OPINION: The announcement by Nestlé of its new plant-based range was met with furious indignation from farmers who accused the food giant of ‘virtue signalling’. But where was their recognition of hypocrisy when dairy farming was linked to deforestation, asks Claire Hamlett.

Welsh farmers, led by the indefatigable anti-vegan-in-chief Gareth Wyn Jones, recently threatened to boycott Quality Street chocolate after its owner Nestlé announced the launch of a non-dairy range. Jones’s followers left hundreds of comments on a Facebook post criticising Nestlé for the move, with some accusing it of “virtue-signalling” while continuing to harm people and the planet in other ways.

It’s true that Nestlé is far from being an ethical company. It has been found to use child labour on cocoa farms on the Ivory Coast and to source palm oil from deforested areas, while it is also one of the world’s top plastic polluters. But all of that was the case before it created a plant-based range of chocolates. If you were already avoiding Quality Street or other Nestlé sweets for those reasons and your diet is plant-based, you probably won’t start eating them now. I haven’t eaten a KitKat since that disturbing Greenpeace ad in 2010 showing a man unwrapping one of the chocolate bars and biting into the finger of an orangutan, making blood dribble down his chin - a reference to the destruction of orangutan habitat to make way for palm oil plantations. I don’t eat Quality Street because, as some of Jones’ supporters pointed out, the individually wrapped chocolates create a lot of trash.

We should be under no illusion that Nestlé cares about the planet, despite its CEO Mark Schneider claiming that it is making plant-based chocolates for the sake of sustainability. He also said that adding a plant-based range is a “big commercial opportunity” for the company. Meanwhile, its other environmentally-destructive practices continue. This calls into question whether the new range is really motivated by environmental concerns or is simply an effort to expand Nestlé’s customer base, which - it should be noted but is ignored by Jones and his followers - can now include the lactose-intolerant as well as vegans.

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Whatever Nestlé’s reasoning, it’s clear that the people who called for a boycott of Quality Street were rattled by the fact that the environmental harms of dairy are becoming more widely accepted. If their concerns really were about the company’s unsustainable and unethical practices, one would expect them to hold other companies to the same standard, whether they cater to vegans or not. Yet they were curiously silent over revelations that products made using British cows’ milk have been linked to “catastrophic” deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado.

A new investigation by Greenpeace Unearthed, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and ITV has found that British dairy farms supplying ingredients for Cathedral City Cheddar, Anchor butter and Cadbury chocolate are feeding cows soya produced on deforested land in Brazil and exported by US agribusiness Cargill. The investigation spotlights a “megadairy” in Cornwall, one of a growing number of intensive US-style dairy farms in the UK, where the cows are indoors all year round and partly fed on soya. In 2019, British dairy farms used around 360,000 tonnes of soya imported from countries including Brazil and Argentina, making it the UK’s second largest consumer of soy-based feed after the poultry sector.

Jones and other animal farmers like to tout the sustainability of British meat and dairy products, but often fail to even acknowledge the existence of intensive farms or to address the question of how animal-based foods can be sustainable when so many people are eating so much of them. In their minds, the whole nation is somehow supposed to be able to eat domestically-produced meat and dairy all from pasture-raised animals, without anyone having to cut down on how much they consume. Any suggestion that reducing meat and dairy is beneficial in any way is met with outrage, despite some of the very organisations that support pasture-raised animal farming advocating for ‘less and better’ meat and dairy.

Perhaps the most irritating thing about the backlash from some farmers and meat-eaters whenever a new vegan business emerges or a company adds plant-based options to its product range is that they refuse to acknowledge the core reason why many people go vegan: the animals. While health and environmental impact are good reasons to be vegan, it is the avoidance of eating products derived from sentient beings that is the non-negotiable principle. But acknowledging this as a legitimate position to hold again threatens the very system of exploitation that animal farming is built on. Instead, those who seek to uphold that system chose to belittle the ethical aspect of veganism and indulge in bullying and petty boycotts.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

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