The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder might seem the perfect soundtrack for a vegan festival, but it’s not hard to see why the DJ replaces it halfway through with something more upbeat. Morrissey’s accusatory vocals don’t fit the ambience of a sunny day on Spain’s laidback east coast.
Although we’re at an old cigarette factory in a slightly rundown suburb of Alicante, the atmosphere is more like a village fete than a radical meeting. In front of where they used to make the cigarettes (now a trendy art gallery) there are stalls selling chutney, muffins and smoothies. On stage, they’ve just finished packing away the props left by the children’s entertainers and, inside, more than 200 people have just crammed themselves into a soap-making workshop.
Visitors, best described as v-curious rather than vegan or vegetarian, are cooing in surprised delight at the quality of some of the food on sale. The muffins are particularly good. Made with local carob pods they have the faint bitterness of dark chocolate but with a richness that leaves you scooping up the crumbs in the paper cups. Is the fact that more than 5,000 people made it here to try these and other delights, on a bakingly hot late summer Saturday, another sign that vegetarianism is making inroads into what was once one of Europe’s most determinedly carnivorous countries?
Lonely Planet’s World Food Guide to Spain, published in 2000, advised vegetarian visitors to the country to pack “a small stash of vitamins and a big sense of humour”, and said that many Spaniards “consider a dead pig to be a vegetable”. Things, however, are changing. In 2011, the Happy Cow vegetarian website listed 353 vegetarian or vegan restaurants in the country. This year’s figure is 686, an increase of 94%. Over the same period the number of such restaurants in the UK has increased by 60%, from 842 to 1344.
At the same time, vegetables have become increasingly revered at high-end restaurants, too. In 2011 the “new revelation” chef of the year at the prestigious Madrid Fusion awards was Rodrigo de la Calle, who says: “If I could get away with it I wouldn’t cook with fish or meat at all.” Having won a Michelin star in Aranjuez and then run the restaurant at one of Madrid’s most luxurious hotels, Villa Magna, he’s perhaps Spain’s most prominent “vegivore”, although he’s not a vegetarian. “The bad thing about vegetarianism is that it’s negative,” he says. “It’s more about the maltreatment of animals than it is the love of vegetables. I’m somebody who loves vegetables because I like eating them, not because I worry that animals suffer when we kill them.”
The idea that we should, at the very least, eat less meat is increasingly common in Spain, as in many other parts of Europe. However, the co-organiser of the Vegan Fest, journalism student Laura Jiménez, is ambivalent about the new trendiness of veganism and her less puritanical fellow-travellers. “Things have definitely improved,” she says. “Three years ago we didn’t have any vegan restaurants here in Alicante. Now we have a vegan bakery, 3 Semillas, a tapas bar, Vegan Point, and there’s another vegan restaurant opening in October. But I think a lot of people are becoming vegan for health reasons, when it should be about defending the rights of animals. What should really worry people is that there are still animals being maltreated. Fundamentally that’s the issue we should be dealing with, not the flavour of the food.”
Arguably, it’s been the flavour of the food that’s held veganism back for many years. Morrissey’s argument that “meat is murder” because it’s “death for no reason” was always a bit shaky. Meat-eaters can come up with any number of good reasons for eating a steak. A few years ago in Spain a particularly compelling reason was that there were few tasty, healthy alternatives to meat. Vegans, vegetarians and vegivores alike should be happy that, at last, that’s no longer the case.
