Veganuary: is vegan the next big thing?

Last year, we followed Veganuary – a month of vegan meals. The intention was to move our vegetarian diet up a level. This year, we’re not following, not because it didn’t work, but because we are some of the 50% who stayed vegan once the campaign had ended. Well, virtually vegan. I’ve more or less eliminated dairy products from our diet, now I just need to work on the slightly more difficult (for me) subject of eggs. (I do have the answer to this, but I am not allowed any more pets…). Following a vegan diet hasn’t been as difficult as perhaps you’d think, and we haven’t craved for the loss of any particular food.

The Veganuary campaign started in 2014 with 3,000 registered participants. In four years that number has increased more than ten-fold. There certainly seems to be a lot more interest in both vegetarian and vegan lifestyles in recent years, and much more publicity. Many vegetarians that I know are trying to make the move to vegan: it seems to be a natural progression. So is vegan the next big thing?

According to Friends of the Earth’s research (2014), worldwide there are 375 million vegetarians. I haven’t been able to find any up-to-date European statistics, but most recent surveys seem to indicate that the level of vegetarians is around 10% of the population, and vegans make up about 10% of those, so still very much a minority. What motivates people to make this lifestyle choice?

 

Motivations for becoming vegan

·         Animal welfare: the primary motivation for many westerners is animal welfare. Annually, 70 billion land animals are farmed worldwide, mostly by intensive methods which involve confinement, boredom and pain.

·         Religious: some people will be vegetarian or vegan for religious reasons; the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain religions have a strong tradition promoting the vegetarian lifestyle.

·         Environment: More CO² is produced by animal production than plant production, animals are also responsible for significant output of methane, another gas which is environmentally damaging.

·         World food crisis: with the growing world population, animal farming is in fact unsustainable in the long term. If the population moved to a plant-based diet and the land currently used to produce meat was turned over to plant production, it would be possible to feed the entire world population.

·         Personal health concerns: a plant-based diet is said to prevent or aid the management of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer: the four big killers in the West.

In the UK, the Vegan Society’s 2016 research revealed that there had been a 360% increase in the number of vegans over a ten year period. Over half a million Britons follow a vegan diet. Apparently, much credit is due to celebrity supporters of veganism – well, the internet assures me they are celebrities, I’ve never heard of any of them. British business is showing great interest in this growing trend. Many chains offer vegan options, such as Pizza Express and Pret a Manger, and I was really jealous to learn that main stream supermarkets like Tesco stock vegan cheese. Here in France we struggle to even get a vegetarian choice on the menu, although that is changing in the larger cities. The vegetarian and vegan movement has spread beyond Paris to cities such as Lyon and Orleans. I’ve also noticed that the French seem to go straight in to vegan, no halfway house. Being the great philosophers that they are this does not surprise me. It is logical after all. If your concerns are animal suffering, why differentiate between the beef cow and the dairy cow?

My own anecdotal evidence is that the top European country for vegan food is Germany. Vegan food is easy to find in any supermarket, even the smallest corner shop, and most towns have a restaurant that serves vegan options, if not a dedicated vegetarian or vegan restaurant or café. The Netherlands and Scandinavia are only slightly behind, and in Bregenz, Austria we stayed on an ecological, organic, vegetarian campsite with a fabulous cafe (it was €36 a night though!).

In the words of Albert Einstein, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”