Christmas dinner is hell for vegans |
It’s one of the last bastions of national orthodoxy, one that people look forward to for months, but many vegans dread Christmas dinner. It’s not the food that’s the problem – it’s the conversation.
Veganism is now as mainstream as oat milk lattes, so for 364 days of the year it barely raises an eyebrow, but come 25 December it’s often seen as a personal affront to centuries of tradition. Politely declining the turkey is treated as a personal assault upon centuries of gravy-soaked heritage.
As the seasonal sitting wears on, even mild-mannered relatives can metamorphose into belligerent barristers for Big Meat. ‘But would you eat a pig if you were stranded on a desert island?’ wonders an auntie, as though the Yuletide table were the Old Bailey. Grandpa, who hasn’t mustered a full sentence since the Blair years, awakens to mutter that ‘in my day we ate what we were given’. A third relative asks: ‘If you don’t want to eat meat, then why do you eat food that looks like meat?’ The question is delivered with the sort of ‘gotcha’ triumph one associates........