Latest series of The Professionals featured 10 veggie savoury dishes out of a total of 100 – and just two for vegans

Vegetarians and vegans are sharpening their knives for MasterChef: The Professionals after analysis showed it featured meat and fish savoury dishes nine times more than vegetarian alternatives.

The BBC One show reaches its climax on Thursday after six weeks of searing, stuffing and sauteeing, and its makers say the recipes reflect “what is happening in professional kitchens up and down the country”.

But the Vegetarian Society has said the focus on meat and seafood risks turning the show into “a dinosaur” and fails to reflect growing enthusiasm for non-meat and “flexitarian” diets.

And the Vegan Society, which believes close to a million people in the UK may now be vegan, has called for the programme to change direction to cast more vegan chefs and challenge the contestants to produce Michelin-standard food from vegetables.

MasterChef remains a bastion of butchery, its opening montage featuring a chef lugging a side of pork and another blow-torching a chicken. By the end of the semi-final stage, 10 out of 100 savoury dishes presented by the contestants were vegetarian, and only two of those were vegan, according to Guardian analysis, while 37% featured red meat, 40% fish and seafood and 13% poultry.

Richard McIlwain, the chief executive of the Vegetarian Society, said he was “endlessly frustrated” at the amount of meat and fish dishes. “We have been brought up since Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White on the whole machismo of the kitchen; that there is something about cooking a good steak that is an extension of being a good chef,” he said.

“Are these programmes turning into dinosaurs, not because more people are turning vegetarian and vegan but because many people are cutting out meat, particularly in terms of climate change? Where is that being reflected in the cookery shows?”

In a semi-final challenge last week, all four chefs chose red meat for their street food dishes, with pork, beef, lamb and mutton served up. Early in the series, one chef, Gina, who works in a vegan restaurant, prepared a vegan menu including a mushroom Thai curry and a cashew milk parfait. She hoped the judges “won’t even notice that it’s vegan”. Her parfait didn’t set and her dishes were deemed too “grainy”, and she was sent home.

In another of last week’s semi-finals, another contestant, John, told the judges: “I have got a lot of things I am passionate about and reducing our meat consumption is part of that.” He made a mushroom dish that included chicken stock, morels filled with a chicken mousse, chicken skin and chicken fat hollandaise. It underwhelmed the judges, and the co-host Gregg Wallace opined that it lacked a chicken sauce. John was knocked out too.

“To see just two vegan savoury dishes on a show like MasterChef is very disappointing in 2021,” said Francine Jordan, a spokesperson for the Vegan Society. “Vegan food has never been more accessible, more exciting and easy to work with. We have vegan haggis, vegan eggs, vegan bacon.”

There is evidence from the meat industry that restaurants are buying less meat, partly because profit margins can be higher on vegetarian dishes, but also as a result of shifting tastes. One in four mains and side dishes on Wagamama’s menu are now vegetarian or vegan, and in October McDonald’s launched a vegan burger. Tesco has said sales of plant-based meat alternatives have doubled since 2018, with sausages, burgers, deli meat slices and falafel particularly popular.

A spokesperson for MasterChef said: “There have been vegetarian and vegan dishes set as skills tests in every recent series and the judges have also set plant-based challenges. For the rest of the series, the chefs choose their own dishes to best showcase their own unique skillset and in recent years we have seen an increase in plant-orientated food from contestants.”

The meat industry hit back at criticism of the show, saying the ratio reflected British tastes and citing polling from 2018 that found 81% of people regarded themselves as meat eaters. “They probably are reflecting the amount of vegetarians in the country,” said Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, who said the portions of meat were modest and were shown in balance with “fantastic vegetables”.

He added: “It’s more interesting watching someone butcher a piece of meat than chopping up a carrot.”

An Oxford University study published in October said meat consumption in the UK fell by 17% in the decade to 2019. The number of people who were vegan rose from 150,000 in 2014 to 600,000 in 2019, according to Ipsos Mori surveys for the Vegan Society. When the next poll is taken in 2022, the number is expected to reach close to 1 million.