veganism – Pike & Hurricane

Veganism, vegetarianism: trend or real awareness?

Pauline Zaragoza — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 12:48:19 +0000

Festivals, restaurants and even butcher’s shops… Vegan and vegetarian lifestyles have gained ground over the past decades. Videos on animal cruelty and deforestation show the terrible side of our industrial society. It all raises attention on our consumer behavior, facing environmental issues, and our eating habits. But do these diets really reflect an understanding of contemporary issues or are they a new business trend?

Veganism, vegetarianism – what does that mean?

Depending on the person, the vegan or vegetarian lifestyle can be influenced by various motivations such as animal wellbeing, health issues or even religion. The vegetarian lifestyle was born in 1847 with the Vegetarian Society; the word comes from the Latin “vegetus” which means healthy, fresh and alive. From this word, the term veganism was coined in 1994 by Donald Watson, co-founder of the Vegan Society created in the United States in 1948.

There are a hundred ways to practice those diets: ovo, lacto, ovo-lacto, veganism, raw veganism, fruitarianism, Buddhist vegetarianism, Jain vegetarianism, Jewish vegetarianism… But the main and more marked difference between vegan and vegetarian is the lifestyle. A vegetarian person doesn’t eat any product from slaughter such as meat, fish, or even gelatin. However, vegans stop eating all types of animal products such as milk, honey, eggs, fish and meat. And if you want to look further as a vegan, in addition to the diet you have to cut your consume of animal products such as clothes (fur or leather), make up, or any product derived from animals.

An environmental issue

The vegan and vegetarian lifestyle became significant thanks to a heightened media coverage. Especially Netflix, the giant media which gathers more than 139 million subscribers, offers a lot of documentaries about environmental issues linked to food on its platform: “What the Health”, “Food Matters”, “Cowspiracy”, “Forks over knives”, … the list is long. This raises the question on the role of Netflix regarding food and environmental awareness which has for sure increased these past years.

In fact, those revelations have foundations. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has recognized the impact of the livestock sector as the largest user of agricultural land, through grazing and the use of feed crops, but also its influence on climate change, management of land and water, and biodiversity.

Figures show that farming is responsible for 14,5% of greenhouse gas emission and 63% of Amazonia’s deforestation. Moreover, according to the Harvard Medical School a huge reduction of meat consumption would be as efficient as halving the world’s car fleet. On average, we need 4,660l of water to make 1kg of vegetal protein instead of 7,900l of water to produce 1kg of meat. Also, farming is responsible for water pollution, especially due to pisciculture which releases chemical products, pesticides, antibiotics and hormones into the water. All in all, the livestock sector is responsible for 80% of acid rain.

A bobo trend?

But we can question some aspects of those diets. There is a growing trend of celebritiessuch as Joaquin Phoenix, Pamela Anderson, Natalie Portman, Jared Leto, Ellen DeGeneres, and, more surprisingly perhaps, Bill Clinton whot follow a vegan diet. Today, 5% of the world’s population, namely 375 million people, are vegan or vegetarian. The countries where the most vegan and vegetarian people live are India (38%), Israel (13%), Italy (10%) and finally Germany and the United Kingdom (both 9%). That represents a huge business area, and therefore the vegan/vegetarian label has become a new marketing tool.

McDonalds, KFC, Stella McCartney, Lidl, Adidas and others have conceded to the sirens of the veganism/vegetarianism trend. In France, this market increased by 24% in 2018. In the United States, according to Forbes, consumers spent nearly $1.9 billion on plant-based milks and $3.3 billion on plant-based foods in 2018 which represents a huge potential for business, even more so since the number of vegans in the United States jumped from 1 percent in 2014 to 6 percent in 2017.

Plant based foods are now offered in trendy coffee shops, plant based fast foods, vegan restaurants, major league baseball stadiums and even by vegan butchers, which was named a top new job trend for 2017 by Time Money.

Nevertheless, the product and place access is still concentrated and unequal. Most of the people in Western countries which adopted a vegan/vegetarian diet live in big cities. Paris and Lyon, two of France’s biggest cities, are more inhabited by vegans and vegetarians than smaller cities and towns. Therefore, veganism and vegetarianism are an urban trend and practiced mainly by the middle and upper class.

A sustainable movement?

Despite various positive effects for health, environment and animal wellbeing, veganism/vegetarianism is not without its negative sides. In fact, plant-based food can lead to vitamin deficiencies such as vitamin B12 deficiency (B12 is primarily found in animal products) and sometimes hide eating disorders. Vegetarian diets do not cause eating disorders, but “may be selected to camouflage an existing eating disorder. In addition, sometimes veganism isn’t tolerated by some bodies.”

Those plant-based diets can also have a bad impact on the environment as shown by the avocado controversy. During the past years, not only the number of vegans and vegetarians has increased, avocados have become the latest trend of the Western world’s diet. However, their industrial production is also harming the environment by the use of energy, water, fertilizer and pesticides.

Moreover, there is what we can call vegan extremism. Recently in France, we’ve seen an increase in attacks against butchers, and sometimes those attacks have been violent. These attacks are motivated by a vegan ideology named antispecism. According to this concept, the human species isn’t superior to the animal species but equal.

Some intellectuals expressed their position on the matter. One of them is the essayist Paul Ariès who considers “the alternative is not between the shitty meat produced in inhumane conditions and fake meat prepared by biotechnology.” For Ariès, we have to go back to being conscious eaters, in other words, we have to switch to small farmers who respect animals and support biodiversity.

In a more trivial expression the French sociologist Jocelyne Porcher denounced veganism which according to her will bankrupt traditional farming and favorize the false meat industry. She thinks that “vegan people are not revolutionary but idiots useful for capitalism” because it makes us more dependent on industry.

The comeback of normal human consumption: flexitariansim

Before the World Wars humans did not eat meat every day. The overconsumption of meat only came with the rise of the industrial modern society. What we can be sure of is that most agree on the fact that animal wellbeing matters and that reducing meat consumption is better for one’s health.

But we shouldn’t fall into the black and white thinking that all carnivores are bad people. Everyone has to take responsibility for facing those issues. Maybe the solution is to go back to the way we used to behave: being flexitarians. And the good news is, this lifestyle is growing.

To conclude, we have to act for a better future, planet, food consumption, animal care, health and, most importantly, we should stay tolerant and respect everyone’s choices.

by Pauline Zaragoza

Photo Credits

Vegetables Avocado, Jill Wellington, Pixabay

Sheep, Couleur, Pixabay

Bar Coffee Restaurant, Free-Photos, Pixabay

Chicago Fur Free Friday 2010, Jovan J, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Breakfast Food Eating, Free-Photos, Pixabay

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Meat the Problem

Laura Korte — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 23:05:22 +0000

Around 51 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions comes from animal agriculture. 1 kg of meat uses between 5,000 and 20,000 litres of water to produce, compared to 1 kg of potatoes which takes around 290 litres. Livestock produces 37 percent of methane emissions. Animal agriculture uses up to 30 percent of our planet’s land mass. And so the list goes on, but the topic of animal agriculture continues to take second place after the issue of burning fossil fuels when environmental protection is discussed. Not that it is not important, but why do we not address the elephant in the room?

It is not unreasoned. The amount of money circulating in the food industry globally has been estimated to be annually around 4.8 trillion USD and counting. And with money comes greed and power and thus, lobbyism.

Lobbying is a form of advocacy from individuals, companies and lobby groups with the purpose of influencing the decisions of the government — and sometimes we forget what the topics being lobbied against or for are about. The overall attitude towards our governments and decision-makers is often that whatever is decided is for the greater good and not to thicken one CEO’s wallet. However, examples from all over the world lead to the question about what actually happens behind the curtains.

Strong meat and dairy lobby

When we, the common folk, see the government published dietary guidelines, the norm is to accept them and follow them, or at least to try to. The dietary guidelines are visible in school lunches and are up on waiting room walls. But if we only listened to independent scientists and not the government on this topic, we would realise that there is a lot that is added to the guidelines and a lot that is left out. As for the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for the US, scientists point out that the amount of red meat recommended is far more than actually recommended. Why? The guidelines are issued by the US Departments of Agriculture (USDA). The aim of the departments is to help the market for US grown meat and animal produce, and in the US alone the USDA spends 550 million USD annually to advertise animal products with slogans such as “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.”

Legislation such as the US Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is supposed to protect all animal enterprises from damages caused to the property or profit line. With the legislation, even acts committed without violence, such as blogs posts and Youtube videos, can be convicted as acts of terrorism. The legislation was passed in the US Congress after heavy lobbying from pharmaceutical, fur and farming companies in 2006, and has since then faced criticism on its infringement of the right to free speech.

As someone who grew up in Finland for most of my childhood, I vividly remember the school cafeteria walls being covered in milk advertisements sponsored by Valio. Valio receives 1,8 million euros as campaign funds from the European School Milk Scheme of the EU. The European Milk School Scheme does not only provide campaign funds for privately owned companies like Valio, they also subsidise the cost of different dairy products for the EU states.

The US and Finland are not singular nor peculiar examples; this sort of lobbying affects legislation all around the planet.

Burning of the Amazon Rainforest for the use of animal agriculture

Towards a more sustainable diet?

Those who have made the decision to stop consuming animal products are often labelled as eccentric hippies or met by counter-arguments about the lack of protein and other nutrients, and how soy production for vegan food has a tremendous impact on climate change and Amazon deforestation. However, according to WWF, 75 percent of the soy produced is fed to the animals, which are then consumed as food , although 12 billion of those animals are thrown away as food waste yearly. And only about 6 percent of the remaining soy is actually used in human food. The rest is used in other soy products like biodiesel.

Even though it needs to be recognised that livestock produces vital food and resources for many people, meat and other animals products cannot be sustainably produced for the whole population of this planet. And just by doing the maths for this; land and water use of the animal agriculture industry are far beyond sustainable.

Although meeting someone whose diet and lifestyle is 100 percent sustainable has so far been a mission impossible, it is more and more common to see how people continuously weigh their choices. We are repeatedly put into the test of sustainability, and whether we fail or succeed, the impact of the result will be global.

To realise that we all – not excluding animals – live on this same planet and breath the same air is vital for our survival. The separation of ourselves into different groups, into a pyramid of hierarchical order, acts as a hindrance for our goal of sustainable living. As sustainability becomes more and more critical to incorporate into our everyday lives, we could make a start by supporting each other in the process.

By Laura Korte

Photo Credit:

7018-agriculture-animal-534 by Gratisography, CC0

Burning of rainforest for the use of animal agriculture by Genetic Engineering Network, noncommercial use only

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