Veganism, Year Seventeen: A New Country, a New Hope
Seventeen years ago yesterday, I published "Meat, Dairy, Psychology, Law, Economics" here on Dorf on Law. Although that column was couched in somewhat boring academic terms, it was in reality a very personal piece explaining why I had decided to become a vegan. Ever since then, I have published yearly "veganniversary" columns (see 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 plus followup, 2019 plus followup, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, as well as the original column in 2008 plus followup).
And now it is 2025, the better part of two decades later. What's up? As I announced last month, I recently relocated to Ireland as a visiting professor at University College Dublin's Sutherland School of Law. I cannot know how long I will end up staying here (for one year or fifty), but I am thinking of it as my new home, just as I treated Toronto as my home for the two years that I lived there before hopping across the Pond last month. This followed a misfired plan to move to Amsterdam in 2022. (My 2023 veganniversary column was based in part on that adventure.) I have undeniably been a peripatetic guy!
My veganniversary columns have ranged over the years from relatively heavy scholarly fare to rather light social observations, and this year will be very much in the latter category, amounting to a selective recounting of my experiences in these various first-world countries from the perspective of a no-exceptions ethical vegan. While positive signs continue to show up everywhere I live and travel, I must sadly report that the world is still at best making painfully slow progress on this issue to which I am so firmly devoted.
One constant across countries is that what counts as a "national dish" is never vegan. While there are countries in the world with cuisines that are more or less "naturally" vegan-friendly, most of those countries are in South and East Asia (mostly for economic reasons rather than due to greater moral enlightenment, but better is better). In the colder climes of Europe and North America, meat and dairy are inescapable.
Canada? Poutine (and back bacon). The Netherlands? Bitterballen. And other countries in this region are hardly any better. Swedish meatballs. Wiener schnitzel in Austria. Bratwurst in Germany. Pierogi in Poland. French cuisine is a vegan's nightmare from top to bottom. And now Irish Stew. One of the pleasures of visiting and living in these cities is finding restaurants that offer vegan versions of their home-country's signature dishes, with the extra effort from those searches causing me to discover places (and to visit neighborhoods) that I would never have otherwise stumbled upon.
As a fun coincidence, I even found a Dutch restaurant in Toronto that served vegan bitterballen. On the other hand, that might not be much of a coincidence at all. Toronto, after all, is a huge global capital (well, not a capital in the same way that New York is not a capital, but still) that is unique in being populated by immigrants from nearly everywhere, making it one of the best restaurant cities that I have ever seen. Whereas in most cities (in the US and elsewhere) there are few enough vegan-only restaurants that I make sure to return to them with some regularity -- both because they serve delicious food and because I want to support them -- that is simply not possible in Toronto. Or necessary. It would be possible to eat both lunch and dinner in restaurants for a month in Toronto and never even need to resort to a vegetarian place, and new vegan places are popping up all the time.
What about my new home? Well, Dublin certainly is not Toronto when it comes to vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants, but that is hardly a surprise. The same thing is true for all restaurants here, again because Toronto is much larger and is much more multicultural than Dublin (and most other cities). Metro Dublin is less than one-third as populous as the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), coming in at just above 2 million people in a country that has barely more than 5 million residents. One would similarly never expect, say, Munich to have what the San Francisco Bay Area has in terms of restaurant fare.
Even so, Dublin is an EU capital and it shows, especially because the ethnic mix of the city has been changing relatively quickly in recent years. (Admittedly, "relatively" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.) Had I not been spoiled by my two years living in what will never become the 51st state, I would most likely be pleasantly surprised by Dublin's vegan-friendliness. As a structural matter, the restaurant culture here is friendly to vegans simply because it is de rigueur to list potential allergens on menus in a very visible way, making it possible to know which restaurants are not going to have anything edible even before one might enter the establishment.
[As an aside -- and having nothing to do with veganism, I assume that there is a word in the Irish language for de rigueur, but as I recently learned, not many of the Irish speak Irish. Watch this award-winning 13-minute short film for a very funny and heart-warming take on this phenomenon. https://youtu.be/JqYtG9BNhfM?
And what of Dublin's justifiably famous pub culture, where many meals are consumed along with pints of the higher-quality Guinness that the Irish keep for themselves? Even back in my early vegan days, it was safe to assume that every restaurant, including American versions of pubs, would at least have a side salad and fries. My experience thus far here suggests that most of the Dublin pubs do far better than that, with many of them offering variations on vegan burgers or non-dairy nachos -- again, very well marked on menus. Although I recently confessed that I am not a fan of Guinness (or River Dance, or U2), I am every bit a pub creature, so this matters.
As an amusing closing anecdote, I will note that a nearby pub recently reopened after undergoing four months of renovations, which means that it was brand new to me. This was exciting, because until this week I only had two locals, which made my neighborhood seem like a veritable pub desert by comparison to other parts of the city. Is the new/old place great? Well, yes but no. Yes for all of the obvious reasons; no because I eagerly looked through the menu on the first day, and it quickly became clear not only that there were no vegan items among the mains but that there were not even any salads listed.
Ah, but there are always fries, right? Oops, of course I mean chips. And chips are crisps, although it is important not to order the ones infused with cheddar. Indeed there are, because all pubs serve chips. (And seriously: Ireland, potatoes, chips; Q.E.D.) But this particular pub offers only "chips soaked in duck-fat, with mayonnaise." Yikes. I have seen vegan-unfriendly restaurants of varying degrees before, but this place can only be called militantly vegan-hostile. Duck fat? Really?
Even so, this was an especially happy veganniversary.
- Neil H. Buchanan