Meat-free - the new vegetarian
The Grocer thinks vegetarian is a dirty word. Anna Pickard explains why and comes up with a few of her own
February 6, 2008 10:00 AM
A meat-free roast ready for the oven. Photograph: Graham Turner
According to The Grocer, it seems that 'vegetarian' is a dirty word to many British consumers. I can think of many more dirty words, some of them even concerning vegetables, but that's not the point right now. The point right now is that supermarkets have found that while people seem to avoid the term 'vegetarian' when attached to a label, they're more excited by the positive language encapsulated in the term 'meat-free'.
With a 5.5% increase in the meatless market, supermarkets are now looking to maximise the potential of people who may not want to label themselves as 'vegetarian', but perhaps don't choose to include meat in every single meal - whether for health, expense, or ethical reasons. But why?
But why is 'vegetarian' a difficult word for people to ally themselves to? Is it the memory of unappetising vegetarian options glimpsed over tables? The grim one-person teas you made for yourself during years of over-zealous Morrissey-led teenage temporary vegetarianism while the rest of the family were tucking into shepherd's pie? (I'm speaking for myself here, four years of meatlessness for little other reason than The Smiths told me it was the thing to do).
Or is it because people associate the term with a strictness of being that they find unattractive, together with political or personality statements that they feel publicly branding oneself as a vegetarian might carry? Like teetotalers or Gordon Brown.
Funnily enough, I was just watching Come Dine With Me (so shoot me, it's a sinful pleasure, watching other people's dinner parties go wrong) and a Texan guest was heard to declare "Ah, vegetarian - an old Indian word for bad hunter" - which is the kind of mindset that it would seem many people have - surely you'd only want to eat vegetarian having failed at eating proper food.
On the contrary, of course, people are choosing to eat non-meat-based meals for an increasing number of reasons, with health and fitness, an increasing awareness of five-a-days and distasteful farming practices being only some.
So while they might never want to term their choice a vegetarian one, there's not many people who might feel ashamed of ordering something with a little circled 'v' next to it on the menu. Now that restaurants have stepped up to the plate, with restaurants like Terre A Terre in Brighton, Manna in London and Greens in Manchester providing vegetarian gourmet menus which prove that, unlike in the 70s, asking for the vegetarian - sorry, meat-free - option does not mean getting a lump of cheese and half an iceberg lettuce plonked on a plate (sometimes with a handful of prawns because no one was quite sure whether they counted or not).
So the problem has traditionally been that perhaps people see it as a negative choice rather than a positive one - that you're shutting doors and saying 'You MUST not eat this thing', whereas 'meat-free' has the fluffy noughties feeling of 'hey! free yourselves of the need to eat meat for every meal!' as if all omnivores were doing that in the first place.
So because we're all desperate to feel that we're free to do as we want, any old time, we perhaps feel better about eating vegetables if we can pretend we're ridding ourselves of something bad while we're at it - like it makes any difference what the pasta and pesto bake was called.
It can't be a bad thing - whether people are doing it on a full-time or meal-by-meal basis - if people are being more aware of what they're putting in their mouths. But that doesn't stop it from sounding a little silly that yes, on a basic level the supermarkets now wish to concentrate on the 'meat-reducers', as this new breed of consumer is called, as they open up the vegetarian market away from the ... well, we can't call them vegetarians anymore, I suppose. So, meat-excluders? So they're opening up the meat-free selection for meat-reducers as well as meat-excluders, and allowing the meat-maximisers to do as they wish, as, in fact, they were always going to.
This sounds like a whole new game - making up new definitions for silly marketing terms:
Meat-reducer: The machine that turns a perfectly good bird into a turkey twizzler.
Meat-excluder: Wadding that you can put under the door to stop meat from seeping in on cold winter nights.
Meat-maximiser: Something that you can get from the classified ads in the back pages of low-brow Sunday newspaper magazines.
A new word for 'vegetarians who eat fish' (pro-piscine-meat-excluders?) will be added as soon as we think of it.
