This UK Chain Is Selling The 'World's First' Vegan Scotch Egg

Fundamental carnivores everywhere suffered coronaries when Tesco announced the latest assault on their sacred meat-only menu. As Plant Based News reported, 600 Tesco Metros across the United Kingdom will now offer Squeaky Bean's vegan scotch eggs.

For £3, you can get a pack of six. In place of an actual egg, customers will find Crackd's eggless egg product, which boasts an ingredient list that includes pea proteins, nutritional yeast, various gelling agents, and plant-based flavorings. In total, the number of ingredients needed by Crackd for their eggy bits and those needed by Squeaky Bean for their sausage, as inews.co.uk noted, reaches well over 70. Most of it is probably included to replicate that runny, yet sort of solid texture of the boiled egg within the scotch egg, though in this case, the vegan one cuts it up more like an egg salad. 

So far, the response to Squeaky Beans' announcement on Instagram has been rapturous, with the comments section consisting of variations of the word "Yes," expressions of excitement, and "This is amazing." Of course, they are the target audience. 

The introduction of a vegan scotch egg shows that the alternative meat market continues to thrive. At the close of 2020, CNBC reported that, despite the reservations held by the more fundamentally carnivorous, the alternative meat market had already grown into a $20 billion industry. However, this shift in industry fortunes changes little in terms of public health. At the dawn of 2020, the BBC ran a piece detailing how vegan sausage rolls and tofu fish and chips could either be just as unhealthy or even more unhealthy than the meat product they are replacing. These warnings contain the usual issues, including how the nutritional profile we get from meat differs from a plant-based diet, which needs more consideration than most might have given when deciding to adopt a meat-free existence.

In terms of scotch eggs and other fry-up food, however, the important point is the ever-lurking sodium content that appears to haunt every single food, or so it seems. A vegan KFC burger contains more salt than a meat one, for example. This is in part due to preserving the food, but also to trick the palate of the public into enjoying the plant-based burger. In that view, if you want a vegan scotch egg, you should definitely enjoy one. It's just that as the market continues to fill with plant-based alternatives, society will have to relearn what it knows about nutrition to navigate the food options now available.