Lucky Worcester
Fabulous headline:
Friar Street is set to become the home of new vegan and queer space
Vegan and queer. All the fun in one place! Should we call it queegan? Veer? Vuighur?
A NEW vegan deli and non-binary clothing shop is set to open in the city centre.
I don’t much fancy the idea of clothes and deli in the same space. Feels a bit nauseating somehow.
Flo will be opening up in Friar Street offering a safe space to the LGBTQ+ community.
Who’s Flo? Why are we suddenly talking about her instead of the deli-clothes mashup?
Owner Rie Vockins named the new store after their grandmother who was called Florence and called it a ‘phoenix from the flames’ after a difficult three years.
…
Mx Vockins said: “I’m opening a vegan deli and gender-neutral clothing store.
Any chance of a gender-neutral deli and a vegan clothing store? I think I’d prefer that.
“If you’ve had a bad day, you can come here and just pop in and say hi. It’s a safe place for everyone.”
Hm. That’s very nice and everything but it’s not going to pay the rent. It’s kind of a niche market as it is – vegan gender-neutral people who want to eat and buy clothes at the same time. If you make it into a kind of clubhouse where people can just hang out saying hi to each other, your profits might turn out to be smallish.
The store will be split into two sections. At the front, the store will offer a vegan deli bar serving artisan cheese, wine and meat and the rear will have racks of gender-neutral and sustainable clothing.
Ok. This is very difficult, technical stuff, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. Except maybe the “gender-neutral clothing” part – I’m not sure what that means.
A vegan deli serving “cheese, wine and meat”?
Pretty soon all the kale in Worcester is going to start identifying as meat.
Vegans I know tend to refer to vegan faux “cheese” and vegan faux “meat” as cheese and meat, respectively, if they assume the context is clear. Often it isn’t. Perhaps they see the products divided into “cheese” and “real cheese” (or “dairy cheese”) rather than “cheese” and “fake cheese”.
lol how did I miss that? I guess I was so challenged by the very difficult technical stuff that my overheated brain just couldn’t handle it. But yes no doubt the shop identifies as vegan and the cheese and meat identify as soy cheese and tofu meat without regard to their actual contents.
I get the impression that the person opening the shop doesn’t really get out much. However much it may seem to be the case, Twitter is not the world. Online, the Vegan NB “community” may seem widespread and vocal, but they’re not likely to visit Worcester from Portland, Christchurch or Toronto.
It’s not just a niche market, but a niche within a niche. They’re struggling under the assumption that combining the two demographics is expanding potential customer base when in fact it is shrinking it. The Venn diagram showing the overlap of “nonbinary” and “vegan” is not a circle. Each of those two putative “communities” is already a tiny minority within the population at large. There’s no particular reason to believe that most vegans are NBs, or that most NBs are vegans. Now if they were to open a shop intending aimed at catering to male sex offenders who “identify” as women, then they’d be on to something.
TVAV!
@Mel #1: A friend of mine, who went vegan a few years back, asked what stopped me becoming vegan. I said “cheese”. He said, “you can get vegan cheese”.
After I stopped laughing, I asked what kind of “cheese” it was and reeled off a Python-esque list of all the cheeses I could think of on the spot. He hasn’t asked me since.
I did follow up with: why don’t you just accept that you eat a restricted diet and stop pretending to eat the things that you don’t eat? Why not just embrace the philosophy fully and stop torturing yourself with reminders of what you voluntarily gave up? I’ve never had a satisfactory reply.
When you think of it, the Labour Party in the UK is in the process opening up a vegan/NB deli…
The idea that being vegan has anything to do with crude physical diet is a recent cultural invention and deeply rooted in racism and Western cultural imperialism. The stereotypical vegan is not just imagined to be cis-vegan (i.e. avoiding meat or other food-items derived from animals), but also white, middle-class, and straight. Oh, and this whole weird obsession with physical food-items is kind of obscene not to mention creepy as Hell. I’m just saying…
I think that they would say something like: Aww, come on, the store espouses a vegan philosophy and is geared mostly toward a vegan clientele, but that doesn’t mean that every product in the store needs to be vegan! Similarly, the non-binary clothing store can still carry some binary clothes, which you can buy as gifts for friends, in case you have any friends that are girls or boys.
>Why not just embrace the philosophy fully and stop torturing yourself with reminders of what you voluntarily gave up?
Speaking as a vegetarian (although not a vegan), if I eat black beans or tofu formed into a patty and grilled, it’s not because I’m torturing myself with reminders of what I voluntarily gave up. I’m just eating something tasty. (This is a conversation that I occasionally have in real life; for whatever reason, there are people out there who like to needle vegetarians for eating “fake meat,” even when the food in question is not really meant to imitate meat at all and just happens to be described as a “burger.”)
We are supposed to imagine that laboratory manipulated chemicals and pea protein is supposed to be healthy? Just give me tofu. I can deal with tofu.
Every faux dairy product I have had has just been vile.
I was asked the same question a few years ago, and gave the same answer (cheese is considered a staple in our house). I didn’t receive the same answer back, though. They just said “Oh, you can give up anything you want to”. Maybe. The thing is, I don’t want to.
Tempted to go along and order a steak so rare it’s still mooing, and then claim that I’m widening the bandwidth of veganism.
Trans kale is kale!
You win!
Re #11
There is a wonderful vegetarian cookbook I used to have, The Vegetarian Epicure, where the author advises against going the “fake meat” route and says just make good food that isn’t conceived with meat in the first place. I tend to agree; I, like you, enjoy the plant-based burger products on their own merits, not according to how well they simulate meat.
As to why this store is a combination clothing store and food store, I think the point is that vegan clothing exists; it uses no leather (or other animal products, I suspect, such as wool). Lots of places sell gender neutral clothing (one had a slogan of “clothes have no sex”, if I recall correctly), but I guess you can’t do that anymore, gender neutral clothing is only for gender neutral people now.
Graham @7 Exactly. There are vegan ‘grilles’ here, which serve things that resemble meat and other animal products. I have been on a vegan diet off and on for 20 years (mostly on), for health reasons, and I never understood that. Just eat vegetables people, it’s not that difficult. Besides, the overprocessed vegan ‘substitutes’ that I have tried didn’t agree with me. I don’t eat tofu or kale either because I don’t like the stuff, but I’m not going to have a vegan Philly cheesesteak. If I feel like a cheat, I’ll cheat with the real thing.
I think conflating gender ideology with veganism is appalling, it gives vegans a bad name, not that I’m a true vegan, but I’ve taken a lot of shit from people because of my diet. Eat whatever the hell you want is my philosophy on that, after all it’s a personal choice. I don’t recommend it to, or push it on anyone, and it takes some getting used to, which is why all the fake animal products are produced in the first place. I just happen to be fine with solely eating veggies. :)
Unfortunately eating isn’t just a personal choice, at least not in the sense that people’s choices don’t affect anyone else. Think cattle and monoculture and The Great Plains for just one example.
>If I feel like a cheat, I’ll cheat with the real thing.
Speaking as a vegetarian, I don’t understand this mindset. Imitation meats and imitation cheeses are arguably less healthy and less good for the environment than many other veg(etari)an foods, but that doesn’t make them any less veg(etari)an. I don’t see how it’s “cheating” to eat a meatless Philly cheesesteak.
@19 Good point, the harm to the environment from animal agriculture is massive, and when I changed my diet for health reasons alone I wasn’t aware of the full impact. The more we move away from animal agriculture to plant based is a step forward. What I mean is that my small choice seems insignificant, but it does make a small difference, and one that I wasn’t fully aware of, other than the personal benefits.
@20 Good point also, it really isn’t a cheat if I’m not eating animal products. What I mean is that if I’m going to cheat on my diet, it’s going to be an actual cheat, with real cheese made from milk, and real meat from animals that have lost their lives for me to consume them. This is more of a moral dilemma for me now than when I first started eating this way, so it helps me to stick to my diet, as I think more about my choices when eating, and now incorporate more awareness and understand the difference these choices make for not just my personal health, but for the welfare of the creatures and the impact on the environment.
Given that, I also avoid highly processed foods, and it’s difficult to produce phony meat, dairy, fish, etc. without a level of artificiality and processing to make the food appear and taste like something that it’s not. Given a choice between a plant based burger and a bowl of cooked fresh broccoli, I’ll pick the broccoli every time.
I love broccoli with my trans kale.
Well, yes and no. I feel I have to stick up for some traditional agricultural practices. Feedlots for cows as used in the USA and many other countries are a disaster. Huge quantities of agricultural land are given over to growing wheat and corn to feed cows on hard stands. All the manure has to be collected and taken away for processing. The whole thing is frankly offensive on many levels and relies on industrialisation and massive transport logistics from end to end.
Traditional grass based farming for animals – on appropriate soils and not relying on clearings forests or wetlands – has significantly lower carbon emissions and animal welfare is a much higher priority. NZ farmers are not all perfect, but as an industry they are definitely lifting their environmental game and their carbon cost (even allowing for freight) is low and improving. Additionally, there is promising research to reduce future methane emissions from ruminants as well.
On the other hand, vast areas of wheat, soy, maize, legumes create monocultural deserts, prone to disease, soil loss, and requiring fertiliser and spraying herbicides and pesticides.
The real issue is tuning the type of agriculture and it’s practices to the specific soils and ecology of the area. it requires educated and skilled farmers and researchers working hand in hand – and is not especially scalable in an industrial way. It still stands to feed more people high quality, low impact, ethical food than organic or industrial agriculture.
As the smoke rises upward @11: to be honest, I was ribbing him a bit with that remark, partly because his move from veggie to vegan was accompanied by also becoming a vegangelist who keeps banging on about it.
But also, when you have your bean patty, you acknowledge that’s it’s a bean patty. I wouldn’t consider a spinach and potato curry, for example, to be a “vegetarian lamb curry” – it’s a meal in its own right. I’m referring to things like “vegan bacon” which is shaped and coloured to look like bacon rashers or “vegan fried eggs” which just look awful.
Rob @23 I was thinking in terms of the amount of crop production that goes to feeding livestock as well, soybean farming in particular, when land that grows soybeans could be used to grow other vegetables that would also be suited for human consumption. The difference in the efficiency of eating plants vs. feeding animals plants and then eating the animals, or animal excretions is a big one. As I understand it, in NZ there is also the issue of the amount of land that has been cleared for grazing livestock, and the sizable export of animal products, which puts a lot of pressure on the arable land available there. It’s not just about their presence on the land with the localized impact, but the overall demand and large scale peripheral impact.
Again, when I was experimenting with how my diet affected my health in the late 90’s, I found that eating entirely plant based worked very well for me in particular, and only after that learned about the other reasons people choose to eat this way and how it affects other things besides personal health, and found it interesting.
Anyway, I think veganism, even as a fetish, which for many people it seems to be, is an entirely different *type* of thing than gender woo.
A bit binary for my tastes.
Oh, that’s easy enough to demonstrate: https://youtu.be/adPXDTvADD0
I think enby clothing is jeans with full pockets paired with tees that have v-necks and flowers.