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A carving board with vegan burgers and bacon, onions, a cleaver, herbs, and condiments.
Courtesy Rudy’s Vegan Butcher

London’s First Vegan Butcher Shop Sells “Meats” That Rival the Real Thing

Tom Morris

April 10, 2021
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Not eating meat is no longer a concern reserved for vegetarians and vegans. The damaging effects the factory-farm industry has on the land, communities, animals, and people’s health have been extensively documented, and animal agriculture is now a primary source of global warming (if cows were a country, they’d be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world). In turn, the meat-free market is booming. In the United Kingdom, sales of plant-based foods is expected to exceed £1.1 billion ($1.41 billion) by 2024, according to research firm Mintel; in 2019, almost a quarter of all food products launched there were labeled as vegan. And the runaway success of Rudy’s Vegan Butcher, which opened five months ago in the London borough of Islington, only further suggests that the end of meat is near.

Founded by vegans Ruth “Rudy” Mumma and her partner, self-taught chef Matthew Foster, the shop looks like the real thing—from its butcher’s coat–wearing staff to a glass display case showcasing neat, uncooked “cutlets”—and its products, made from scratch without preservatives, taste like it, too. (The couple also run Rudy’s Vegan Diner, an American-style restaurant with two locations in London.) There’s “soysage” sausage, “chili-non-carne,” and peppered “turk’y” slices, as well as items required for a proper British breakfast, such as wheat protein–based “black puddin’,” “baycon,” and scrambled “v-eggs.”

Supplies sold out almost immediately when Rudy’s unlocked its doors, prompting the business to temporarily close while it moved into a larger kitchen to meet demand and create even more new meat-free fare. When the shop reopened last week, fans seemed most excited about its D.I.Y. kits, designed to create delights like Reuben sandwiches and burgers at home. This approachable, no-pressure style of selling plant-based food reflects Mumma and Foster’s understanding of the wide-ranging reactions and routes to veganism. “All we ask is that people are open-minded,” Mumma told The Telegraph right before the shop opened. “We have a lot of curious people who just want to give our products our try.”

# Europe# Food# Health and Wellness# Climate# Animals

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It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.