Tennessee Titans are beefing up for NFL as ‘plant-based vegans’

You might expect America’s most musclebound athletes to live on a diet of steak and eggs. Not these NFL stars.

Chef Charity Morgan in a selfie on Instagram with husband and Tennessee Titan Derrick, who introduced her to the vegan diet.

Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, soccer player Jermain Defoe, the whole of the Forest Green Rovers football team … There’s no shortage of vegan sportspeople these days, but it’s fair to say that most are known for their stamina and agility rather than brute force. No offence to Hamilton or the men in green, but sitting behind a wheel or chasing down the long ball in the lower divisions hardly compares to, say, pinning down a 195cm beefcake on an American football field. When you are ­getting hit all day long by a 21st ­offensive guard you need all the power you can get, and the ­secret to that lies in a diet of lean chicken, six-egg omelets and 500g steaks, right?

Not if you are the Tennessee Titans, it doesn’t. When they slammed into the LA Chargers over three hours of attrition at Wembley in London a week ago, you may be surprised to learn that a third of their squad was fuelled only with quinoa and lentil patties, breaded cauliflower florets and truffled mac’n’cashew cheese. The vegan world has found its very own musclebound multi-millionaire poster boys.

The person who has turned them on to this plant-based regime is chef Charity Morgan, 39. The struggle, she says, is of the mind as much as the body. “A lot of it is mental. If you serve cauliflower or aubergine and call it ‘steak’, they’re happy. Or if you are giving them a mushroom taco burger, you pile it high, you make it a double-decker so it screams ‘man food’. That’s what it’s like with the guys; you can’t make them feel they are compromising. You can’t just give them a salad.”

She has to keep a close eye on protein content and ensure that the players get a balance of the right vitamins, but she says it’s not nearly as hard as meat-eaters may imagine. “A lot of the leafy green vegetables are surprisingly full of protein,” she says, and combined with things such as soya beans, tofu and lentils, it’s not hard to ­provide everything a sportsman’s body needs.

So while some players will be piling their plates high with free steaks in the team cafeteria in Nashville, hers will be tucking into “super-calorie-dense” sweet ­pot­ato and black bean enchiladas, say, with Mexican rice, beans and guacamole, or burgers with grilled onions, vegan mayo and Beyond Meat pea protein patties. “I started by asking the guys to name their top three meals that their moms made for them that they loved to eat, and they said lasagne, ­enchiladas, buffalo chicken, pot pies. So I dupli­cated them as cleaner versions using plant-based things like cashew cream instead of dairy, or broccoli or oyster mushrooms instead of meat.” The biggest compliment, she says, is when players don’t even notice the food is vegan, just that it tastes nice.

It was Morgan’s 29-year-old husband, Derrick, the Titans’ outside linebacker, who introduced her to a vegan diet. After a stint as a model, Charity was working as a private chef in Los Angeles, creating meal plans for celebrity clients, when she met Derrick eight years ago. “When you are an athlete, after somewhere around year three you realise you’ve made it and you start to ask yourself how you are going to stay there. The percentage of players still in the NFL after five years is very small. It’s a 100 per cent injury sport — at some stage you will get injured — so players are always trying to find ways to give themselves the edge.

“For Derrick in 2012 it was all about getting more oxygen into his body, so he spent the year in hyperbaric chambers; another year it was all about his training; another year about the brain. In 2015 he became a sleep-component guy, and read about how much sleep he needed and the optimum room temperature. Every year it was something different.”

Then, two years ago, he was going into year eight of his professional career and went to a ­nutritionist, complaining that he felt sluggish. She suggested he give up meat and dairy. “And oh my god, it was like the lights suddenly went on. He felt energised, his sleep was better.”

So Charity and their two children, King Elias, 6, and Love, 3, joined him. “My favourite pastime was eating cheese,” Charity says, “so I never thought I’d be vegan. I laughed at people like that, but it was incredible. My skin was clear, my digestive issues cleared up. It was like, ‘This is how God designed my body to be.’ ”

Derrick started taking his packed lunches into work and gradually the other players took an interest. “Everyone else would be getting their chicken and steaks and he’d have this big bowl of protein balls with salsa, avocado, hemp seeds, chia seeds, different beans and raw sweet potatoes and spiralised beets. The guys kept saying, ‘Wow that sounds good’, so he said, ‘Why don’t you guys try it? The first one is on me, and we can go from there.’ ”

Charity has about 20 players on her roster out of a squad of about 50. None has gone back to their meat-eating ways but the numbers fluctuate as players get injured or are dropped from the team.

Tennessee Titans quarterback Marcus Mariota scrambles against the Baltimore Ravens in their NFL game on October 14. Picture: AP

At times during our chat at NFL’s swanky central London ­offices Charity succumbs to the unproven conspiracy talk beloved of the vegan fringe: “milk inflames your tissues”; “cancers are linked to dairy”; and she has a rather folksy theory that by eating plants you are simply cutting out the middle man in your quest for nutrients (“What are the world’s three strongest animals?” she asks, and ignores me when I suggest lions. “Elephants, gorillas and hippos. All herbivores.”) However, in the main she is entirely non-preachy and has no time for the more political aspects of veganism, going so far as to disown the term.

“I describe myself as ‘plegan’, that’s a plant-based vegan. I wanted to give the guys a way in. I didn’t want to say you can’t wear leather, you can’t eat honey. I wanted to give them a list of what they could do, not what they couldn’t. I’m not here to judge anyone, I’m here to help, whatever way it is.”

I ask her where she stands on avocados and almonds, which some vegans say are off limits ­because they are pollinated by captive bee colonies. “What? That’s crazy. There’s not one person on this planet who is 100 per cent vegan. No one. If you drive a car, you’re not vegan. If you ride a bike, you’re not vegan. Animal products are so ingrained in our system, it’s not a fight I’m willing to have. I don’t care if someone only has a meat-free Monday. I’m going to pat them on the back and say, ‘OK, how can we make that a Tuesday as well?’ ”

It’s an attitude that has drawn flak from the more militant wing of the movement, especially those who condemn Morgan for wearing leather clothes. “What, am I supposed to throw my thousands of leather products out of the window because one day I decided ­veganism was a journey I wanted to be on? That animal has already sacrificed its life.”

Worse still is the lack of compassion she perceives from many vegans. “Donald Watson started the vegan movement out of compassion. So when I see people acting like wolves and attacking you for your choices, they are being anything but compassionate.”

When the meat-loving chef Anthony Bourdain died, Morgan posted a tribute on Instagram and was vilified. “Vegans were like, ‘I’m so glad he killed himself”, the most cruel things. And that is why I will never call myself a vegan.

“Look, we’re talking the NFL, a manly sport that ­believes in eating 16oz steaks and chasing after a pigskin ball. How vegan can they ­really be? All I’m saying is I’m meeting them where they are.”

The Times