Call For Vegan Options on Public Sector Menus

More and more people are recognising the benefits of eating vegan – so it’s time that public sector establishments such as hospitals and schools offered a variety of options free of animal-derived ingredients.

By ensuring that vegan options are included on the menus of all public sector facilities, the government can place itself at the forefront of an ever-growing social movement, reduce its environmental footprint, improve its ethics profile, and provide more inclusive meals. This would mean better availability and variety of options not only for vegans but also for vegetarians, flexitarians, and people looking to make healthier food choices.

Offering vegan foods brings a number of benefits:

Animals

Farmed animals have feelings, thoughts, and personalities, just as we do, yet the food industry treats them like machines, with cruelty that’s hard to swallow. On today’s factory farms, they’re crammed by the thousands into filthy sheds and wire cages. They’re never given the chance to raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything else that’s natural and important to them. Eating vegan means sparing animals unfathomable suffering.

The Environment

According to the United Nations’ Livestock’s Long Shadow report, raising animals for food is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global”.

A recent study by The RISE Foundation found that Europe’s meat, egg, and dairy production must be halved by 2050 in order to meet the emission-reduction targets of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Health

Heart and circulatory diseases cause more than a quarter of all deaths in the UK – and diet is a major contributor to these conditions. Eating vegan is one of the best ways to keep your heart in shape, lower your cholesterol levels, and thereby decrease your risk of having a heart attack. Since dietary cholesterol is found only in animal-derived foods, a plant-based diet is 100 per cent cholesterol-free.