How Warsaw became the unlikely vegan capital of Europe | Karol Adamiak

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I want to tell you about a relatively typical neighbourhood in my city. There are two vegan sushi restaurants, three vegan ramen spots. There are a few vegan delis. All the convenience stores have a vegan section. There’s an abundance of vegan bakeries. There’s a place that does vegan peking duck – it’s good, I promise. Many of these vegan places proudly have a rainbow flag on display. I’m not talking about Los Angeles or New York. I’m not even talking about Copenhagen. My neighbourhood is called Śródmieście. The vegan paradise I’m talking about – it’s Warsaw.

If you don’t believe me, well, Warsaw has been ranked among the top vegan cities in the world by HappyCow (a vegan ranking website) for the past six years. In 2022, it was National Geographic’s number one vegan city in the world. Maybe your perception of Poland is all kielbasa (sausage) and conservative politics. Herring and hate. It’s more complicated than that. In the past two decades there has been a quiet vegan revolution in the country.

In reality, it shouldn’t be too much of a shock that Polish food lends itself well to veganism. Prior to falling under the long shadow of the iron curtain, Polish cuisine was mostly plant-based. Only the aristocracy had easy access to meat, fish and dairy products. Most of the people in the country were peasants and they ate what they grew. The cuisine was full of root vegetables, potatoes and earthy greens. This was a plant-based diet by default, not ideology.

As today, this cuisine was heavy on soups and stews. An old favourite was a vegetable soup, flavoured with sugar and cinnamon to which beer was added at the end to create a yeasted acidity. That one didn’t stand the test of time. Cracovian Jews used to make obwarzanek, parboiled rye dough shaped into a circle, and sell it from carts on the streets of the city. This fared a little better – it likely inspired what we know today as bagels.

In the communist era, meat was a luxury, despite everyone’s alleged equality. Meat production was inefficient, which meant ordinary people did not have the money to afford the scant supply. This meant people craved meat as a status symbol – particularly because the socialist elite did have access to animal proteins. When the USSR collapsed people wanted to eat meat – and as market forces entered agriculture and people gradually gained disposable income, they spent heavily on it.

But as Poland became a mature liberal democracy appetites changed. For the younger generation that grew up in a time of relative abundance, animal products were so commonplace they failed to have much lustre.

“I lived in Madrid as an Erasmus student and I found it hard to sustain my social life without eating meat … Whereas in Warsaw, I honestly cannot recall the last time I went to a restaurant that did not have a vegan option in their offering,” Michał Korkosz, AKA Rozkoszny, told me. Rozkoszny is one of the most prominent vegetarian food influencers in the country – with more than 700k followers on instagram. His cookbooks Fresh from Poland and Polish’d, which offer vegetarian twists on classic Polish recipes, have sold 230,000 copies and been translated into three languages.

In some cases, Rozkoszny celebrates the plant-based foods of old Poland. Schabowy z kani (parasol mushroom schnitzel) is a traditional recipe, one known to seemingly every Polish grandma. Similar to a regular schnitzel, the mushroom is prepped, paneed, and then fried, often served alongside young boiled potatoes and mizeria (Polish tzatziki). In other cases, he takes traditional dishes and gives them a modern twist to make them vegan. Żurek is a popular soup traditionally made with stock of smoked pork ribs and served with various kinds of kielbasa (sausage). But in żurek as proposed by Rozkoszny, the soup is made with miso – hardly a traditional Polish staple, but now widely available – and roasted mushrooms.

Before becoming a bestselling author and influencer, Rozkoszny studied politics and sociology. He’s attuned to the fact that what you eat can be a political statement. He once conducted a study in which he interviewed a number of Polish MPs on their diets and tried to map their politics. “The more left-leaning a politician, the more likely they were to have a vegetarian diet and eat international cuisines,” he told me. A 2019 study by Ipsos showed similar results. Polish politicians were asked: “What actions are you willing to take to help fight climate change?” Among politicians from the left, 30% stated that they would give up meat, versus a mere 11% for the right wing Law and Justice party.

“Veganism tends to be perceived as a pejorative term,” according to Anna Spurek, the chief operating officer at the Green REV Institute, Poland’s first vegan thinktank. “The meat lobby and interest groups use it to polarise society.” It has been a common refrain of rightwing politicians that veganism is anti-Polish – that it is a similar form of propaganda to the ‘LGBT agenda’ – and that vegans are ‘insane and detached from reality’,” she said.

But veganism should be an idea that transcends neat political brackets. For one, Spurek thinks that the Polish idea of solidarność – solidarity, and the name of the political movement that helped bring down communism in Poland – can also include the concept of interspecies unity and green politics. And in a way veganism represents a return to Poland’s peasant roots, and a more conscious and healthy way of eating. Across Poland, even in rural areas, diets are increasingly plant-based.

While veganism has been caught in Poland’s increasingly polarised politics, its impact on the culture is obvious everywhere. With Barclay Bram, I run a vegan Polish supper club in London called Bracia (it means brothers in Polish). Many people in London comment that this seems like something that could only happen here – and we see their surprise when we tell them how vegan-friendly Poland is. Recently, we’ve been doing events back in Warsaw. In February, we’re taking over Lotos, a traditional restaurant open since 1958, famous for its nóżki w galarecie (legs in jelly – literally a chicken soup served cold so the collagen has become gelatinous, with veg and carrots suspended in it). The owner, Hanna Szymańska, told us she’s looking forward to putting out a vegan menu for the night: “You have to move with the times.”