VEGETABLE BIRYANI

A quite extraordinary thing happened today. I selected vegan chilli from the menu in Stockholmhaven, and the Elves who work there assumed I was a vegan.

They didn’t have any vegan chilli, so they entered an elvish conflab about what else they had, and before I could protest and say ‘it’s okay, I’ll just have chips,’ I was thrust an iPad with a long list of ingredients telling me exactly what goes into a vegetable biryani.

Now. I’m not a vegan. But tell me, why should only vegans be expected to eat vegan food? I get the feeling that most of us have just assumed that vegan food is so tasteless and bland that you must have to be rigidly attached to your principles to eat it - because nobody would be mad enough to actually choose it, would they?

To be fair to my Swedish friends, I think it might be statistically true that most people who choose vegan food from a set of options... are actually vegans; I do appreciate that. And also to be fair, I’m in a small minority as a sort of flexitarian who resents the idea that a lifestyle choice earns you a label.

But here’s the thing, meat-eaters. You can eat it all; you’re not limited. Pick a veggie meal in a restaurant if you like the look of it. Why not? There’s every chance it’s the tastiest thing on the menu!

And veggies, you don’t have to be defined by that label either, whatever your reason for the herbivorous doodah! Eat, drink and be merry. And definitely don’t judge people who pick the veggie option when they don’t have to. It isn’t religion.

As for you people who make it and serve it, maybe we can dream together of a world where meat-eating isn’t the default and where anyone else isn’t a wild-eyed, hippie maverick? I mean maybe, just maybe... it’s quite the norm to have given up chomping through the body parts of dead animals, delicious though that may be! And actually, vegetarian cuisine is just getting better and better anyway.

‘How was that vegetable biryani then?’ I hear you cry.

Well. It could have done with a little more flavour in my opinion. But of course it could.