Conference season is just around the corner, which naturally means the Green Party is starting to consider which mad policies it should discuss in Brighton. Should “workers who menstruate” get an additional 36 days of paid leave a year? Should the minimum wage be £15 an hour? Should the UK lift economic sanctions on Iran? Now the party is pushing for legal requirements that restaurants and catering businesses serve vegan food. Whether the British public wants this stuff forced on them doesn’t seem to be factored into the equation.

This latest motion is reportedly backed by at least one senior Green, and the plan is to compel “services” to provide vegan food through equality legislation. Laws designed to protect individuals against racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination would be extended to cover people’s diets.

Public bodies, including schools, would have to promote this through “inclusion strategies”. So, alongside sexual education classes, children will have to endure vegan education as well. Perhaps these sessions should teach pupils what notable Left-wing figures have said about such diets. They might draw on, for instance, George Orwell, who in The Road to Wigan Pier described vegetarians as “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers”.

The problem is that if this Green proposal were ever enacted, the result wouldn’t be more crunchy carrots dipped in hummus; instead, we’d receive more slop. Public bodies aren’t known for imaginative food, just whatever is easiest to cook at scale. Services would reach for the ultra-processed stuff, beetroot-dyed and shaped into fryable faux-bacon. Or they’d reach for seitan, wheat gluten dressed up as meat, which is typically smothered in sauces to hide how dreadful it is and colloquially termed “wheat-meat”.

Of course, most kitchens already offer food to vegetarians, without being compelled to do so, because there are quite a few of them around: last year, 14% of the UK’s population followed a meat-free diet. But it is often a culinary crime: another stodgy grey mushroom risotto, another soggy steamed nut “roast” that’s barely been in an oven, which most vegetarians dread.

Who exactly is this aimed at, then? The public sector, schools, big businesses, and everywhere within a mile of Hackney Town Hall will already cater to every dietary whim going. This law will mostly clobber small independent cafés with tight or no margins, while bigger companies shrug and force lentil sausages down people’s throats regardless.

Meanwhile, the business of vegan food is contracting. Restaurants are closing and retail offers are being slowly ditched. Maybe that explains this push from the Green Party: the culture moved as far as it could, so now it’s time to force the rest of us to comply.

Or maybe it’s because many of us now know that the emission maths which typically lies behind the claims that vegan food is better for the planet — and us — is nowhere near as settled as many assume. The claim that vegan food simply “produces fewer emissions than animal products” has been widely debunked, on oat milk, on tofu which can “be worse than chicken”, on the framing green veganism even exists at all, and whether it makes any meaningful difference to emissions.

None of this means the underlying instinct to live in harmony with nature is mad. The logical endpoint of the green movement should be people having smallholdings, living humble and seasonal lives in touch with the land. But you have to sell people on the virtues of this approach, not simply legislate for the destruction of living standards by fiat. Instead, Britons get bilge: top-down, bureaucratic and joyless. We end up legislating for fetid gruel rather than growing seasonal produce.

So no, this was never really about the planet. It’s almost as if being green isn’t about being a green person. Really, it’s about telling other people what to do.