Veganish Dot World

I found these Very British bangers from the very good Butchers from Canada at grocery outlet several months ago. I think they were two dollars for a package of four sausages. That was a great deal so I bought a couple of packages and put them in the freezer.

Even though I had never tried these (so I didn’t know how they tasted), I thought they were worth a try because of the “very good” nutrition facts on here.

I believe they are something like 190 cal, 27 g of protein, 4 g of fiber, maybe just 0.5 gram saturated fat, and only about 15% of the maximum recommended daily value for sodium.

Another thing I like about these is that they are pre-cooked and ready to eat. This makes them great for camping food because one can basically munch on a sausage like this instead of a granola bar. Or if you’re at home and feeling lazy, you can slice up something like this and eat it right out of the package without needing to heat anything up.

I don’t know if it’s ADHD, hyper focus, or what, but often times I don’t have the wherewithal to do anything other than grab food and eat it. Otherwise, I don’t eat anything at all. So it’s very helpful to have food like this that I can eat straight out of the package,

I finally tried the Very Good Butchers Very British Bangers one evening. I sliced them up and cooked them with a little bit of oil in a frying pan. Once they were browned on both sides, I put the slices in a bowl and dipped them in the Trader Joe’s vegan creamy cauliflower salad dressing. That was a nice high protein, low carb snack.

I wish that a product like this could be widely available at grocery stores all over the world for a more affordable price. Most grocery stores don’t carry anything like this at all. But if they do carry something like this, most likely it is more like eight dollars for a package.

I checked the very good butchers website, and it seems that they sell these for typically around $11 per package. After that, I would imagine that one would have to pay for shipping and that wouldn’t be cheap either.

I had posted about these very British bangers when I first bought them, in the let’s go vegan-ISH Facebook group. Someone had told me that they thought that the very good butchers were going out of business. Several months have passed since then. I was curious, so I looked them up at their website.

On the website, I didn’t see any kind of update on the status of the company. However, I do see that it says that their products are only available to order up through December 31, 2022.

I looked at their blog, which is referenced from their website, and the last post on the blog went up in February 2022. I’m guessing they were no longer able to pay anybody to put up new blog posts after that. Either that or they were too disgruntled about their company outlook to produce any more chirpy, cheerful posts about the delicious meals that one can make with their products.

I googled “very good butchers news,” and I found several articles from this year.

One of the articles says that the very good butchers company has not been profitable since 2016. Wow! Six years without being profitable. What a bummer!

The very good butchers (from Canada, mainly based out of Vancouver, it seems) indicates they had been producing a wide variety of meatless meats. If the nutrition on the other products is similar to the very British bangers that I got, then these would have been very nutritious options for people. But perhaps they were generally speaking, too expensive for regular people to go for, on a frequent basis?

It’s so discouraging to see companies that are producing good, nutritious products like this not being able to survive. More and more, it seems to me that we need some sort of government support to help companies like that make their products for a cheaper price and also increase their distribution levels so that more people can have access to these and buy them for the cheaper prices.

In the USA, people often reference President John F Kennedy, in the early 1960s, making the goal of putting a person on the moon by the end of the decade of the 1960s. Surely the US government spent a lot of money on that project, and indeed they did put a USA person on the moon in 1969.

I often wonder, why wouldn’t the USA government be able to make a similar goal with regards to making nutritious, meat alternatives available for a cheap price in all grocery stores across the USA, within the next 10 years? Sure, it would cost money to ramp up production and create facilities to produce these nutritious alternatives (similar to the very good butchers products), but I can’t imagine that it would cost so much more, compared to ramping up the space program. Plus, after the initial investment, the animal-alternative food industries would be continuing on, making money and being profitable, just like any other food industries are today.

The way it is right now it seems like a vicious cycle. Small businesses start up with great recipes, good products, providing vegan alternatives to animal products. However, their products are more expensive because it’s more expensive to produce things in small batches. Yes, there is a small percentage of people who are wealthy enough to pay higher prices and who will buy it, but if they try to expand to reach a wider audience, which is what is absolutely essential for helping animals, they can’t find enough people who are willing to pay the higher prices and therefore they can’t expand.

So they are destined to stay either a small boutique industry, which means that animals can’t be helped by the existence of the meatless, meat companies, or they go out of business, because they expanded too much and invested money in that, thinking people would buy their products, but people didn’t buy them because they were too expensive.

If the product isn’t nutritious or isn’t tasty, those are different issues., For those cases, they need better recipes or better techniques for making a better product. What I’m talking about is a product that is nutritious and tasty enough for people to eat on a regular basis. If the product is too expensive, and people aren’t buying it because of that, that’s where I feel like these businesses could use some help in order to expand and become an everyday thing that is available at grocery stores all across the world.

A different solution besides government leadership on this issue is for companies that already make animal products to also have lines where they produce vegan or meatless alternatives.

One example of this is the Cacique soy chorizo. It tends to be about $1.80 to 2 dollars, and that’s very similar to the pork chorizo that Cacique also makes. Perhaps if we could see more of the companies producing animal products doing things like this, we can finally have meatless alternatives which are competitive, both price wise and nutrition wise, with the animal products.

Once vegan or meatless alternative to animal products are just as widely available and the same price, while being just as nutritious and just as tasty as the animal products .., Then, it will probably be a lot more realistic for a lot more people to choose the alternatives on a regular basis. Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I really hope so.

The pessimistic side is that unfortunately, right now, we are really far away from that being the reality. Right now it’s very uncommon to find the vegan or meatless alternative being competitive with the animal products in terms of widespread availability, price, convenience, nutrition, and taste.

I eat vegan food as my normal thing every day, but I don’t live a lifestyle that is similar to the way regular people live in the USA. And most people in the USA don’t live a lifestyle that is similar to how other people live in other countries.

Regardless of where people are in the world, most people are not encountering an abundance of vegan, nutritious, tasty, low cost options right in front of them that they are passing up on. For most people, whether they are in San Francisco California or Reno Nevada or Damariscotta Maine or Shanghai China or Lima Peru or Florence Italy, the vegan options are not readily available to them in their daily lives.

I don’t know what we can do to change this, as the situations and lifestyles are so different, all across the world. All I know is that we have a very long way to go. And we’re going to keep on seeing businesses like this put so much effort into things, creating great recipes and doing good work, and then failing and disappearing completely, unless we get some additional help, I think.

Edit: I’ve only tried that one item, Very British Bangers, which I thought was tasty enough. I bought it when it was two dollars a pack (clearance item at grocery outlet). I wouldn’t have bought it for $11 a pack plus shipping and the hassle of waiting for it to come in the mail.

However, if the very good butchers products in general were not very tasty, then these actually weren’t such a great product, and these were not such great recipes after all. Plus, I do realize that my taste buds are not the same as the usual person who eats meat on a regular basis. An item that is tasty enough for me might not be tasty enough for the general population to eat.

My point of this edit is simply to say that I’m not trying to suggest propping up a company that wasn’t making a “very good” product to begin with.

I am suggesting help for companies who are indeed making a product that is nutritious enough and tasty enough for people to eat on a regular basis as an alternative to the animal products or meat that they already eat.

Perhaps such companies need some support … partnerships with companies who produce meat, or otheanimal products, and or government subsidies like what it’s already provided to companies that produce meat and other animal productsso their tasty and nutritious products can be distributed widely and also have a low price. If the price is more expensive than the price of animal products, it won’t make most much sense for most people to switch to the meat-free alternative.