January 25, 2025

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

I’m marking Veganuary 2025 by publishing a blog post a day.

When we launched Angel Food in 2006, we had our logo and “Gluten-free, Dairy-free, Egg-free, Vegan” sign-written on our company vehicle. One day I was filling up at the petrol station and a young guy in chef gear looked at the writing and said to me with a derisory laugh, “Ha! You cater for all the people I hate.” I like the idea that, if that guy is still a chef, then he’ll almost certainly be having to put some effort into cooking more inclusively by now.

I first visited Northern Ireland with my husband Colin a decade ago and back then vegan options were rare. On one winter visit to the town of Ballycastle, we were thoroughly chilled after a beach walk and looking for a hot lunch. We walked into a bar and gratefully took a table in front of the open fire. The menu didn’t have anything obviously vegan, so we asked the waiter if they could rustle something up. The ruddy-faced chef who looked like a heart attack waiting to happen came out to discuss the situation with us. When we explained what vegan meant, he exhaled sharply and said in his strong North Antrim accent, “Boy, that’s harrrrrd”. To his credit, he did rustle up a Thai green curry which was not delicious but it was vegan and it was hot.

The vegan options are generally better now, but it can still be hit-and-miss. Recently we organised a family dinner at a local bistro, having confirmed with the staff that they could do some vegan options before we booked. When we arrived the only vegan meal available was the vegetarian burger minus the mayo and the cheese and the bun. It was a large pile of rocket leaves topped with a patty which was glutinous and inedible. We ate the rocket leaves but left most of the patties. Colin spoke politely to the manager, who agreed it wasn’t good enough and offered not to charge us for the two so-called burgers.

Colin and I visited Seoul for a family wedding recently. We stayed in a cheap hotel that had a tiny basic shared kitchen for guests to use. The convenience store next to the hotel sold shelf-stable bowls of cooked brown rice, and cans of vegan tuna made from pea protein. We had this for breakfast every day with chilli sauce before heading out to explore the city. (We enjoyed it so much that we still have brown rice for breakfast once or twice a week, and we call it our “Korean breakfast”.)  After breakfast, we’d plan our day’s itinerary with the help of the vegan travel app Happy Cow, which lists vegan and vegetarian food options around the world. There were so many fully vegan eateries in Seoul that we ate almost exclusively in those – which meant we didn’t have to worry about language difficulties (we don’t speak Korean). It also had the wonderful benefit of taking us to fascinating neighbourhoods well off the tourist track that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

When we visited friends in Asturias in northern Spain a few years ago, I found myself questioning my stance against animal farming. We had been warned to drive our hire car cautiously through the countryside because there were small family groups of cattle grazing by the roadside and, often, walking on the road. As a vegan activist, I found it confronting to see these cattle living lives that didn’t seem as awful as those I was accustomed to seeing. Might this form of animal agriculture actually be okay? In the end, I decided that although it was gentler than factory farming it was still not okay: the cattle are still at the mercy of humans, they are born so they can be killed. During that visit, we also had a small insight into traditional European cheese culture. Our friends took us to Picos de Europa National Park, including a stop at a tiny mountain village. There are jealously guarded limestone caves in the area that families have used for generations for ripening cheeses – the moulds vary from cave to cave and so do the resulting cheeses. Whenever our friends visit that area, they buy cheese from a particular local family. Amanda knocked on their door and the elderly brother of the woman who makes the cheese came out and talked to us in their front yard. We were all standing under their washing line, which was full of large pairs of old underpants which must have been white a long time ago. It was quite bizarre, like most of my favourite travel memories. After a brief chat, he brought out samples of the current batch of cheese and our friends went through the ritual of tasting them. He asked – in Spanish – if Colin and I would like to sample it too. Amanda was the only one in our group with decent Spanish and she declined the offer on our behalf. She didn’t think he’d grasp the concept of veganism so by way of explanation she said, “Oh, no – they’re from New Zealand.” And he seemed satisfied with that. I love the idea that there’s an old guy in northern Spain who thinks that New Zealanders don’t eat cheese.