Do you all remember when I was talking about a vegan cruise down the Danube? Sure you do. It was all I spoke about on my blog for six months!
It has taken me a while to process the experience and now I feel just about ready to share a fraction of some of the hundreds of photos I took during this once in a lifetime experience. Boarding the ship was like stepping into a completely vegan world and everything you could want or need was at your fingertips.
I even got my haircut onboard!
Before you get busy scrolling below to see my cabin, food and sightseeing photos, I want to also tell you I am joining forces with Vegan River Cruises for two glorious vacations in 2016. Yes, two 100% luxury vegan cruises to choose from this year.
The first cruise will be a 7 night/8 day cruise along the Rhône in the south of France. I’m not sure I need to sell too hard with this one. It’s the south of France in late October 2016!
All your food, all your drink and some of the most glorious Autumn weather in Europe? Yes, please. See you on the ship! Click here to see all the details and to book your cabin.
I did say I will be on two luxury vegan cruises in 2016. Here is the second.
I am thrilled to be taking part in the Vegan River Cruises trip between December 29, 2016 and January 4, 2017 as it takes in the glorious waterways of the Netherlands and Belgium.
Starting in Amsterdam before docking in Brussels for New Year’s Eve, this Winter cruise is going to be the height of relaxation as we glide past windmill-studded countryside. Get in early if you want one of the best cabins. Click here for info and booking.
OK. Now those photos I promised you from my recent NYE vegan cruise down the Danube.
This blog has been nominated in the Best Vegan Blogger category as part of the Vegan Awards UK 2016.
It’s always a thrill to get a nod like this so thank you to Vegan Festival UK, the organisers of the awards as well as several fabulous vegan events around the country.
See the full list of nominees in the Best Vegan Blogger category below:
As of the end of April/beginning of May 2016, I no longer work with Besos de Oro
I am super happy to announce that I am helping Besos de Oro promote their gorgeous vegan Baileys alternative throughout the UK.
If you were one of the fortunate VegfestUK attendees who got their hands on this creamy spirit-based drink over the past year, you already know what all the fuss is about. It felt as if the majority of people stopping by my FGV stand at the shows were doing so to tell me about this amazing drink they had just sampled.
Besos de Oro is a creamy, subtly sweet brandy and horchata drink that can be consumed on its own as a digestif or poured over ice cream or brownies as a decadent treat. Personally, I would be making some sort of alcohol-fuelled milkshake topped with vegan cream.
When Peter from Besos de Oro reached out to me to see if I wanted to be part of the UK team, I jumped at the chance.
As of the end of April/beginning of May 2016, I no longer work with Besos de Oro
The first big piece of news I am spreading for Besos de Oro is their Valentine’s special offer.
Check it out.
Besos de Oro have a fantastic offer for Valentine’s Day 2016.
Loved up shoppers will get a bag featuring 12 raspberry-filled chocolate hearts made by the glorious Essy & Bella (remember I wrote about them here?) plus a bottle of Besos de Oro for £19.99 plus £2.50 p&p.
That is a pretty special deal and I’d say that even if I wasn’t part of the sales team.
This Valentine’s offer is limited to only 300 orders and because I was a bit slow getting this blog post up, I think a big chunk of that quantity has already been snapped up. Order promptly and the delivery is guaranteed to reach you and/or your sweetheart in time for the big day.
If you want to order a bottle with a bag of chocolates for someone special (that can include yourself!), you need to get over to the Besos de Oro Facebook page and send them a private message telling them you want to order. Peter will put a bottle of the creamy drink and a bag of hearts aside for you before telling you how to pay.
Now, if someone could just buy one of these packs and ship to me in Mexico my heart would be eternally theirs.
Interested in marketing? Have a passing interest in mass advertising?
Let Gourmet Burger Kitchen demonstrate how NOT to run an advertising campaign in 2016:
Firstly, spend several years building up a small but not insignificant niche following of vegetarians by developing an inclusive menu with clear labelling on all your meat free options.
Then push yourself to be one of the only restaurant chains to include extensive vegan beer and wine listings on your menu, thus opening yourself up to one of the fastest growing consumer groups in the country.
Finally, release a staggeringly ill-conceived series of billboard adverts ridiculing individuals who choose not to eat animal flesh. Make these potential customers feel stupid and out of touch. Let them know their compassionate choices mean nothing to you or your business.
If you still have energy left, apologise and say it was all a silly joke that went wrong.
End of lesson.
Gourmet Burger Kitchen is surely learning an expensive lesson that will stick with them a long, long time. Vegetarians and vegans possess undisputed buying power that can seriously affect the financial wellbeing of a food business.
Who do they think holds the balance of power when a group of friends, family members or work colleagues go out for a meal? Yep, the people who won’t just eat whatever is shoved in front of them. The people who have special requests make a lot of decisions when it comes to group dining.
Take my partner Josh for instance.
Josh was working in a central London office with approximately 30 people, including 3 vegans. Every time a staff social event was planned, an email was sent to the vegans with a few restaurants or catering suggestions in order for them to say yes or no.
It was that simple. If the vegans didn’t feel comfortable with the suggestion, the staff party wouldn’t be held there.
You don’t have to be a genius to see how this translates into lost income, but I wanna expand because I like the sound of my own keyboard.
Imagine if 30 people were readying for an office meal and Gourmet Burger Kitchen was suggested. Josh and his vegan comrades would send an email back to the social secretary saying, “No thanks.”
I’m not sure what the average spend per diner is at GBK but let’s say it is a conservative £15. Now multiply the 30 missing guests by the spend per head to reach lost income of £450, which I would say is on the very low end of what a party of that size would spend.
When we start to think of all the vegans and vegetarians around the country who were outraged by those billboards, we can start to see the huge financial blow this could have on the burger chain.
A group of friends want to catch up over snacks and a couple of beers? The vegan says no to GBK, instantly costing the company £80. When my friend asks me where he can take me for a bottle of wine to catch up when he is in the UK, I think of all the vegan options at GBK but then opt for another bar when I remember the billboards that made fun of my compassionate choices. We would have spent at least £50 on wine.
And so on.
These figures might not sound like much as stand alone loses, but you add up every single time a vegan or vegetarian gets to navigate their group away from GBK and you are potentially looking at millions of pounds in lost takings across a year.
If I tell my friends enough times that a restaurant was disrespectful to me as a customer, it starts to sink in and inform their choices even when I’m not eating with them. Imagine this on a scale of a hundred thousand customers repeatedly telling their friends that a food chain made fun of them and their choices.
This knock-on effect of lost trade and decline in brand identity is nothing short of a PR disaster for the burger chain. Not only do they stand to lose money, but also the goodwill of a huge swathe of consumers and that is a lot tougher to win back.
So, there you have it people. How NOT to run an advertising campaign in 2016.
I once wrote a blog post for my buddy JL in which I explained how mainstream media and advertising made me feel like an outsider as I grew up in Australia.
You can read that original post here, but the main message was that the perpetuation of eating animal flesh as normal was inextricably woven into other hegemonic themes such as sexual identity, male virility and body perfection. The media worked to make me feel like a failure or not the best ‘man’ I could be. That’s right, the name Fat Gay Vegan was created as a counter to these negative and damaging forces.
Fast forward four years since I penned that post and how have things changed in Australia?
Well, watch this recent television advert and spot how many ways I (or anybody) could be offended.
Many of my readers are of course vegan so the attempt to portray the vegan as the non-sporty person, cowering on the floor on their own, will be the part of the advert that confronts on first watch. I’m not sure how to begin unpacking the scene where the military use a flamethrower to set the vegan’s coffee table on fire. Is that violence as a comedic response to someone saying they don’t eat animals? I’m struggling to see the humour.
The vegan is also the only person not ‘Australian’ enough to be considered worthy of being airlifted back for the national celebration. That’s some straight up bullshit.
OK, so we have the vegan-shaming out of the way. Let me get some other things off my chest.
The most excruciatingly offensive and upsetting part of this advert is the appropriation of Indigenous terms and language to promote Australia Day.
For those of you who don’t know, Australia Day is ‘celebrated’ each year on January 26. The date remembers the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Port Jackson in what is modern day Sydney. This marked the beginning of the systemic brutalisation of the Indigenous people of the landmass that came to be known as Australia.
Not sure what I mean by brutalisation?
European forces took ‘ownership’ of an already populated land by poisoning, shooting, hanging, starving and massacring Aboriginal people who resisted (and many who didn’t). Women and children were raped and killed. Families were torn apart in the belief that Aboriginal children would never have a good life (or possibly as a deliberate genocide tool to force the ‘dying out’ of Aborigines). This forced removal of children from families came to be commonly referred to as The Stolen Generations and it is estimated that approximately 100,000 Aboriginal children were separated from their family unit. This happened officially until c. 1970.
So how does this all fit into the lamb advert you watched above?
The campaign to bring Australians back ‘home’ so they don’t miss out on eating dead animals on Australia Day is jokingly referred to as Operation Boomerang. Yes, that’s correct. A celebration of the arrival of murderous invaders that immeasurably altered the lives of generations of Indigenous people has been given the Indigenous name of a hunting and ceremonial weapon. A boomerang returns to the thrower, just like these Australian are returning home to eat lamb. Get it?!
Many Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians refer to Australia Day as Invasion Day and this ad campaign makes a mockery of the Aboriginal experience. It has completely disregarded Aboriginal perspectives, apart from stealing a term to serve its own message.
How many other ways can I take offence by watching this advert?
Let’s see:
to my eye, every Australian being ‘boomeranged’ back for Australia Day presents as white.
there are no overweight people being brought ‘home’.
sport is woven into the entire theme and the explicit link between eating meat, maleness and being Australian is undeniable. No women sportspeople were involved, because sexism is rampant in Australian culture and the contributions of women in sport is seen as negligible.
the advert is racist in it’s portrayal of Japanese people as business experts wrapped up in ceremony. Did you see that goofy, white Australian ‘bloke’ not able to get his head around their kooky custom of bowing? He didn’t know when to stop! LOL. Quick, get him some lamb to eat.
the militarisation of national identity is complete in this advert. The army/special ops are seen as enforcers of a narrow view of Australian identity. They will ‘rescue’ you if you are a white, sporty, lamb-eating man with a fit body… or a women who fits these characteristics but doesn’t rock the boat too much.
I often talk about the way in which multiple prejudices work together to perpetuate domineering and dominating forces.
This advert is almost comical in its outrageous attempt to paint a picture of what being Australian means. The advertisers are using anti-veganism, body shaming, racism/white-dominance, nationalism, sexism and military worship in order to sell a product that is violent at its core.
This is why we as vegans need to resist and challenge all forms of oppression. They are all connected and it is common for them to be used in tandem to perpetuate animal suffering, dominance, and privilege.
Extra note: it is somewhat heartening to learn that this advert has rapidly become the most complained about advert in the history of modern Australia.
This is my favourite piece of news I have shared in a long time.
I’m thrilled to let you know I am making my very own beer!
The brew is being made and sold in conjunction with Dominion Brewery Company, which is also responsible for the incredibly popular Pitfield range of vegan beers.
Andy, head brewer and owner of Dominion, has helped me bring my ideas to life and we recently held a tasting workshop during which we fine tuned the flavours.
The FGV beer will be exclusively launched at London Vegan Beer Fest in July and will be available to attendees of Manchester Vegan Beer Fest and Glasgow Vegan Beer Fest later in the year.
You can follow Vegan Beer Fest UK on Facebook and Twitter to be the first to know about tickets and dates for these three huge events in 2016.
Following on from the beer fests, the FGV beer will be available to buy online and in independent beer shops, vegan retailers and selected bars.
I recently answered a letter, in my role as resident agony uncle for Vegan Life Magazine, about how to deal with non-vegan guests at a vegan wedding.
My suggestion to the concerned reader was to throw the sort of wedding they wanted to throw. If people love and care for you, they will respect your wishes and enjoy the event.
That is exactly what happened during the wedding of Els and Matt. Josh and I were thrilled to be a part of the special event and Els was more than happy for me to share how wonderful the celebration was with all of you.
Check it out. This is what a vegan wedding looks like.
One of the most enjoyable parts of the incredible vegan cruise I have been on during the past week was getting to spend time with one of my favourite vegans.
Colleen Patrick-Goudreau is a one-person powerhouse. Her educational books, talks, public appearances, podcasts, and interviews are more than inspirational. Colleen has the rare ability to engage complete strangers with her disarming and charming conversational presentation style, leaving them happy to have heard her message of how to go and stay vegan.
If you have ever questioned if a person can be unapologetically vegan AND a nice person, you haven’t met Colleen. She speaks with complete authority when it comes to why and how people choose to live vegan, but never loses her compassion for other humans in the process.
A photo posted by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau (@joyfulvegan) on
The above photo was posted by Colleen over on her Instagram account. We had a fabulous time catching up as we cruised along the Danube with Vegan River Cruises.
You can get all the latest updates from Colleen by visiting her website, liking her on Facebook and following her on Twitter.
At least a few times a week I am asked to name my favourite, must-eat vegan dishes in London.
The list of food and drink I can’t live without in the capital changes now and again, but here is the current crop of things that make me go “Yummers!” in London.
Get ready to work your way through Fat Gay Vegan’s Top 13 Things to Consume in London.
