Food orders for work related events are to be vegan and vegetarian only

[ValerieVomit]

We all received an email at work to say that when we order catering in future for work related events we can only order vegetarian and vegan food. The management team has imposed this. It's to reduce our carbon footprint. I don't think that this means there is to be no carnivorous food available for the rest of the organisation but our department won't allow us to order any.

Reasonable or not?

Has the business had one of these buffets yet? I’d think the best test is the food actually eaten or not.

Ethical veganism has been held by ET to be a protected belief in the workplace. A sensible employer who wishes to avoid discriminating will ensure vegans are not placed at detriment by being unable to participate in work events and benefit from hospitality.

Sounds very tough indeed. The privilege oozing from some of the posters telling us this policy is oh so inclusive has been nauseating. Maybe it'll stop now.

My own food intolerance is pretty minor and easily managed, and I'm fine with veggie food to the extent that I've voluntarily eaten at vegetarian restaurants before. So this isn't about me. But it should be bleeding obvious that removing any commonly eaten type of food is going to be an issue for some people who through no fault of their own must have very restricted diets.

The UK import avocados from Peru, South Africa, Chile, Israel and Spain (in that order).
But if you read US stuff, you would believe that most avocados come from Mexico.

Personally, I'd like to see spit roast hogget with a vegan buffet.
No dairy; because dairy is the most common and most lethal food allergy in the UK.

Most fruit and veg is shipped unrefridgerated. Oranges from Spain, bananas from the Carribean, apples from NZ.... only stuff you find in the fridge section at the supermarket is airflow and to be avoided like the plague.

If we don't need sheep on hill farms, we can rewild (and pay farmers to do this - although as Knepp Estate found, rewilding was actually a lot more lucrative than farming poor soil). If we ate a tiny fraction of the neat we ate, we need a much smaller proportion of land for farming. This is not controversial except amongst those who REFUSE TO LOOK AT THE DATA.

Citation required please? (For UK consumers) I'm not an avocado apologist - if this is true, it is interesting. But earlier you were implying that it was carbon costs of these foods that were the issue when this is very simply not true.

Google it - avocado drug cartels

As much as you can "rewild" hill farms, you will then wipe out ground nesting birds who rely on nesting in grasslands. Grasslands are an important ecological area and they have to be carefully managed with grazing animals (which we then eat the surplus of). If we weren't to do that, we would then need to reintroduce wolves, bears, etc to stop the overpopulation of deer. We would also need other types of wild herbivores such as cattle too.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/avocado-industry-history-cartels-millennials-nigella/

Two have the same CO2 footprint as 1 kg of bananas

Anyway. If someone is going for an environmentally low impact buffet they can research what they want to serve. Meat. Non meat. I don't care. I don't eat meat anyway.

Knepp doesn’t have poor soil. They are mainly an arable farm. Guardian inspired tripe

Absolutely agree. Rewilding means different things to different people but I meant the Knepp model. Absolutely incorporates regenerative agriculture and large herbivores. But NOT monocultures of grass with single species flocks.

Mine did this for a team lunch so I went to pret. They can but what they want but I’ll enjoy an hour out of the office.

Much sympathy from me, your restrictions sound a lot like my relative's. They're currently awaiting a(nother) dietician referral because they're struggling to get enough calories and are underweight.

I'm sorry to hear that - it's horrible to think that others suffer so much too. Strangely, I'm overweight! I barely eat, but I also can't move around at all, so I'm assuming it's a combination of that and meds. Are they able to have the shakes from the GP? I can't tolerate those either 😁

Because we all know they probably won't. Most will be imported this time of the year especially. Even the chickpeas for the hummus will come from India.

UPF foods don't generally have a low carbon/environmental footprint either.

derxa

The main reason Knepp turned to rewilding was that most years they were struggling to turn a profit from farming wheat- even as a large, wealthy estate with money to invest in machinery and agrochemicals.

Upland sheep are an unmitigated disaster for the moors. Ground nesting birds are in utter crisis anyway. The high moors of Dartmoor are actually pretty devoid of bird life and biodiversity- the "molinia desert" they call it, due to the invasive grass molinia. Sheep are not native to the UK, and their grazing patterns are very destructive to the native flora. There is definitely a case for limited cattle and pony grazing, creating a mosaic of woodland, scrub and grassland- and for pigs, too. But both the economic and ecological future for upland sheep farmers looks pretty bleak, tbh, even though no one wants to say it out loud. I think the best they can hope for is a decent subsidy system for land stewardship.

I don't actually know but I'll ask in case that's not been explored. It's only recently that their BMI has dropped to below 18 so maybe they've not been offered them yet.

My sheep prices go up year on year. If no one wanted to eat lamb then I couldn’t sell.
I looked up the Knepp estate again. They sell 35 tons of meat a year. I’ve no idea how this fits in with the premise of the thread. I knew this conversation would not be taking place on French or Spanish fora. It’s a white middle class English discussion.

I love how obsessed people are with the carbon footprint of avocados, like it's some sort of 'gotcha'. It's not.

For one thing, avocado is not likely to be the main focus of any buffet. It's too expensive. They might have some guacamole, but that's likely to be it. And for another, it's still a tenth of the footprint of beef. Sure, it's higher than bananas. But bananas are going to be worse than locally grown strawberries.

It's truly bizarre that a vegan/vegetarian buffet is apparently bad because it goes too far, but on the flip side it's bad because it doesn't go far enough 😆

I'm not getting into the allergies argument, as honestly that could be an issue for people regardless as to whether the buffet was omnivorous or not.

"It’s a white middle class English discussion"

Damn. I'm in the wrong place!! I only count as one of those.

Yeah this always surprises me too but I guess its just the nature of capitalism. Vegan is a market now and companies are falling over themselves to make vegan this and that.

I personally would rather have something cooked in butter with real cheese but I don't get the extreme pushback to vegan food some people have.

OP I wouldn't be against this personally, I eat most foods there are only a few things I don't like the taste of. However I would be concerned the quality of the fair isn't going to be great for standard buffet prices. Decent fruit and veg is more expansive than processed meat like breaded chicken. I see a lot of potato croquets in your future.

Why do you think this is specifically a white middle class English discussion derxa? Are other ethnicities, classes and nationalities not affected by climate change?

Myself, I'm a single mum on benefits living in social housing, so quite vulnerable to food insecurity. I'm pretty damn glad I'm vegetarian because I wouldn't be able to afford meat anyway.