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?

Interesting thread - I work at a large University and there is a proposal to go 100% plant based by 2027 - that would be for all food outlets on campus, all income-generating events held on campus and all meetings, leaving do's, dinners, etc. held on campus. It would affect thousands of staff, students and visitors. Not sure if it will be extended to catered halls of residence, but presume that it will. I could live with meat-free, but I'm not a fan of plant milks or the current vegan offerings we have (lots of fake cheese and meat products - and the carrot and hummus sandwiches aren't great) - a mix of veggie / vegan would be better than a 100% vegan commitment.

Can say which Uni.

A lot of staff and students are promoting a University wide movement to plant based catering - https://www.plantbaseduniversities.org/ (via Animal Rising)

My Uni is Manchester.

Thanks for this.
I have a son at Exeter and I noticed the student Union voted for the same.
He’s vegetarian but has commented he doesn’t know any others who are, so it’s interesting which way the vote went.
Young people making a difference !! 👏

I buy our meat from deerbox, wild venison, not farmed.

deerbox.co.uk/

A 100% plant based university sounds like an utter nightmare for those with allergies and other gut issues.

It would be much better if they only sourced local and seasonal food, but obviously that would be less exciting and more expensive . Much easier to ship berries grown in synthetic fertilisers half way around the world than to use outdoor reared meat where their 💩 is used to fertilise the local fields.

I don't understand why people keep banging on about how it takes more water to get meat than plant based food. We don't have a lack of water here. I would have thought that it was less ethical to grow plants in the desert than to farm sheep on the Welsh hillsides.

I assume that people with dairy, egg, fish and shellfish allergies wouldn't think it was a nightmare.

Apparently some people with peripheral neuropathies need meat in their diets to feel well - B12 from plant based products and supplements aren't the same.

Nightmare if you have issues digesting legumes but also don't want to eat UPFs.

for all those promoting eating "grass fed organic local meat" it's no better (and in fact in many ways worse) for the environment than other meats.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb

https://www.monbiot.com/2022/08/19/unholy-cow/

Perhaps the most important of all environmental issues is land use. Every hectare of land we use for extractive industries is a hectare that can’t support wild forests, savannahs, wetlands, natural grasslands and other crucial ecosystems. And farming swallows far more land than any other human activity.

What are the world’s most damaging farm products? You might be amazed by the answer: organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb. I realise this is a shocking claim. Of all the statements in my new book, Regenesis, it has triggered the greatest rage. But I’m not trying to wind people up. I’m trying to represent the facts. Let me explain.

Arable crops, some of which are fed to farm animals, occupy 12% of the planet’s land surface. But far more land (about 26%) is used for grazing: in other words, for pasture-fed meat and milk. Yet, across this vast area, farm animals that are entirely pasture-fed produce just 1% of the world’s protein.
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all functional groups (or “guilds”) of wild animals increases. The only category in which numbers fall when grazing by cattle or sheep ceases are those that eat dung. Where there are cattle, there are fewer wild mammals, birds, reptiles and insects on the land, and fewer fish in the rivers. Perhaps most importantly – because of their crucial role in regulating living systems – there tend to be no large predators.

Excerpt. Full article at link above.

@millionleaves
So are you in favour of wild meat?

@Kalevala I'm not personally in favour of any meat consumption.

How should the deer population in the UK be managed in the absence of natural predators?

Isn’t it a bit hypocritical of humans to think they need to manage wildlife populations? We have no natural predators in the UK and cause infinitely more damage to the environment, but thank goodness we’re around to cull the deer.

Do you think we shouldn't manage the deer population?

This article says the deer population rises by 30% a year. There are no wolves to keep this in check.

https://wilderness-society.org/predator-problem-britains-burgeoning-deer-population/

The expansion of the deer population results in more widespread grazing of the landscape, in turn creating more uniform habitats. As well as creating a more monotonous landscape, it also has serious consequences for biodiversity. More uniform habitats results in reduced niches for other species. Deers grazing on the understory of woodland vegetation adversely impact bird species such as the warbler, nightingale and willow tits, as they use such areas for nesting and foraging. Consequently, the ecosystem services that birds supply, such as seed dispersal and pollination, are lost, resulting in negative knock-on effects for the wider environment.

@Kalevala It's not an area I personally have knowledge of, but I found this comment on reddit:

George Monbiot’s book “Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life” has really great information for why introducing nonhuman predators is far more beneficial for ecological and population control that human culling. It was written before he went vegan so just a content warning that there is stuff about fishing, eating animal products etc (not in a promotional way, it’s just there), but he has since gone vegan AND written an excellent book on the environmental consequences of animal agriculture which is unrelated to your question about population control but worth a mention nonetheless. Essentially, the unbalanced size of nonhuman animal populations is frequently an issue caused by humans that human culling doesn’t really help because while it shrinks the population size, it does nothing to engineer the environment the way nonhuman predators do. Over abundance of certain species CAN be a huge ecological problem, but culling is not the solution because we don’t know enough about it to do it well and in a truly ecologically beneficial way, whereas introduction of predators and encouraging a self-willed environment (as in the case of the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone) is holistically beneficial.

Maybe read Monbiot's book if you want to understand more. I am sure others also have other suggestions and solutions I am not personally aware of. This was just from a quick google and I can't speak further about the suggested approach as it's not an area of my knowledge.

here's another thread which speaks to the deer issue:

https://www.quora.com/How-do-vegans-suggest-to-solve-the-overpopulation-problem-with-the-white-tailed-deer-that-causes-billions-in-damage-and-200-human-deaths-every-year

Some interesting answers.

Bit late to this thread but I don’t understand how anyone would have an issue with this. It’s free food. Grab a burger on the way home if you can’t cope without meat in one of your 3 meals a day.

As a veggie I’d have loved this at work events.

There was a very interesting document on Netflix about eating meat vs vegan, the benefits to health of going vegan with lots of info about damage to the planet from cattle farming.

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81133260

This appears to be US based. We don't have wolves in the UK.

The reintroduction of wolves to Scotland is being considered I believe, but it would take time. But if wolves can eat them why can't we?

@Kalevala I'm not here to tell you you personally can or can't eat deer. It's your choice. As I said, from a personal perspective I am against hunting animals for a variety of reasons. I am sure there is a solution of which I am personally unaware that would be workable from a vegan perspective.

Did you read the comment above about Monbiot's book? Please feel free to read that and as he is British I am sure he relates his suggestions to Britain.

@millionleaves
Monbiot's solution appears to be the wolves. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/11/britain-deer-population-ecological-disaster-wolves-humans-predators?CMP=share_btn_url

This would take some time however. Even then, I see no issue with those who would like to eat meat, eating wild meat. The arguments against eating meat on this thread seem to be about farming, not wild meat.

Driving slower seems to be a good answer as well as reducing humans taking over more land.
Hunting to reduce numbers isn’t
Wonder how sterilisation would work ? Humans, deer or both ? Depends how radical you are I assume.