacting to these kinds of thingfs, because among some people, saying "I'm vegan" is a shorthand for virtue-signalling. Animal welfare etc etc.

But any processed food has food miles - and I for one, am sick of people thinking they're more virtuous than I am because they're vegan, when they eat rubbish, or quinoa which is currently contributing to swatjes of forect being killed off etc etc etc.

I think we all have to face that food in the developed north tends to come to us at the cost of the under-developed global South.

It's rather rubbish stuff - if people are going to be vegan, then I don't know why they need to have fake bacon

Not all vegans are automatically all about healthy eating all of the time. I eat fresh plants most of the time. I also eat pretend fish fingers, pretend burgers, cashew cheeses and Oreos, because they are delicious.

My point about vegan food being UHP was referring to commercially prepared so-called "vegan" food where the attraction is that it's like non-vegan food but vegan IYSWIM eg vegan "bacon" or vegan "Cheese"

It's rather rubbish stuff - if people are going to be vegan, then I don't know why they need to have fake bacon. It's about a wholly different approach to food, I should have thought.

I like cheese & yoghurt to much to be vegan, but sometimes, yes my cooking is vegan - spinach in filo pastry (layered with olive oil, not butter) , with tomato, olives and onion - yum! I can add feta cheese but sometes I don't similarly with a chick pea curry. And so on.

But if I want bacon, or sausages, or cheese, I'm not going to eat the fake stuff.

Hard disagree here 🤣 Tonight my plate contained five different veg and legumes all freshly prepared and one delicious Impossible burger. I bloody hate bean burgers 😁

Why do people think vegan food is more UHP than any other food?

Because in the past decade it's become increasingly so. A vegan burger used to be a bean burger, now it's beyond meat or similar.

All the people I know who have become vegans in the last 5 years eat lots of upf vegan food, more than previously as omnivores as they're just doing straight swaps - beef mince for Quorn mince for example. Mass catering tends to do the same sort of thing. Or vegan catering in mainstream restaurants.

Vegan options used to be a lot more interesting and less processed.