Plant-based food writer Richard Makin: ‘Vegans look different than they used to’

Before switching to a plant-based diet, food writer Richard Makin had a decidedly un-vegan job: making ice cream.

He spent three years driving around London, selling ice cream sandwiches – before turning vegan in 2017, something he called a “surprisingly intuitive transition”.

“I overdosed on dairy ingredients, because I was making all of the ice cream myself,” says Makin, 39, now based outside of Manchester.

“So every single day I was pouring cream, eggs and everything into a big pasteuriser.”

This, coupled with the fact he shared a production premises with a now-defunct vegan street food company, showed him the potential of plant-based food.

“They did the most spectacular vegan Vietnamese food you’ve ever tasted, and it was down to those trades – I would give them a scoop of ice cream, and they’d give me a banh mi or something – that I realised that you can love food and be vegan at the same time,” Makin remembers.

“I don’t think I had put those two things together – I always thought that vegan food was kind of a punishment. A lot of people think of it that way, and it’s just not true. It just takes a little bit of learning and a little bit of kitchen ingenuity, and you can create food that’s absolutely as good – if not better – than anything else.”

Makin’s time working with ice cream introduced him to the world of recipe development: “The thing I loved about making ice cream was coming up with those flavours and making them a reality.”

In 2017, he founded his Instagram account, School Night Vegan, tracking his switch from vegetarian to vegan, and in 2018 he shut down his ice cream business to go all-in on vegan recipe development. In 2023, he wrote his first cookbook – Anything You Can Cook, I Can Cook Vegan – and he’s now releasing his follow-up: Stress-Free Dinners.

While his debut was “very much for vegans”, Makin says, his latest offering is “for absolutely everybody”. You won’t find any unusual ingredients in the recipes, with the dishes designed to be “so accessible and so unintimidating”, he notes.

He’s also writing in a slightly different food landscape. It seems like veganism was everywhere five or so years ago, but the climate has changed – which Makin calls “a market correction”.

“There was this huge boom in the kind of products that you could buy as a vegan, and that really won a lot of people over – whether it was Beyond Burgers, or the vegan sandwiches at M&S or whatever. It made it a lot easier for people to be vegan.

“I think there was always going to be a pendulum swing, because it was such a huge explosion… But I think most people have just incorporated vegan ideas and vegan meals and vegan recipes into their diet in a way that they never would have 10 years ago, so maybe they don’t identify as a vegan.

“But in terms of the number of plant-based meals that people are eating and the positive attitude towards high-fibre diets and plant-based proteins and things like that, people are just as open as they ever have been, if not more.

“I feel like the tide’s changing, but I don’t necessarily think it’s in a bad way. It’s doing exactly what vegetarianism did 15 years ago, which is it stopped being this buzzword and stopped being the butt of the jokes… It’s just not really a big deal anymore.”

This means that “vegans look different than they used to”, Makin suggests. “There used to be this whole image that went along with being a vegan, and it had this anti-establishment edge to it. Whereas now, my mum and dad are vegan; they’re both 75, and they made the switch the past five years and it wasn’t a big deal.

“It wasn’t a political decision, it wasn’t an identity crisis or anything like that. It was just, oh, we’ll give it a try, and they found it easier than they thought and they felt good on it, so they carried on doing it. It’s as simple as that really.”

You won’t find much fake meat in Makin’s recipes – in his new book, just one recipe involves plant-based sausages – with a focus on protein sources like tofu and tempeh instead.

Makin suggests that plant-based meat replacements is one area where “the tide has really changed”, suggesting that people were “overexposed” to these ingredients.

“I think overexposure was a big reason for why people started to look elsewhere for their sources of base protein, but also all the conversations around ultra-processed meals and ingredients really put a lot of people off,” he says.

“Whether that’s right or wrong – there’s a lot of pushback on whether that’s actually as big a deal as we thought it was.”

Makin does cook with meat replacements “every now and then” as they can “really help you in a pinch”, but adds: “It’s not something I use every day.”

For anyone who does want to incorporate more vegan meals into their diet, Makin warns against trying too hard.

“People tend to overthink it. They try and find stuff that feels completely new that fits their idea of what vegan food is, when in reality, vegan food can be exactly what you were eating yesterday, but without the animal products,” he notes.

“Whether that means you’re buying store-bought replacements or you’re learning how to use tofu… When you make those switches in your mind, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every meal. You can substitute in a way that feels really intuitive.”

Stress-Free Dinners by Richard Makin is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Publishing, priced £22. Photography by Richard Makin. Available now.