Closed for business – something’s gone wrong in Scotland’s vegan city

It is five years ago now that I was writing constantly about face masks, and two-metres-apart, and Zoom quizzes (oh, the endless Zoom quizzes) and how well Nicola Sturgeon was doing and really I can’t see her putting a foot wrong ever, can you? But I was also writing about the concerns that the coronavirus originated in animals and that the way we do farming was increasing the risk of it happening again. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how we felt, sometimes too easy.

Five years on, the concerns about the way we do farming are still relevant. Many countries, including Scotland, have turned the production of meat into an industrialised, mechanised process. The animals are packed in close together, they’re unlikely to be genetically diverse, and the stress harms their immune systems, all of which means that if something nasty breaks out, it spreads fast. It’s asking for trouble really, and it’s cruel of course.

The reality of it, what we’ve been doing to animals in modern farming, is one of the reasons I don’t eat meat and haven’t done so for 30 years and for a while it seemed like I was part of a trend (for once) that really could go mainstream. When I first went veggie in the early 90s, eating in restaurants usually meant one option only and usually penne arrabiata (oh, the endless penne arrabiata). But more people went veggie and vegan and the food manufacturers, supermarkets and restaurants responded to the demand and it all got a lot better.

One city seemed to be at the forefront of it all as well: my city, the vegan city, Glasgow. From about 2007 or thereabouts, there was a vegan pub, The 78, and its sister cafes: Mono and Stereo, and lots of other places started to pop up as well. There was Entrading on West Regent Street and Glasvegan on St Enoch Square (awesome veggie haggis roll) and best of all, the Lotus on Bridge Street for Chinese (vegan prawn toast is a thing, a delicious thing). Before long, Glasgow had a reputation as the veganist city in Scotland.

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But something’s gone wrong. You may have noticed there was a vegan festival in Glasgow this weekend, which you’d think would be a sign things are as good as ever for vegans: 80-plus stalls, workshops on the nutrition and medicines of indigenous tribes, understanding your protein needs, and sound baths (please bring a yoga mat if you would like to lie down). The reality is, however, that a lot of Glasgow’s best vegan places have been closing. Lotus: closed. Glasvegan: closed. And others too, including Plant Blonde, Serenity Now, and the coffee shop Ushi’s (which was not only vegan but “queer/socialist-run” which probably explains why I never went there). Vegan city is becoming less vegan.

There’s a number of trends at work here I think, some of which go back a fair bit and some of which apply to restaurants in general. Speak to restaurateurs in Glasgow and they’ll tell you about the rising costs and changing consumer habits (we’re eating out less and eating less when we’re out because we’re poorer). They’ll tell you as well how the city council has made things worse for them: the dreaded LEZ for instance; the council also had plans to scrap free parking after 6pm, which would have hit restaurants and their staff hard and although the plans have apparently been dropped for now, the fear is they are likely to be revived. The council needs the money. The council wants the money.

All of this stuff applies to almost every restaurant, vegan and non-vegan, but the vegan restaurants have started to hit other problems as well. As I say, there was a time when the veggie/vegan options in restaurants weren’t very good which gave veggie and vegan folk a kind of secret power, a veggie veto: if you were going out with friends, they’d always ask you if a restaurant was good for veggies and if it wasn’t, you’d go somewhere else. Restaurants eventually cottoned on to this and realised they needed to improve their plant-based options, which most of them did. Eating out as a veggie now is much better than it was 30 years ago.

But this has also caused problems for the vegan places. The ones that were really good, like Lotus of blessed memory, were good because they specialised in vegan cooking and knew what they were doing so the food was excellent. But as the omnivorous restaurants have got better and better, and in some cases excellent for veggies and vegans, there’s no longer the same need to go to plant-only places. And if you’re in a group, there are lots of good options that cater for vegans, veggies and the people who are still eating animals. This has undermined vegan restaurants, on top of all the other stuff they’re facing.

But the fact that vegan places are shutting down also makes you wonder about the trend towards veganism more generally. It’s certainly moved from the fringes to the mainstream and, although the exact numbers are hard to pin down, there would seem to have been a big increase in the number of vegans in the last ten years or so. There’s probably about two million of them now, give or take, so quite a lot of people and quite a lot of consumer power.

But has it peaked? Like a lot of other veggies, I’ve flirted with veganism and gave up milk years ago because of the way cows are treated. But I’m less convinced about some of the other arguments for veganism: it’s perfectly possible for example to eat eggs from hens that are happy and have not been mistreated. I also worry about a diet that can’t provide everything from natural sources (B12 in the case of veganism). And a lot of vegan food – the alternatives to cheese for example – has to be highly processed to become edible and tasty, and most vegan cheese still fails that test. Veganism hasn’t won the argument.

This isn’t defeatism I hope – the scale of the meat industry utterly depresses me (70 billion animals killed for food every year) and, as with most things, I agree with Morrissey: a death for no reason and a death for no reason is murder. But there are some promising trends out there: lab-grown or cellular meat, for example, could be a gamechanger. And maybe the real victory will be when eating plants instead of meat isn’t a separate activity but genuinely mainstream and normal and everyday. And it seems to me that, bit by bit, in the vegan city and elsewhere, we’re making some progress towards that goal.