When, in the space of two days, a Harvard professor calls coconut oil “pure poison” and the entire internet erupts in a row over Jamie Oliver’s jerk rice, it’s fair to say we’re living in highly charged gastronomical times. It’s little wonder many of us welcomed the lighter news that the Great British Bake Off’s new series will include a vegan week.

The decision was made to honour the rise of veganism, presenter Paul Hollywood told the BBC, but when asked if he would consider going vegan himself, it’s reported that replied: “Are you joking?” The idea that cooking without meat is sacrilege, while prevalent among the culinary elite, is fast becoming dated for the rest of us. And as it slowly rises from the fringes, veganism needs all the popular endorsement it can get.

There has been a dramatic change in our diets in the UK in recent years, with more than 3.5 million vegans as of April this year, according to one survey, and many more are experimenting with flexitarianism. Retail has quickly caught up, with Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose beefing up their vegan offerings, as well as cafes and festivals popping up in all corners of the country.

While every other blog has a new vegan recipe, there isn’t a single cookery programme aimed at vegans or vegetarians

The nation’s favourite baking programme, which is set to educate millions of eager viewers on how to make a decent cake sans eggs and milk, has already had a huge influence on our tastes. Between 2009 and 2014, annual baking sales rose from £523m to £1.7bn, partly due to the rise in such programmes, according to Mintel, and every year the “Bake Off effect” sees supermarkets flooded with shoppers stocking up on baking essentials in anticipation of the latest series. One poll puts it as the second most influential cooking show after Jamie Oliver’s 15-Minute Meals.

And not only do cooking programmes influence what we eat, they exist as a snapshot of domestic life throughout recent history. In the 1940s, Philip Harben ignited our love affair with cooking programmes with ration-friendly recipes, then in the 50s and 60s, Fanny Cradock showed housewives how to create fancy food at home. Madhur Jaffrey began a series on Indian food in 1982, while more recently, TV has met our obsessions with reality TV and celebrity cooks with the likes of Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares and Top Chef.

But what’s more telling is the programmes that provide distraction from, rather than a reflection of, the general mood and popular discourse. If Bake Off says anything about our current times, it’s that the economical, political and environmental pressures overwhelming us today have given us no choice but to stick our heads in the saccharine, pastel, fluffy sand and enjoy the sweet, sweet goodness of competitive baking, because we’d rather focus on the fallout from a baked and binned Alaska than one whose ice is rapidly melting.

But it’s not working any more. We’re becoming increasingly aware of agriculture’s role as a major driver of global warming, from the vast amounts of grain and water required to grow, kill and transport animals and store their flesh, to chopping down forests in order to keep them. All in all, the process contributes to land and water degradation, biodiversity loss, antibiotic resistance and deforestation, to name a few. Nowadays, we’re more interested in learning new recipes to spice up meat-free Mondays than how to keep our dinner guests entertained with seven different ways to serve lamb. Younger generations in particular are becoming more aware of the future they’re going to inherit, with warming temperatures and more extreme weather; it’s surprising they have an appetite at all.

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Yet while every other blog and Instagram post these days shows off a new vegan recipe, there are relatively few meat-free cookery books, and there isn’t a single cookery programme aimed at vegans or vegetarians. It takes some serious digging to find any programme relating to veganism that isn’t a nightmare-inducing documentary shedding light on farming practices and their contribution to climate change. And the internet still only has a small hold on our attention. Research last year by The Grocer found that 22% of Brits get their recipes from YouTube, 18% from TV and 62% from recipe books.

Influential TV and the celebrity chefs it has grown are falling behind the zeitgeist and missing a huge opportunity to show increasingly concerned audiences how to find their way around a chickpea. Veganism has left the fringes of society and is shaking up our meat-and-two-veg diet to become a more socially conscious one largely informed by social media. A vegan week is a good start, because as the Bake Off tent heats up this year, it’s becoming harder to ignore the fact our planet is too.

• Jessica Brown is a freelance journalist based in London