HEALTH

JOSH MILBURN: Should vegan parents raise their children as vegans? In a recent paper, Marcus William Hunt contends that there are good reasons not to raise children as vegans grounded in concerns about the impact of veganism on children’s wellbeing. Carlo Alvaro, in response, contends that parents should raise their children as vegans. This debate is interesting, important, and worth attending to.1 In this paper, I want to focus on a specific and novel contribution Hunt makes concerning vegan parenting. In a separate piece, Hunt argues that when parents disagree about whether to raise…

VICKY BOND: Take a moment to picture a farm animal enjoying dinner. Are you imagining a cow grazing on grass or perhaps a chicken pecking at the ground, foraging for seeds and insects? In today’s factory farming system, the “feed” these animals eat is far removed from their natural diets. Rather than munching on grass or insects, most animals on factory farms eat some type of animal feed—a cost-effective mixture of grains, proteins, and often the addition of antibiotics designed to make them grow as quickly as possible. The ingredients in animal feed don’t just matter to the animals’…

L. SYD M JOHNSON: One Health (OH) is an approach to health that views the health of humans, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems as interconnected. Conceptually, it emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches to global health challenges. The World Health Organization notes that OH “is particularly relevant for food and water safety, nutrition, the control of zoonoses … pollution management, and combatting antimicrobial resistance.” This statement of priorities is reflected in the growing literature on OH and pandemics, wherein the emphasis has often been on nonhuman animals as vectors of disease and…

NURIA ALMIRON: Climate change denial refers to the stances that advocate against the evidence posited for human-induced global warming... Since the publication of Livestock's Long Shadow by the Food and Agriculture Organization in 2006, an increasing number of governmental and non-governmental organizations and independent researchers have pointed at animal agriculture, and, by extension, animal-based diets, as a primary contributor to global warming. At the same time, over the last few decades, animal advocates, animal rights organizations, and many scholars and experts from a wide array…

MORGAN OFORI: It has been 10 years since Jane Land and Matthew Glover started a plant-based revolution. In the last decade, the number of vegans in the UK has quadrupled to one million. Here, five readers share how they fared with Veganuary since it launched a decade ago... ‘The only thing I regret is not doing it sooner’. I tried veganism in January 2014, which coincided with the first Veganuary. I only committed for six weeks, thinking it would be too difficult to go without cheese. I still remember taking a couple of hours to do my first food shop, reading all the labels. Now I’ve been…

VEGCONOMIST: With Veganuary 2024 having recently come to a close, the organization has revealed that over 1.8 million people received its support and guidance to try veganism, in the form of emails, videos, social media posts, and podcasts... Veganuary has calculated that the actual number of participants is likely to be even higher than the figures indicate, as many people take part without officially signing up. To gain an estimate of the true number, the organization has commissioned YouGov surveys in its core campaign countries. The results suggest that the total number of participants…

MATTHEW ADAMS: There can be little doubt that industrialized animal agriculture reveals human-animal relations defined by routinized, institutionalized violence on a staggering scale. The number of animals involved is astonishing. There are an estimated 23 billion chickens on the planet at any one time, roughly three chickens for every human, by far the most numerous bird species alive today. The number slaughtered annually is estimated by the United Nations at 66 billion; compared to 1.5 billion pigs and 0.3 billion cattle. The overwhelming majority of these animals are reared and killed in…

T. KORTETMAKI: Climate change compels us to rethink the ethics of our dietary choices and has become an interesting issue for ethicists concerned about diets, including animal ethicists. The defenders of veganism have found that climate change provides a new reason to support their cause because many animal-based foods have high greenhouse gas emissions. The new style of argumentation, the ‘climatic argument(s) for veganism’, may benefit animals by persuading even those who are not concerned about animals themselves but worry about climate change. The arguments about the high emissions of…

CHEF'S PENCIL: If you’ve ever thought about starting a new diet at the beginning of the year, you’re not alone. Much of the world sees New Year’s Day as a time to make lifestyle changes or commit to new habits, and the proportion of Google searches dedicated to diet and nutrition on New Year’s Day can be nearly double that during the last week of the preceding year. Overall, interest in dieting steadily drops as each year progresses, until the next New Year’s Day comes around. Our research is based on Google Trends data for the year 2022. We also got a glance of diet searches for the first…

CHRIS BRYANT: Since launching in 2014, Veganuary has boasted increasing sign-ups year on year. But what’s the evidence that the campaign that encourages people to adopt a vegan diet during January is really taking a bite out of the meat market? More than 700,000 people signed up in 2023, and it’s likely that these figures – which only account for people who officially signed up on the Veganuary website – represent just a fraction of all those who took part without signing up. Veganuary is a campaign which encourages people to try veganism in January... More than three quarters of British…