Work sustainability policy dictating crap food

I agree. I would like to be vegetarian but I have an allium allergy and it’s pretty much impossible to eat anything catered that is both vegan and safe for me.

Plain egg and mayonnaise or cheese sandwiches would be perfect, but these days it seems to be a procession of complicated fillings that all have alliums of some sort shoehorned in, or worse, completely anonymous stuff in bread that is probably contaminated with all the other fillings anyway.

Oh, and don’t even start me on the samosas and similar mystery parcels of doom! 😂

It's a real shame if it's increasing food waste and that needs to be addressed.

If your employer provides all your meals every day, I would be annoyed. But I struggle a bit with the odd meeting being a huge problem.

I dont go to many catered meetings but they have normally been sad sandwiches, crisps and fruit.

I'm not sure I really would miss catering ham if I was offered roasted red peppers and pesto instead or instead of egg mayo got hummus or avacado and tomatoes.

Maybe others are getting more exciting meat dishes at thier meetings.

I can't eat a lot of veggie/vegan food unless I make it myself as it has so much soya in it... next time say you have allergies to nuts and soya and see what alternatives they come up with.

I am less worried about eating meat as we don't eat a lot anyway, but most commercially prepared vegetarian and vegan food is awful. In fact. Thinking about it I hate commercial buffets full stop.

I imagine the animals involved were rather more depressed.

I know, what a load of shite but quite amusing to read!

Our City Council did this. ( and so did Cambridge) . Vegan exclusively , whooo 😇😇we’re so wonderful.

Until the local rag printed some pics of the huge piles of stuff left untouched to be thrown away ( I don’t know why it didn’t go to some sort of charity, maybe they thought that would be unnecessarily unkind), which caused a rethink ( I can’t reist saying ‘egg on faces’)

I think most people would read what you wrote and take from it that you didn't eat the food, but fair enough I retract.

Where did I say that?

I ate the sandwiches but because it was carbs, carbs and more carbs I was hungry with the hour.

Not eating bits of animal flesh made you depressed? You can't have one meat-free meal without triggering mental illness? Really?!

"I don’t willingly restrict my diet to a minority of food" when you just said you willingly went hungry rather than eating a non-healthy carb laden sandwich for one meal of your life? Okay.

Hardly. Scrutiny of a company’s carbon footprint is increasing, not decreasing.

But, OP YANBU. These sorts of stunts absolutely get on my tits. I attended a course at an engineering firm and it transpired they’d gone meat free and of course the sandwiches and sides were absolutely dire, laden with carbs and not particularly healthy. I couldn’t leave to get food as there wasn’t time so spent the afternoon with a rumbling stomach & of course good luck if you’re gluten free.

Veggies and vegans like to moan that now you can understand how they feel, but I don’t willingly restrict my diet to a minority of food. If you are going to do that, or are forced to through allergies, of course you’re going to be offered limited options.

according to the carbon trust, compared to beef mince, Quorn mince has 4% of the carbon footprint, 6% of the land-use footprint and 8% of the water footprint.
compared to a pork sausage, a Quorn sausage has 11% of the carbon footprint, 21% of the land-use footprint and 39% of the water footprint.

Do you not see that you being unable to "cobble together a meal" from what's on offer is no different to a vegetarian being unable to "cobble together a meal" when what's normally on offer is a load of meat as the de facto standard?

Non veggies and vegans have had choice for years, and now on the odd occasion the tables are turned it's suddenly an outrageous step on your right to choose. Just like they've got on with it for this long, maybe you can just get on with it for one meal every so often.

I’d bring a pack up with the food you like. I worked at a university and the catering was so poor that I brought a lunch for years.

I'm an ex-veggie and really like fake meat. I think I'm an anomaly though! I'd be really happy with Quorn ham sandwiches, instead of ham sandwiches.

However, mock meat is an acquired taste. A lot of people, veggie, vegan or not, do not like it. The texture is a bit strange so I understand that. It seems thoroughly pointless to provide food that the majority don't want.

As someone upthread said, it's an excuse to cut costs. No point in paying for a buffet if no one is going to eat it.

@DoreenonTill8 I’ll do the honours 😋. It's ooonnly one meal! Surely you can eat vegan for one meal?????!!!

This is so amazingly naive Im not surprised the environment is fucked.

cows need food. They don’t just eat grass. Some of it is grown in U.K. some of it isn’t.

cows belch out a huge amount of greenhouse gases just by existing.

Then add in all the supplements and antibiotics needed to keep cows healthy, energy used to process milk and make it into cheese etc etc

why don’t you try comparing carbon footprint for dairy vs fake dairy?

The dairy industry is so overwhelmingly bad for the environment (greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, soil degradation, water usage, to name a few) that I would imagine any comparison to flying in ingredients from elsewhere (that will be used for many things besides dairy substitutes) barely touches the sides.

Your choices aren't being taken away, so yabvu there.

But otherwise I get it. I'd be irritated. Your neurodiversity means you're more limited than average in the food you can eat. Whether other people understand or find that logical is immaterial. It's not very inclusive to limit the types of food provided without considering the dietary needs of employees. And it's obviously not sustainable for them to provide food that doesn't get eaten and only ends up contributing to more food waste.

Agree with the poster upthread who said it's probably going to end up as a cost cutting exercise.