Solutions Designed for Vegetarians Won’t Cut It for Meat Reducers. Here is Why.
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: No, not every restaurant already offers a food haven for diners who want to eat veggie.
When going through the list of Time Out’s Top 100 London restaurants in 2017 we found that:
On average, 25% of main dishes were vegetarian
9 of the 100 restaurants had no vegetarian main dish on their a la carte menu
And another 41 restaurants had only 1 or 2 options
Some of the best veggie food is only offered on separate vegetarian menus that you’ll never know about, unless you are willing to ask for them
Isn’t that a lot?
If you think about veggie food as ‘food for vegetarians’ it probably is a lot. Only about 5% of the population are vegetarian. For them, a separate veggie menu isn’t a problem either, because they will ask for it. However, if you consider that another 35% of the population report a desire to eat less meat, 25% of veggie main dishes is not a lot at all.
If you think about restaurant food only in the context of a family celebration, 25% veggie dishes is a lot. However, if you also consider the lunch you buy at a take-out chain, or the dinners you order to your house, 25% of veggie dishes isn’t a lot at all.
For whom is that a problem?
For diners: 35% of the population report a desire to eat less meat. If there aren’t many options, restaurant menus force them to decide whether they want to enjoy their food OR reach their goals. Most interestingly here, the diners who feel this the most are NOT vegetarians or vegans. Those groups have already built habits that enable them to eat a meat-free diet. They have either adopted a new lifestyle (i.e. cooking at home or going to different restaurants) or often sacrifice their enjoyment of food (eating lots of mushroom risotto or fries). And they usually identify as vegetarian and don’t mind asking the waiter for separate menus or even custom-made dishes. The people who are conflicted are those that are not willing to make these sacrifices.
For the world: Meat is a very resource-intensive product. A vegetarian diet has roughly half of the carbon footprint, requires 40x less land, and 4x less water. From an environmental point of view, every steak that doesn’t need to be produced is a good thing. Ideally ,people would only eat meat when they specifically want to eat meat, not because of a lack of alternatives. There is a lot more to this, read on here if you are interested.
Why aren’t more restaurants using this as an opportunity?
Negative effects of human meat consumption are a relatively new problem. The meat industry as it exists today is only ~50 years old and before that, humans ate a lot less meat. In addition, the human population has nearly tripled in the last 60 years, which means that we don’t just eat more meat as individuals, but that we eat A LOT more meat in aggregate. The effects this has on our health and the environment have only been understood relatively recently (in the last 20 years or so), and wider public awareness has only really kicked in over the last 2–3 years.
Therefore, restaurants have had no reason to change. Like all other businesses, they only change if they either see a business opportunity or feel that they must. So far, most vegetarian restaurant food has been created for vegetarians.
However, restaurants are now missing an opportunity by not starting to think about meat reducers’ needs. For meat reducers, not eating meat doesn’t get prioritised over enjoying food and this leads to fundamentally different needs.
This group of diners (which makes up around 35% of the population) doesn’t want to ask for vegetarian food. They also don’t want to order the vegetarian dish. They’ll be very happy to order a vegetarian dish if it’s presented to them as one of the options and if the description sounds appetising. They don’t ask for veggie food, they want to be sold on it. Not based on the merits of not eating meat but based on great taste.
What can be done about it and why is now the right time?
Some restaurants are already serving a lot of great veggie food that doesn’t get talked about.
There is surprisingly little transparency around which restaurants do better veggie food than others.
It’s easy to find the best, but that’s a relatively small group of restaurants. Few restaurants feel that their veggie food is good enough to belong to the best, so diners don’t have enough information to choose these restaurants for their very good veggie offering.
Restaurants may not want to say that they are good at veggie food, unless they are outstanding. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t say it.
Enough diners now care to make this relevant. Surfacing this information can help a lot of diners reach their eat more veg goals. And probably give more restaurants an incentive to jump on this train.
We know that food is fashion and that it is difficult to take the plunge on a new menu item on the strength of a fad. But plant-based food is not a fad. Too much is wrong with the way we currently produce the vast majority of our meat. And there is no way of scaling up traditional animal agriculture to provide meat for 10 billion people every day.
The market is changing. The real decision for businesses is whether to change now and leverage this opportunity, or wait until change becomes inevitable.
