Health, climate change, animal welfare: What’s driving more people and brands to embrace a plant-based lifestyle?
The unstoppable rise of veganism: how a fringe movement went mainstream
One influential factor that comes up regularly when talking to new vegan converts is a series of online documentaries, documenting the damage animal agriculture does to the environment, or meat-eating does to human health, or exposing factory farms.
DAN HANCOX: ‘If this is the year of mainstream veganism, as every trend forecaster and market analyst seems to agree, then there is not one single cause, but a perfect plant-based storm of factors. People cite one or more of three key motives for going vegan – animal welfare, environmental concerns and personal health – and it is being accompanied by an endless array of new business startups, cookbooks, YouTube channels, trendy events and polemical documentaries. The traditional food industry is desperately trying to catch up with the flourishing grassroots demand. “What do you mean, weak, limp and weedy? In 2017, the vegan category is robust, energetic, and flush with crowdfunding cash,” ran an article headlined “Vegan Nation” in industry bible the Grocer in November, pointing to new plant-based burger company Vurger, which hit its £150,000 investment target in little more than 24 hours…
The rapid explosion of the annual Veganuary campaign, in which curious omnivores and vegetarians sign up to try out veganism for a month and are then plied with recipes and other advice, shows how fast veganism is growing. (The choice of January is significant, given the resonances of fresh starts, good intentions and post-Christmas diets.) Veganuary was launched in 2014, with 3,300 people signing up; by 2016, there were 23,000 participants, then 59,500 in 2017, and a staggering 168,000 this year – and these are just the numbers that signed up officially online… In May 2016, the Vegan Society commissioned Ipsos Mori to poll 10,000 people on their dietary habits and found that Britain’s vegan population had increased from 150,000 to 542,000 in the space of a decade (alongside a vegetarian population of 1.14 million)…
One influential factor that comes up regularly when talking to new vegan converts is a series of polemical online documentaries, or “advocacy films”, many of them on streaming services such as Netflix, documenting the damage animal agriculture does to the environment, or meat-eating does to human health, or exposing gory scenes in slaughterhouses and factory farms. In Blackpool, Michelle Makita tells me the 2005 film Earthlings, with its harrowing, hidden-camera footage of animal suffering, was the epiphany that led her to switch to veganism. “I think I cried for about three days – I was hysterical,” she says. The thriving sub-genre’s titles tell their story in microcosm: Vegucated, Planeat, Forks Over Knives, Live and Let Live, Peaceable Kingdom. A common trope among recent converts is that the revelations about the brutality of the meat, dairy and egg industries were hidden from view, until these documentaries exposed them. SOURCE…
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