The irony of making vegan products at our Milk Bar & my (not very) vegan confessions.
Tomorrow marks the launch of two new Vegan cookie flavours & Vegan Ice Cream Sandwiches at Moustache. Next week we’ll have 5 flavours of vegan milkshakes back alongside our Giant Vegan Cookies & Cookie Cakes via our online cookie shop www.moustache.co.nz.
A milk bar making vegan food?
I have to be honest with ya’ll, the very reason I started Moustache was due to my childhood love of dunking cookies in milk. We are called Moustache Milk & Cookie Bar after all meaning the entire concept itself is inherently not vegan. Back in the days of our O.G store on Wellesley Street, I used to get confused when people came in asking if we had anything vegan as going into a milk bar asking for no dairy felt comparable to going to a butchery asking for vegetables or going to Donald Trump & asking for sanity.
Wellesley was so cramped and tiny there was never any room for new ingredients for vegan cookies even if we wanted to. But when we built our kitchen on K Road, we had a bit more room to play with (still not much since we’re such a small business but hey). Thing is, we didn’t want to create a vegan cookie for the sake of appeasing a token vegan category. I told Team Mo, we weren’t allowed to release anything until the wording changes from, “Oh, this is good for a vegan cookie” to “This is a good cookie” full stop. We toiled over it for a long time — many recipes or vegan baking we tried had that distinct raw taste. Like it’s a series of nuts & oils smooshed together to create some sort of grainy raw bar. Blehck. The process of us learning vegan baking involved me many a time taking cookies back home that we’d replaced our usual Moustache dough with vegan dough & innocently giving them to friends & family without saying anything.
“Well? How is it?”
“It’s delicious”
“And…?”
“And….? It’s yum like your cookies usually are. I don’t know what you want me to say?”
“HA! GOTCHU! IT’S NOT OUR USUAL COOKIE DOUGH THOUGH! IT’S VEGAN AND GLUTEN FREE HAHAHAHA AND YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW HAHAHA WE WIN!”
Vegan +1, Maturity -2.
So why vegan?
I feel disingenuous writing about our vegan range without transparently telling you that I am not, nor are any of Team Mo, vegan. I don’t want our vegan cookies to just tick some token vegan box just for the likes or da dollar billz or to be congratulated by vegans for having a social conscience etc.
In fact, if I were to be completely truthful to all you vegans out there reading this, I am quite possibly the worst kind of non-vegan. I used to wear it like a badge of honour, but now I look back with a bit of disgust. All of my friends know this but I have always had an obscene love for cheeseburgers & fried chicken to the point that at my 21st birthday my choice of catering was 100 McDonald’s cheeseburgers & buckets upon buckets of KFC.
I mean I flew to Texas & spent 50 USD on this gargantuan sandwich with 8 layers; every layer a different type of processed meat. The prize they gave me for finishing the sandwich was a cheesecake (!?).
I was a huge carnivore & proud.
I don’t know why I was so over the top with my meat eating. Actually, I do know why. Growing up, I was always the gangly little Asian girl. Kids used to yell at me to “Go eat a sandwich!” or tell me I was anorexic. I wasn’t anorexic. Because of that, I grew up overly self-conscious of my body & lamented the fact that at least fat people could lose weight but no matter how much I tried, my genetics simply meant I was small in frame. I didn’t understand. People say it’s not nice to point out to someone they’re overweight. But apparently if you’re skinny, then it’s free rein to tell a kid their body type is too skinny & needs to change because only ‘Real Women Have Curves!’.
Anyway, so food became my thing. You got that world? There’s no way I’m anorexic! Because look I am a big meat-eating carnivore! Hear me roar!
But in the process of researching vegan cookies for Moustache & therefore educating myself more on veganism, I do wholeheartedly agree on so many points & that as people, we do need to make some big changes to our lifestyles. Not just for the animals, but also from a purely environmental and sustainability standpoint.
So, whilst I am not vegan, I am making an active choice to cut down my meat intake by about 75% to start with. So far, so good. If I do eat meat, I try my best to eat free range chicken or seafood. I’m not going to lie — I absolutely adore steamed fish, sashimi & crab. But a part of me, I’m worried, will always be niggling for that cheeseburger & fried chicken. I’m not sure I can go cold turkey on meat but I think a huge reduction in my meat intake & becoming a more conscious food-consumer is still a start.
Anyway — so that’s my honest truth. So to come full circle back to the point of this article…Moustache has a whole lot of Vegan products coming out tomorrow & next week alongside our usual Moustache menu. I would urge you to give them a go, whether you’re vegan or not vegan. Trust me, they are so delicious you wouldn’t even know.
From a economic perspective, I would love to keep going making vegan products. But at the end of the day, we are such a small business with limited space, time & resources. And vegan ingredients — such as dark Fair Trade Belgium chocolate, almond flour, coconut oil, premium dutch cocoa etc aren’t cheap. In fact, our coconut ice cream costs us 192% more than our regular ice cream we use for shakes. But at the end of the day, if supported & if sustainable as a small business, then we will keep making (and eating!) it. We hope you enjoy the new options & we will keep exploring & learning.
So thank you for listening to my long-winded vegan story & thank you so much for supporting small Kiwi business. We love what we do and we love our customers for allowing us to keep making cookies — because honestly it’s been almost 5 years since I started Moustache & I’m still not sick of the cookies. Nor am I sick of going to work & seeing kids’ faces light up as they climb aboard our Cookie Bus clutching their Oreo Marshmallow cookie with strawberry milk proclaiming that this is their favourite place ever.
It’s the simple things.
Much love,
D x
