This Just In: Veganism Has Died... Again

This just in: veganism has died… again. Apparently we’re a movement of zombies, jellyfish and low-rise jeans.

A new article from New York Magazine, titled “How Veganism Got Cooked,” a headline that might have been clever if it were about the raw food craze, joins a long line of U.S. media hand-wringing over the so-called downfall of vegan cuisine. Meanwhile, across the pond, William Sitwell, a former food critic with a well-documented disdain for vegans, laments in The Telegraph that Veganuary and Dry January are threatening his restaurant’s survival.

To be fair, vegan dishes often take longer to prepare, and alcohol margins are famously better than liquor-free libations. But that contrast exposes what both pieces carefully sidestep.

The problem isn’t veganism.

It’s the system it’s forced to exist in.

Let’s start stateside. The New York Magazine piece practically refutes itself. Veganism didn’t fail here. America did.

Americans are uniquely susceptible to propaganda, especially when it shows up wearing a lab coat or a gym tank top. From birth, we’re marinated in government-subsidized meat and dairy marketing disguised as nutritional science. We’re warned about “mystery protein deficiencies” while inhaling dollar-store ultra-processed food engineered to be calorically dense and nutritionally hollow. We pop multivitamins like indulgences, slurp fiber-enriched yogurt to compensate for a lifelong aversion to vegetables, and call it a balanced diet.

We outsource dietary wisdom to gym bros, podcasters, and influencers, mistaking confidence for competence and vibes for evidence. Brain worms pass for nutritional insight here.

When veganism struggles in this context, it’s not because plant-based diets are inadequate. It’s because they require intentionality in a food culture built entirely around convenience, excess, and corporate profit. They demand basic food preparation and culinary literacy, skills long bulldozed by shrink-wrapped microwave pouches and app-delivered fast food. Veganism asks people to think critically about what they eat, where it comes from, and who benefits. That alone makes it incompatible with a system designed to keep people distracted, misinformed, and endlessly consuming.

So no, veganism isn’t "cooked" in the U.S.

It’s just inconvenient to an empire that profits from ignorance.

Now let’s hop back to England and pull up a chair at Sitwell’s table. Here, the real culprit becomes obvious. Food costs have been climbing since COVID shuttered restaurants. Labor followed suit. Produce prices soared. Labor-intensive restaurants, especially those cooking from scratch, took the hardest hit.

In many cities, vegan restaurants remain among the last bastions of true scratch cooking. House-made milks and cheeses from beans and nuts. Proteins carefully built from grains and legumes. Thoughtful, nutritionally complete dishes that don’t lean on industrial shortcuts. That kind of food costs money. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, the price tag often becomes unsustainable.

Back in the U.S., we’re still operating under an outdated and frankly stupid system where highly processed meat and dairy products are heavily discounted through subsidies. Taxpayers bankroll animal agriculture at staggering rates, while the crops we do subsidize, like corn, are largely unfit for direct human consumption. We funnel resources through an inefficient animal feed system, bypassing nutrition entirely in the process.

All the while, the same food snobs who once idolized kitchen bros of the past keep recycling their tired tofu jokes. We get it. You don’t know how to cook one of the most versatile foods known to humankind. Palates wrecked by oversalting and over-fatting everything ripped from a vacuum-sealed pouch aren’t exactly primed for subtlety. But I digress.

It’s been rough for restaurants across the board for a long time. Everyone’s hurting. Vegan restaurants, already contending with ingrained bias, cultural stigma, higher costs, and thinner investment pipelines, have absorbed a disproportionate share of the damage.

I genuinely feel for chefs everywhere, vegan or not. Opening a scratch restaurant in 2019 and closing it less than a year later due to a global pandemic was brutal. Rebuilding months later with half the staff, double the rent, ballooning insurance, and costs rising by the week has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

But perception remains a massive part of the problem.

Vegan chefs are positioned as outsiders despite doing the very farm-to-table labor so often romanticized by the mainstream. We’re expected to laugh along with the jokes and absorb the condescension quietly. When we push back, we’re labeled extremists. Meanwhile, we’re doing the work while others complain about the burden of cooking from scratch.

I’m here to commiserate, but I’m also here to call bullshit.

Get back in the kitchen.

And season your damn tofu.