The Vegan Guide: Everything you need to embrace the world's fastest growing way of life

Alex Bourke invites us on a guided tour, looking back at the last 25 years of the ‘Vegetarian – and now Vegan – Guides’ that Alex has produced, including his most recent book ‘The Vegan Guide’ released in 2021.

Vegetarian Guides: The Beginning

My first book was the 16-page The Hippy Cookbook that I launched at the International Vegan Festival in East Anglia in 1992. At that time I was living and working in Paris, so the following year produced The Vegan Guide to Paris, a whopping 32 pages containing 20 vegetarian and vegan restaurants and lots of shops.

At 1993’s International Vegan Festival in Spain, I then gave a workshop on how that book was produced, and the following year people who were at the festival brought out similar vegan guides to Amsterdam, Berlin, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Munich and New York.

After two years of living it up in Paris, I moved back to London and met my friend Paul Gaynor at London Vegans, who was distributing a photocopied list of all the vegetarian places in London. We decided to turn it into a book, meeting up evenings and weekends for the next few months, and in summer 1994 launched our 250-page Cruelty- Free Guide to London at Animal Aid’s summer fayre. We then managed to get it into every bookshop in London.

Since then there have been six more London guides, three for Britain, guides to France, Europe, East of England, North of England, Scotland and a 200-page guide to Paris. Also Campaign Against Cruelty – an activist’s handbook, and the film Animal Rights – A Universal Declaration, which features undercover footage from six nationals and is shown in schools across the country as part of the Citizenship curriculum. Recently I published mini vegan guides to Central, East, North, South and West London, and then combined those in the latest 800-page Vegan London Complete. Publication number 26 in 2021 is The Vegan Guide – everything you need to embrace the world’s fastest growing way of life.

‘Vegetarian’ vs. ‘Vegan’

In 1998 I registered the company name Vegetarian Guides Ltd. Back then, there were hardly any vegan restaurants. In London we had just Country Life in Soho, the East West macrobiotic restaurant on Old Street, and Rainforest Creations at Spitalfields Market, out of 100 vegetarian places. Bookshops wouldn’t have touched a guidebook with the word vegan in the title.

How things have changed.

Campaigning groups like Viva!, Animal Aid and PETA have revealed the realities of vegg-eat-dairyanism, that dairy and beef, or eggs and chicken, are the same business, and the deception of “vegetarian” cheese and “free range” eggs. Most new vegans go straight to vegan, not via several years of being vegetarian. Virtually all new vegetarian restaurant openings are vegan, except in Indian areas. A Waterstones manager told me “vegetarian is dead, everything needs to be vegan nowadays.” So I registered Vegan Guides Ltd before anyone else did, and am transitioning my business across to the new name. All the titles now proudly feature the word vegan.

Vegan: Done Right?

I remember the owner of Bunjies vegetarian restaurant on Charing Cross Road in the mid ‘90s lamenting that times were tough as so many mainstream restaurants had started offering vegetarian dishes. But in his restaurant there were only two vegan dishes. Vegetarians were fed up with having to always eat plain pizza, an omelette, or that abomination served in ‘80s pubs known as cauliflower cheese.

Now everyone has a vegan offering. The laws around food labelling are very strict, so yes the vegan offerings are vegan. Except when a new member or staff accidentally sends a real chicken burger out on Deliveroo to a vegan who ordered chick’n.

‘Big Brands’ & Multinationals

They are all about the money and follow the market. Those customers who used to read the menu and walk out, today they can capture them by having vegan options, whether those customers are vegans, vegetarians, or members of a religion that is against eating animal products. Imagine you’re a restaurant or pub and four groups of four hungry students walk in, chances are one of those groups includes a vegan, so if you don’t have great vegan options, you’ll lose the whole table and at least £40 to somewhere else that does.

Just look at how Leon and Brewdog do more vegan options every year, and Wagamama is already at 50%. Even McDonald’s is getting in on the vegan pound. The consensus amongst my readers about the McPlant burger is that’s it’s good that there is a vegan burger that tastes the same as a Big Mac for the same price, though many of them would not set foot in a McDonald’s themselves. Perhaps one day all Brewdogs, Wagamamas and Leons will be 100% vegan. I’m not so sure about McD though.

Moving Beyond Guides & Vegan Events?

We haven’t managed to get rid of the tobacco industry, except in Bhutan, where it was banned in 2010, though there is still smuggling from India and right now a temporary lifting of the ban so smugglers don’t bring in covid. So no, I don’t see a 100% vegan world anytime soon, but maybe 90%. In India. There is a vegetarian restaurant in every street, you don’t need a guidebook to find one, and in the UK we are definitely heading that way, only vegan. However, many vegan restaurants don’t display the V word in their name for fear of scaring away non-vegans, so for now we’ll be needing guides to find them.

A vegan world can only happen when subsidies for nonsense crops such as meat, dairy, eggs, and let’s throw in tobacco and sugar, are ended. Then those brutal industries, which only exist at all because they are propped up by subsidies, will collapse. Farmers can be helped to transition to growing healthy, sustainable, highly profitable, plant foods, as some already have, and no one will need to get up at 5am anymore. Everybody wins. I’ll be out of a job of course and very happy about that. I can teach English or help out in a vegan café. And go to vegan festivals every weekend.

Favourite Spaces

I like being able to create my own meal, so have always loved buffets. Back in the day, Country Life, Cranks and Heathers were the pioneers, and Rainforest Creations for raw buffets. Then came the Loving Hut vegan Chinese buffets.

Nowadays it seems to be burgers, burgers, burgers and loaded fries everywhere, which is not food I would choose to eat every day, though it’s fun once in a while. Which is why I am a huge fan of Vantra - a healthy vegan restaurant in Soho, and the many healthy, black owned vegan cafes and restaurants such as Guava Kitchen, All Nations Caribbean Vegan House, Lovegift Vegan and 222. There are also lots of elegant new high-end vegan restaurants serving very pretty food which is delightful for those who want to treat themselves to a bit of luxury.

Highlights

For me the explosion of vegan festivals has been utterly fabulous, with often several around the country on a weekend. Vegfest took them to a completely new level in top exhibition venues, with hundreds of stalls and dozens of workshop and event rooms and celebrity presenters.

Some might wonder why veganism trundled along for 60 or 70 years without making much of a dent in the world, and then suddenly exploded across the planet. The professionalization of our movement has changed everything, getting the truth about food out into national media so everyone can see it. It began with the arrival of Viva! and PETA in the ‘90s, and continues with Veganuary saturating the media every day throughout January and getting vegan food ranges into every supermarket. I remember when the Vegan Society had just three staff and a

bunch of well-meaning but mostly clueless amateur trustees who year after year opposed even having a press officer. Now they have over 60 staff, a big media department, employ dietitians, and their trademark is everywhere. And let’s not forget grassroots activists up and down the country tabling every weekend in town centres. These days it’s no longer a table covered with gory animal abuse leaflets; now we have recipes, health and the environment to talk about, and vegan food giveaways, all whilst still revealing the horrors of the animal slavery industries.

The arrival of really tasty vegan burgers that don’t cost four times as much as cowburgers is an important breakthrough. Standout moments on national television for me were the BOSH! boys making vegan cooking fun, and watching Ellie Goulding cook with Jamie Oliver. In 2021 the things I’m most excited about are the stunningly designed and masterfully written information sheets, videos and books published by the vegan doctors, dietitians and nutritionists at Plant Based Health Professionals UK; Animal Rebellion working with ProVeg to get vegan food into school canteens; and the arrival in Europe of Plant Based Treaty.

The New Guide

Boris closing all restaurants and bookshops for months in 2020 brought my restaurants guidebook business to a standstill. So I got on with an old idea for a low-priced but comprehensive guide to going vegan or doing it better, compiled by a team of experts and campaigning legends. These included my old co-author, friend and chef Ronny Worsey, and members of London Vegan Campaigns, the group whose members invented vegan festivals, street stalls with food giveaways, set up London’s first vegan café, and created the original one-month Vegan Pledge. I was frustrated by the poor quality of the (mostly American) go-vegan books out there that were written either from an animal rights viewpoint or a health angle and were, quite frankly, one-sided, dull, way too long, or very lightweight with huge fonts and many important nuances of our diet omitted. We decided to do it right.

The Vegan Guide – everything you need to embrace the world’s fastest growing way of life doesn’t open with 50 pages about what’s wrong with animal farming. We summarise all the go-vegan arguments in six pages, then dive straight into a mouth-watering spread of vegan food from all around the world. There are sections on all the basic vegan cooking and recipe construction techniques you’ll need, meat and dairy substitutes, the psychology of dealing with family, friends, and your kids’ school, the 20 tribes of vegan, reversing diabetes and heart disease with vegan wholefoods, feeding cats and dogs by the world’s top vegan vet, comprehensive coverage of vegan nutrition by a graduate nutritionist and a GP with a masters in nutrition, and we end with where to get help and how vegans will take over the world. 160 pages for just a fiver, by some of Britain’s most experienced campaigners and vegan professionals – what’s not to like? And our book has jokes, lots of them. Buy now online or order from any bookshop. They make great stocking fillers and they’re ideal for anyone doing Veganuary or simply wanting to up their vegan game and fill the gaps in their knowledge.

Plant Based Treaty

In September 2021 I was approached by Plant Based Treaty, a new division of the Animal Save Movement that started in Canada many years ago, to help with their campaign in the UK to get the Treaty added to the Paris Climate Agreement. The principal demands of the Plant Based Treaty are to halt the expansion of animal grazing and feed growing and the deforestation they imply, to reduce animal agriculture and redirect its subsidies to help farmers transition to plant-based, and finally to restore land liberated from animal farming for reforesting and rewilding.

I went up to Glasgow and compiled a plant based guide to the city centre and the area around COP26, with a big map of 20 vegan and 11 vegetarian pubs, cafes and restaurants. I also ran a stall at Glasgow Vegan Festival to recruit local vegans to PBT, and gave a talk to the vegan group at Strathclyde University and got the student union on board for our first event.

Then at the end of October I returned with a big team of Plant Based Treaty Campaigners and we ran events around the city, starting with a giant “cow in the room” at Strathclyde University student union where the United Nations Conference of Youth was taking place. We distributed 25,000 of our free vegan Glasgow guides into cafes and pubs and everywhere inside COP26, projected our videos onto iconic Glasgow buildings at night with dancers doing the Plant Based Treaty dance, and gave out free vegan chocolate bars and energy drinks from The Vegan Kind, the “vegan Amazon” which is based in Glasgow, to anyone who endorsed the Treaty. Unfortunately, on day 5 of our 17-day campaign, I went down with covid and had to watch the rest of the show online while spluttering and sweating in isolation.

I talked earlier about how we must end animal ag subsidies. At COP26 it was shocking that Boris Johnson and COP26 President Alok Sharma chose to keep animal ag off the agenda, having already suppressed a report about the benefits of plant-based agriculture. The political will to even talk about animal agriculture does not yet exist. And yet, several Glasgow MPs supported an early day motion in favour of the Plant Based Treaty. PBT will continue throughout 2022 to invite individuals, businesses and organisations to endorse the Treaty and lobby their local and national political representatives to do the same. The Plant Based Treaty can unite the voices of not just the entire worldwide vegan movement, but all those who recognise the importance of halting the expansion of animal agriculture, rolling it back, and restoring the natural world. It’s our best shot at getting animal agriculture on the agenda at COP27, knocking out the subsidies, and bringing the entire meat and dairy industry down, so it can transition to plantbased, with all the benefits that will bring for the world. And farmers too.

The Plant Based Treaty can unite the voices of not just the entire worldwide vegan movement, but all those who recognise the importance of halting the expansion of animal agriculture, rolling it back, and restoring the natural world.