La Fauxmagerie: Where vegan cheese is at home
It is a busy Sunday afternoon, the last before Lockdown 2.0 paralyses the country again. In search of one last taste of London’s eclectic food scene, I am on my way to find it in a little shop in Cheshire Street, just off buzzy Brick Lane. It is the first plant-based cheesemonger in the UK founded by the sisters Rachel and Charlotte Stevens in 2019. La Fauxmagerie — a place that gives vegan cheese a home.
The shop front is reminiscent of a typical French fromagerie but inside you are being remembered that it is unique in its own way. When entering the bright and little space, you will find yourself looking at all the shelves full of different vegan cheeses, pickles, chutneys, crackers, wine, and even chocolate — all you need for a perfect plant-based cheeseboard. However, your eyes will hold on to the heart of the shop, the display cabinet, where unpackaged plant-based cheeses are ready for individual and zero-waste purchase. The prices vary from £3.20 to £8 for 100g to 160g depending on the cheeses, thus they are on the pricier side compared to store-bought dairy cheeses.
Rachel and Charlotte explain that “the word ‘cheese’ originates from the Proto-Indo-European word ‘kwat’ which means to ferment or sour; a process which our nut- and soy-based products undergo.” Their suppliers are mostly small businesses that create artisan and innovative vegan cheeses made of cashews, almonds, soy milk, tofu, chickpea flour or sprouted brown rice.
Anya Peach, an omnivore customer of La Fauxmagerie, is convinced by the taste and texture alike. “I was really impressed by the quality and likeliness to real cheese. The Camembert melted really well and had really nice texture,” she explains.
Besides all the success, La Fauxmagerie was unintentionally involved in a controversy proceeding from Dairy UK. The lobbying group kicked off a debate on La Fauxmagerie’s use of terms like vegan cheese and accused them of misleading consumers. Rachel and Charlotte resisted these allegations and referred to the fully vegan and plant-based position of their business that is communicated clearly and non-misleadingly.
Public stigma is undoubtedly still attached to plant-based products like vegan cheese. The EU actually prohibited the marketing use of the terms milk, cream, butter, cheese, and yogurt for completely plant-based products. But daily life shows different habits as Anya’s experience shows. “If I did not know they were fake cheeses, I would not have guessed,” she says. In our common language, we may still make use of attempts to distinguish dairy and plant-based cheeses as real and fake in order to compare but that could change in the future.
After I had tried the Camembert-style Shamembert and Gorgonzola-style Veganzola, I too, felt more at home. Even though these vegan cheeses are not like the traditional Alpine cheese that I grew up with, they are within this broader cheese family many of us know and are familiar with. I used to love cheese — the flavour, the texture and, I guess, the social aspect it has when eating it together — but I decided to quit it because of the animal’s unethical fate in the dairy industry. So the vegan cheeses of La Fauxmagerie might be able to connect the familiar and unfamiliar with the known and unknown to perfect taste, compassion, belonging, and pleasure.
