Don’t think the vegan trend has hit the mainstream yet? It’s so popular even prisons are ditching animal products. This Christmas, ten of Scotland prisons will serve up vegan options to prisoners for Christmas Dinner and on New Year’s Day.
The menu options, made available through the Daily Records FOI, show dairy-free yogurt and soy milk at breakfast, stuffed peppers and mushroom couscous for dinner, and apple plum tart or dairy-free smoothies for dessert.
New Year’s feast will include a butternut squash and walnut tart, vegan apple pie, and melon boats. There will also be falafel and spinach burgers on offer.
Scotland is embracing vegan food en masse. The national stadium, Hampden Park, has added vegan options. And government buildings and events have been encouraged to add more vegan food as well.
Scotland also recently just got another vegan supermarket and scores of vegan restaurants have opened in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Dairy Decline
The demand for vegan food is concurrent with a decline in the consumption of animal products as well. Earlier this year a survey found some 60 percent of Scottish dairy farmers said they see the industry as being in “full decline.”
That survey followed up on an Oxford Farming Conference poll earlier this year.
“[I]t’s time for the farming community to get their head around veganism,” journalist and farmer Darragh McCullough wrote in the Irish Independent after the conference.
“Farmers need to stop claiming that if we had to rely on vegans to feed the world, we’d all go hungry. It’s a lame attempt to ignore the real point,” he wrote. “Equally, claims that you cannot get enough nutrients from a vegan diet ignores the fact that a big chunk of the world’s population in places like India have effectively been living off a vegetarian diet for centuries.”
Vegan Prisons
Scotland’s prisons aren’t the only correctional facilities to embrace vegan food, either. UK prisons served vegan Christmas dinner last year to thousands of inmates. New York City just passed a resolution requiring its prisons to offer inmates vegan options. And California has been working to increase its state vegan options in prisons as well. Actress Pamela Anderson recently encouraged Justin Trudeau to serve Canada’s prisoners vegan meals.
“Canada could be a true leader in saving our planet for future generations,” she wrote.
“Beans, rice, lentils, pasta, and potatoes and other vegetables, as well as fruits, supply all the nutrients that anyone needs.”
