I’ve always been uneasy talking about veganism in public, not least because it feels deeply personal to do so. There’s always the risk of veganism inviting the familiar mockery, casting you as the archetypal ‘angry vegan’. I’ve even indulged in a small pride at being seen as the ‘reasonable vegan’, the one who doesn’t lecture anyone or produce photos of dead animals over lunch. But the recent SU referendum irked me. It is disappointing, frankly, that in a university supposedly committed to critical thought and debate, there is no real discussion or outcry about an issue as central to sustainability and ethical concerns as our eating habits.

The SU referendum was held at the start of Michaelmas, with a vote passed to abandon its campaign for 100% vegan catering in its university cafes. The campaign now advocates instead for a 75% plant-based target. The reasoning was twofold: first, that full vegan provision might compromise accessibility, for example, for students with sensory issues. And second: that there are more “important” sustainability issues.

“The problem, I suspect, is that we shy away from confronting the realities of modern livestock production”

Let me start by saying that accessibility, of course, warrants serious attention. But the way it’s been invoked here feels a little, well, convenient. The suggestion that plant-based catering is inherently less accessible confuses poor menu design with the concept itself. Plenty of students with sensory sensitivities or otherwise restricted diets rely on foods that are already plant-based: plain pasta, rice, potatoes, breads. If accessibility is the genuine concern, then the solution is thoughtful planning and labelling, not maintaining a default that is animal-product heavy, especially when it is animal products that exclude the widest range of diets and allergens in the first place.

The claim that there are more “important” sustainability issues is equally puzzling. Can the SU be more specific? And since when can we tackle only one sustainability problem at a time? I won’t drown this piece in numbers, but it’s hardly contentious to note that food-system emissions are dominated by animal products, and that shifting diets have an enormous potential to cut them – credible estimates suggest that shifting away from animal products could reduce global food-system emissions by around 50%, with even larger reductions (+60%) possible in high-consumption contexts such as the United States. I had hoped the University’s cafés might nudge people towards trying good vegan food rather than defaulting to old habits, and perhaps even discovering they like it in the process.

And yet all the talk of sustainability, helpful as it is, manages to sidestep the far more uncomfortable point at the heart of the matter: animal welfare. We tend to stop the sustainability talk around carbon calculations because this feels neutral, no one can quite judge what anyone else is doing to reduce their emissions. But how we value animals is another question altogether – and one we seem remarkably reluctant to articulate.

“I’m struck by how willing we are to call out injustice in so many contexts, yet don’t follow the same moral logic when it comes to what we choose to eat”

The problem, I suspect, is that we shy away from confronting the realities of modern livestock production. Factory farming, responsible for the overwhelming majority of global and UK animal agriculture, functions by prioritising efficiency over welfare. That is not a controversial claim. One doesn’t have to be especially imaginative to see that our current level of consumption is not being upheld by cows gently ambling about on smallholdings. In Cambridge, one might picture the familiar sight of cows grazing on Coe Fen as representative of the system under discussion. In reality, these bear roughly the same relation to industrial agriculture as a Beatrix Potter illustration does.

The University Catering Services insist on sourcing animal products that are Red Tractor certified, as though the label were a meaningful guarantee of welfare. Yet investigations have repeatedly shown that Red Tractor standards amount to little more than the legal minimum, and are poorly enforced even then. Practices most people would assume are banned, from confining mother pigs in farrowing crates for weeks on end with too little space to even turn around, or rearing chickens at densities barely larger than an A4 sheet of paper, are all permitted. Farms carrying the label have been seen beating animals, using illegal methods of slaughter and allowing injured animals to suffer without treatment. The scheme’s inspections are largely pre-announced; its funding comes from the industry it claims to regulate. As far as assurances go, it is a remarkably thin one for a university to rely on. I’ll stop there - my ‘reasonable vegan’ status is already hanging by a thread. You all have access to the internet.

My own reluctance to say all this aloud frustrates me most – something that reflects both the broader hesitancy among vegans to speak up and the rather comfortable indifference of those who would prefer not to think about their eating habits at all. When the SU’s original 100% proposal passed in 2023, the then president of the Cambridge Vegan Society Bella Shorrock, speaking to Varsity, remarked that “angry vegans with their pictures of dead animals” give veganism a bad name. Perhaps they do. And yet, it is an odd moral contortion, that drawing attention to suffering is treated as more inappropriate than the suffering itself. While I understand the instinct to avoid sounding preachy, I’m struck by how willing we are to call out injustice in so many contexts, often quite forcefully, yet don’t follow the same moral logic when it comes to what we choose to eat.

It might be hard to tell, but I am generally optimistic. I do believe that progress is happening, and that norms can shift, especially when institutions like ours are willing to question the familiar. After all, any kind of plant-based target would have sounded implausible not too long ago. And clearly, our understanding of inclusivity is valuable, yet it cannot mean indulging every preference while the cost doesn’t figure in the discussion. That’s why this referendum left me so frustrated. If a university, of all places, cannot manage this reflection, one does begin to wonder what the point of all this education actually is.