Why you should go animal-free: 18 arguments for eating meat debunked

Unpalatable as it may be for those wedded to producing and eating meat, the environmental and health evidence for a plant-based diet is clear writes Damian Carrington in The Guardian

Whether you are concerned about your health, the environment or animal welfare, scientific evidence is piling up that meat-free diets are best. Millions of people in wealthy nations are already cutting back on animal products.

Of course livestock farmers and meat lovers are unsurprisingly fighting back and it can get confusing. Are avocados really worse than beef? What about bee-massacring almond production?

The coronavirus pandemic has added another ingredient to that mix. The rampant destruction of the natural world is seen as the root cause of diseases leaping into humans and is largely driven by farming expansion. The world’s top biodiversity scientists say even more deadly pandemics will follow unless the ecological devastation is rapidly halted.

Food is also a vital part of our culture, while the affordability of food is an issue of social justice. So there isn’t a single perfect diet. But the evidence is clear: whichever healthy and sustainable diet you choose, it is going to have much less red meat and dairy than today’s standard western diets, and quite possibly none. That’s for two basic reasons.

First, the over-consumption of meat is causing an epidemic of disease, with about $285bn spent every year around the world treating illness caused by eating red meat alone. Second, eating plants is simply a far more efficient use of the planet’s stretched resources than feeding the plants to animals and then eating them. The global livestock herd and the grain it consumes takes up 83% of global farmland, but produces just 18% of food calories.

So what about all those arguments in favour of meat-eating and against vegan diets? Let’s start with the big beef about red meat.

Meaty matters

Claim: Grass-fed beef is low carbon

This is true only when compared to intensively-reared beef linked to forest destruction. The UK’s National Farmers Union says UK beef has only half the emissions compared to the world average. But a lot of research shows grass-fed beef uses more land and produces more – or at best similar – emissions because grain is easier for cows to digest and intensively reared cows live shorter lives. Both factors mean less methane. Either way, the emissions from even the best beef are still many times that from beans and pulses.

There’s more. If all the world’s pasture lands were returned to natural vegetation, it would remove greenhouse gases equivalent to about 8 bn tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, according to Joseph Poore at Oxford University. That’s about 15% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Only a small fraction of that pasture land would be needed to grow food crops to replace the lost beef. So overall, if tackling the climate crisis is your thing, then beef is not.

Claim: Cattle are actually neutral for climate, because methane is relatively short-lived greenhouse gas

FacebookTwitterPinterest Cattle graze in a pasture against a backdrop of wind turbines which are part of the 155 turbine Smoky Hill Wind Farm near Vesper, Kan. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP

Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas and ruminants produce a lot of it. But it only remains in the atmosphere for a relatively short time: half is broken down in nine years. This leads some to argue that maintaining the global cattle herd at current levels – about 1 billion animals – is not heating the planet. The burping cows are just replacing the methane that breaks down as time goes by.

But this is simply “creative accounting”, according to Pete Smith at the University of Aberdeen and Andrew Balmford at the University of Cambridge. We shouldn’t argue that cattle farmers can continue to pollute just because they have done so in the past, they say: “We need to do more than just stand still.” In fact, the short-lived nature of methane actually makes reducing livestock numbers a “particularly attractive target”, given that we desperately need to cut greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

In any case, just focusing on methane doesn’t make the rampant deforestation by cattle ranchers in South America go away. Even if you ignore methane completely, says Poore, animal products still produce more CO2 than plants. Even one proponent of the methane claim says: “I agree that intensive livestock farming is unsustainable.”

Claim: In many places the only thing you can grow is grass for cattle and sheep

NFU president, Minette Batters, says: “Sixty-five percent of British land is only suitable for grazing livestock and we have the right climate to produce high-quality red meat and dairy.”

“But if everybody were to make the argument that ‘our pastures are the best and should be used for grazing’, then there would be no way to limit global warming,” says Marco Springmann at the University of Oxford. His work shows that a transition to a predominantly plant-based flexitarian diet would free up both pasture and cropland.

The pasture could instead be used to grow trees and lock up carbon, provide land for rewilding and the restoration of nature, and growing bio-energy crops to displace fossil fuels. The crops no longer being fed to animals could instead become food for people, increasing a nation’s self-sufficiency in grains.

FacebookTwitterPinterest The Wild Ken Hill project on the Norfolk coast, which is turning around 1,000 acres of marginal farmland and woodland back over to nature. Photograph: Graeme Lyons/Wild Ken Hill/PA

Claim: Grazing cattle help store carbon from the atmosphere in the soil

This is true. The problem is that even in the very best cases, this carbon storage offsets only 20%-60% of the total emissions from grazing cattle. “In other words, grazing livestock – even in a best-case scenario – are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock,” says Tara Garnett, also at the University of Oxford.

Furthermore, research shows this carbon storage reaches its limit in a few decades, while the problem of methane emissions continue. The stored carbon is also vulnerable - a change in land use or even a drought can see it released again. Proponents of “holistic grazing” to trap carbon are also criticised for unrealistic extrapolation of local results to global levels.

Claim: There is much more wildlife in pasture than in monoculture cropland

That is probably true but misses the real point. A huge driver of the global wildlife crisis is the past and continuing destruction of natural habitat to create pasture for livestock. Herbivores do have an important role in ecosystems, but the high density of farmed herds means pasture is worse for wildlife than natural land. Eating less meat means less destruction of wild places and cutting meat significantly would also free up pasture and cropland that could be returned to nature. Furthermore, a third of all cropland is used to grow animal feed.

Claim: We need animals to convert feed into protein humans can eat

There is no lack of protein, despite the claims. In rich nations, people commonly eat 30-50% more protein than they need. All protein needs can easily be met from plant-based sources, such as beans, lentils, nuts and whole grains.

But animals can play a role in some parts of Africa and Asia where, in India for example, waste from grain production can feed cattle that produce milk. In the rest of the world, where much of cropland that could be used to feed people is actually used to feed animals, a cut in meat eating is still needed for agriculture to be sustainable.
“What about … ?”

Claim: What about soya milk and tofu that is destroying the Amazon?

It’s not. Well over 96% of soy from the Amazon region is fed to cows, pigs and chickens eaten around the world, according to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, says Poore. Furthermore, 97% of Brazilian soy is genetically modified, which is banned for human consumption in many countries and is rarely used to make tofu and soya milk in any case.

Soya milk also has much smaller emissions and land and water use than cow’s milk. If you are worried about the Amazon, not eating meat remains your best bet.

Claim: Almond milk production is massacring bees and turning land into desert

Some almond production may well cause environmental problems. But that is because rising demand has driven rapid intensification in specific places, like California, which could be addressed with proper regulation. It is nothing to do with what almonds need to grow. Traditional almond production in Southern Europe uses no irrigation at all. It is also perhaps worth noting that the bees that die in California are not wild, but raised by farmers like six-legged livestock.

Like soya milk, almond milk still has lower carbon emissions and land and water use than cow’s milk. But if you are still worried, there are plenty of alternatives, with oat milk usually coming out with the lowest environmental footprint.

Claim: Avocados are causing droughts in places 

Again, the problem here is the rapid growth of production in specific regions that lack prudent controls on water use, like Peru and Chile. Avocados generate three times less emissions than chicken, four times less than pork, and 20 times less than beef.

If you are still worried about avocados, you can of course choose not to eat them. But it’s not a reason to eat meat instead, which has a much bigger water and deforestation footprint.

The market is likely to solve the problem, as the high demand from consumers for avocados and almonds incentivises farmers elsewhere to grow the crops, thereby alleviating the pressure on current production hotspots.

Claim: Quinoa boom is harming poor farmers in Peru and Bolivia

Quinoa is an amazing food and has seen a boom. But the idea that this took food from the mouths of poor farmers is wrong. “The claim that rising quinoa prices were hurting those who had traditionally produced and consumed it is patently false,” said researchers who studied the issue.

Quinoa was never a staple food, representing just a few percent of the food budget for these people. The quinoa boom has had no effect on their nutrition. The boom also significantly boosted the farmers’ income.

There is an issue with falling soil quality, as the land is worked harder. But quinoa is now planted in China, India and Nepal, as well as in the US and Canada, easing the burden. The researchers are more worried now about the loss of income for South American farmers as the quinoa supply rises and the price falls.

Claim: What about palm oil destroying rainforests and orangutans?

Palm oil plantations have indeed led to terrible deforestation. But that is an issue for everybody, not only vegans: it’s in about half of all products on supermarket shelves, both food and toiletries. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature argues that choosing sustainably produced palm oil is actually positive, because other oil crops take up more land.

But Poore says: “We are abandoning millions of acres a year of oilseed land around the world, including rapeseed and sunflower fields in the former Soviet regions, and traditional olive plantations.” Making better use of this land would be preferable to using palm oil, he says.
Healthy questions

Claim: Vegans don’t get enough B12, making them stupid
A vegan diet is generally very healthy, but doctors have warned about the potential lack of B12, an important vitamin for brain function that is found in meat, eggs and cows’ milk. This is easily remedied by taking a supplement.

However, a closer look reveals some surprises. B12 is made by bacteria in soil and the guts of animals, and free-range livestock ingest the B12 as they graze and peck the ground. But most livestock are not free-range, and pesticides and antibiotics widely used on farms kill the B12-producing bugs. The result is that most B12 supplements - 90% according to one source – are fed to livestock, not people.

So there’s a choice here between taking a B12 supplement yourself, or eating an animal that has been given the supplement. Algae are a plant-based source of B12, although the degree of bio-availability is not settled yet. It is also worth noting that a significant number of non-vegans are B12 deficient, especially older people. Among vegans the figure is only about 10%.

Claim: Plant-based alternatives to meat are really unhealthy 

The rapid rise of the plant-based burger has prompted some to criticise them as ultra-processed junk food. A plant-based burger could be unhealthier if the salt levels are very high, says Springmann, but it is most likely to still be healthier than a meat burger when all nutritional factors are considered, particularly fibre. Furthermore, replacing a beef burger with a plant-based alternative is certain to be less damaging to the environment.

There is certainly a strong argument to be made that overall we eat far too much processed food, but that applies just as much to meat eaters as to vegetarians and vegans. And given that most people are unlikely to give up their burgers and sausages any time, the plant-based options are a useful alternative.
‘Catching out’ vegans

Claim: Fruit and vegetables aren’t vegan because they rely on animal manure as fertiliser

Most vegans would say it’s just silly to say fruit and veg are animal products and plenty are produced without animal dung. In any case there is no reason for horticulture to rely on manure at all. Synthetic fertiliser is easily made from the nitrogen in the air and there is plenty of organic fertiliser available if we chose to use it more widely in the form of human faeces. Over application of fertiliser does cause water pollution problems in many parts of the world. But that applies to both synthetic fertiliser and manure and results from bad management.

Claim: Vegan diets kill millions of insects

Piers Morgan is among those railing against “hypocrite” vegans because commercially kept bees die while pollinating almonds and avocados and combine harvesters “create mass murder of bugs” and small mammals while bringing in the grain harvest. But almost everyone eats these foods, not just vegans.

It is true that insects are in a terrible decline across the planet. But the biggest drivers of this are the destruction of wild habitat, largely for meat production, and widespread pesticide use. If it is insects that you are really worried about, then eating a plant-based organic diet is the option to choose.

Claim: Telling people to eat less meat and dairy is denying vital nutrition to the world’s poorest

A “planetary health diet” published by scientists to meet both global health and environmental needs was criticised by journalist Joanna Blythman: “When ideologues living in affluent countries pressurise poor countries to eschew animal foods and go plant-based, they are displaying crass insensitivity, and a colonial White Saviour mindset.”

In fact, says Springmann, who was part of the team behind the planetary health diet, it would improve nutritional intake in all regions, including poorer regions where starchy foods currently dominate diets. The big cuts in meat and dairy are needed in rich nations. In other parts of the world, many healthy, traditional diets are already low in animal products.
On the road

Claim: Transport emissions mean that eating plants from all over the world is much worse than local meat and dairy

“‘Eating local’ is a recommendation you hear often [but] is one of the most misguided pieces of advice,” says Hannah Ritchie, at the University of Oxford. “Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation make up a very small amount of the emissions from food and what you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from.”

Beef and lamb have many times the carbon footprint of most other foods, she says. So whether the meat is produced locally or shipped from the other side of the world, plants will still have much lower carbon footprints. Transport emissions for beef are about 0.5% of the total and for lamb it’s 2%.

The reason for this is that almost all food transported long distances is carried by ships, which can accommodate huge loads and are therefore fairly efficient. For example, the shipping emissions for avocados crossing the Atlantic are about 8% of their total footprint. Air freight does of course result in high emissions, but very little food is transported this way; it accounts for just 0.16% of food miles.

Claim: All the farmers who raise livestock would be unemployed if the world went meat-free

Livestock farming is massively subsidised with taxpayers money around the world – unlike vegetables and fruit. That money could be used to support more sustainable foods such as beans and nuts instead, and to pay for other valuable services, such as capturing carbon in woodlands and wetlands, restoring wildlife, cleaning water and reducing flood risks. Shouldn’t your taxes be used to provide public goods rather than harms?

So, food is complicated. But however much we might wish to continue farming and eating as we do today, the evidence is crystal clear that consuming less meat and more plants is very good for both our health and the planet. The fact that some plant crops have problems is not a reason to eat meat instead.

In the end, you will choose what you eat. If you want to eat healthily and sustainably, you don’t have to stop eating meat and dairy altogether. The planetary health diet allows for a beef burger, some fish and an egg each week, and a glass of milk or some cheese each day.

Food writer Michael Pollan foreshadowed the planetary health diet in 2008 with a simple seven-word rule: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But if you want to have the maximum impact on fighting the climate and wildlife crisis, then it is going to be all plants.

Why do people hate vegans?

It has left the beige-tinted margins and become social media’s most glamorous look. But why does veganism still provoke so much anger asks George Reynolds in The Guardian

From the hunger strike to the edible projectile, history offers abundant examples of food being used for political ends. Even so, the crowd of vegans who gathered in central London earlier this year are unlikely to forget the moment when Gatis Lagzdins skinned and ate a raw squirrel.

Along with his co-conspirator Deonisy Khlebnikov, Lagzdins performed his stunt at the weekly Soho Vegan Market on Rupert Street. He would subsequently demonstrate at VegFest in Brighton (although this time his snack of choice was a raw pig’s head) as part of a self-proclaimed “carnivore tour” intended to highlight the evils of a plant-based diet. At the London event, he wore a black vest emblazoned with the slogan: “Veganism = Malnutrition.”

The war on vegans started small. There were flashpoints, some outrageous enough to receive press coverage. There was the episode in which William Sitwell, then editor of Waitrose magazine, resigned after a freelance writer leaked an email exchange in which he joked about “killing vegans one by one”. (Sitwell has since apologised.) There was the PR nightmare faced by Natwest bank when a customer calling to apply for a loan was told by an employee that “all vegans should be punched in the face”. When animal rights protesters stormed into a Brighton Pizza Express in September this year, one diner did exactly that.

A charge commonly laid against vegans is that they relish their status as victims, but research suggests they have earned it. In 2015, a study conducted by Cara C MacInnis and Gordon Hodson for the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations observed that vegetarians and vegans in western society – and vegans in particular – experience discrimination and bias on a par with ethnic and religious minorities.

 

Illustration: Lee Martin/Guardian Design

Once a niche interest group parodied in TV shows such as The Simpsons (in which a character describes himself as a “level five vegan” who refuses to eat anything that casts a shadow), in the past two years, vegans have been thrust into the limelight. A philosophy rooted in non-aggression has found itself at the heart of some of the most virulent arguments on social media. In November 2018, Good Morning Britain hosted a debate titled “Do people hate vegans?”; the political website Vox tackled the question in even more direct fashion a week later, asking: “Why do people hate vegans so much?”

These recent displays of enmity towards vegans represent a puzzling escalation in hostilities, just as a consensus is starting to form that eating less meat would almost certainly be better for everyone – and the Earth. Of course, eating less meat does not mean eating no meat whatsoever, and the extreme prohibitions associated with going vegan (no animal products, no eggs, no leather, no wool) suggest it could have been just another Atkins diet or clean-eating fad – a flash in the pan that blows up and then dissipates, leaving behind nothing more than a dose of mild regret. Instead, just when the growth might have been expected to plateau, it kept on growing. A 2016 Ipsos Mori survey suggested the total number of vegans in the UK had increased more than 360% in the preceding decade, to more than 500,000.

Big business has been quick to cash in. The Los Angeles-based company Beyond Meat, producer of plant-based burgers whose taste and texture are as much like minced beef as possible, recently went public and soon afterwards hit a valuation of $3.4bn; huge conglomerates such as Nestlé and Kellogg’s are moving into the fake-meat market; supermarkets and restaurant chains have introduced vegan ranges. Yet perhaps the definitive proof of veganism’s mainstreaming – and the backlash against it – came in January this year, when the beloved high-street bakery chain Greggs announced it was launching a Quorn-based vegan sausage roll. It was pilloried by Piers Morgan, who tweeted: “Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns.” It turns out Morgan was mistaken: the vegan sausage roll was such a hit that the company’s share value leapt by 13%.

Of course, what we grow, harvest, fatten and kill is political. A Tesco advert showcasing vegan produce met protests from the National Farmers Union who claimed it “demonised” meat, while Shropshire deputy council leader Steve Charmley unleashed a tweet-storm when confronted with pro-vegan advertising in a county he claimed was “built on agriculture”. This moment, and this conflict, were a long time coming. The rise of veganism is a question less of personal taste than of generational upheaval; less about meat and fish and dairy than the systems that put them on our tables in such excessive quantities. Ultimately, the vegan wars are not really about veganism at all, but about how individual freedom is coming into conflict with a personal and environmental health crisis.

In many cultures, the practice of abstaining entirely from animal produce has an established history: with their belief systems rooted in nonviolence, many Rastafarians, followers of Jainism and certain sects of Buddhism have been swearing off meat, fish, eggs and dairy for centuries. In large swathes of the west, though, public awareness of what veganism actually entails has been sketchy. There wasn’t even a commonly accepted English-language name until 1944, when a British woodworker called Donald Watson called a meeting with a handful of other non-dairy vegetarians (including his wife, Dorothy) to discuss a less cumbersome label for their lifestyle. They considered alternatives such as dairyban, vitan and benevore before settling on the term we use today, a simple contraction of vegetarian on the grounds that “veganism starts with vegetarianism and carries it through to its logical conclusions”.

But those logical conclusions did not stop at abstaining from certain foods. The original vegans were not pursuing a diet so much as a belief system, a wholesale ideology – one that rejected not just animal protein but also the way animals had become part of an industrial supply chain. In the 1970s, Carol J Adams started work on the book that would appear, two decades later, as The Sexual Politics of Meat: a seminal feminist text that positioned veganism as the only logical solution to a social system that reduced both women and animals to desirable, but disposable, flesh.

In the early 70s, other activists were considering how veganism might provide a viable alternative to existing food systems. In 1971, Diet for a Small Planet by the social policy activist Frances Moore Lappé introduced an environmental justification for going vegetarian or vegan to a global audience (it eventually sold more than 3m copies). In the same year, counter-culture hero Stephen Gaskin founded a vegan intentional community, The Farm, in Lewis County, Tennessee, bringing together some 300 like-minded individuals. Four years later, The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook by Louise Hagler announced: “We are vegetarians because one-third of the world is starving and at least half goes to bed hungry every night,” and introduced western audiences to techniques for making their own soy-based products such as tofu and tempeh.

The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook fixed a certain vegan aesthetic in the minds of mainstream meat-eating culture for decades to come. Veganism became synonymous with soybeans and brown rice, with ageing hippies spooning beige bowlfuls of worthy grains and pulses – not the glamorous, vibrant, youthful practitioners that now radiate positivity from their Instagram feeds.

 

BBQ pulled jack fruit tacos with avocado and lime: a long way from the beige vegan food much parodied in the 70s. Photograph: LauriPatterson/Getty Images/iStockphoto

It is hard to overstate the role social media has played in transforming veganism’s image, with its facility for fostering an instant sense of community. Witness any number of viral internet phenomena – from Woman Laughing Alone with Salad to acai bowls and this generation’s staple, avocado toast – that have helped free it from its musty old associations. Instagram in particular gave vegan food mainstream exposure, repackaging it (good for you and photogenic!) for the low-attention-span internet age. Not everyone sees this as a positive development: the vegan writer and podcast host Alicia Kennedy considers it troubling that the internet has transformed something with such a rich political history into “a wellness thing” that allows would-be consumers to label themselves vegans without having to engage with the “excess baggage” of ideology. Another American writer, Khushbu Shah, has argued that the popularisation of veganism via social media has erased non-white faces and narratives from the dominant discourse, as white bloggers and influencers fashion a lifestyle in their image.

At the same time, a similar transformation was happening to the food vegans were eating. A blossoming street food scene in major cities influenced a dirtier, trashier vegan aesthetic that gave the diet a further boost. Recipe channels on YouTube and Facebook such as BOSH! – a glossy young male duo – used video to make stunt dishes (apple pie tacos; a plant-based take on a McDonald’s McMuffin; a watermelon “Jaegerbomb”) that injected some much-needed fun into the diet. (Tellingly, the BOSH! dudes, Henry Firth and Ian Theasby, refer to themselves not as chefs but “food remixers”.)

The language began to reflect a new, more approachable veganism. Descriptors such as “plant-based” gained in popularity, effectively rebranding the worthy brown stodge of popular imagination into something green and vital. Other neologisms such as “flexitarian” (a term denoting someone who is predominantly vegan or vegetarian but who occasionally eats meat or fish, added to the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2014) recast daunting vegan ideology as a fun, healthy, casual thing to try.

Cultish initiatives like Veganuary (an annual campaign encouraging people to go meat-free for the first month of the year, launched in 2014) and Meat Free Mondays tapped into this spirit – moving away from wholesale dietary transformation and towards something more manageably sporadic, with the added gloss of being able to share (that is, brag about) the experience online. Beyoncé declared an interest in veganism – at least, for breakfast – while athletes such as Venus Williams (who took up a raw vegan diet to combat a health condition) and Lewis Hamilton played a vital role in raising awareness and turning something once seen as weird and a little annoying into a desirable lifestyle.Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning

Helping the cause was the growing body of scientific literature suggesting that some of the processes that produce the modern western diet were catastrophically bad for us. Bee Wilson wrote in these pages about the health effects of processed pork in a piece titled “Yes, bacon really is killing us.” Food in the Anthropocene, a report commissioned by the Lancet in conjunction with the global nonprofit Eat (a startup dedicated to transforming the global food system) concluded that “unhealthy diets are the largest global burden of disease”, and that meat-heavy food production is “the largest source of environmental degradation”. A major study led by a team from Oxford University, published in the journal Nature in October 2018, showed that huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to slow the rate of climate change. Livestock production has been shown to lead to dangerous levels of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. Factor in pop-science phenomena like the documentaries Cowspiracy! and What the Health – available on Netflix – and your diet suddenly seemed like a way you could save the world.

Big Meat continues to lobby aggressively in favour of our God-given right to eat animal flesh, resulting in a series of legal prohibitions surrounding what can and cannot be called “meat”’ or even – in one US state – a “veggie burger”. But veganism’s virality has proved irresistible. From about 2015, vegan and plant-based cookery manuals started to proliferate at a dazzling rate, with the BOSH! boys selling upward of 80,000 copies and spending four weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list (today, Amazon lists more than 20,000 results for the search term “vegan cookbook”). Sales of plant milks skyrocketed; financial results at the manufacturer of plant-based protein Quorn soared as what one analyst referred to as the “battle for the centre of the plate” began to draw (fake) blood. By 2018, Byron, M&S and Pret had invested heavily in vegan ranges. It was, this paper proclaimed, “the year that veganism moved out of the realms of counter-culture and into the mainstream”. In 2014, Veganuary’s inaugural campaign had attracted just 3,300 participants; by 2019 the number was greater than 250,000, with 53% of them under the age of 35.

But veganism’s explosive growth alone does not explain why it attracted such controversy. There is something inherent to veganism and vegans that arouses deeper feelings. What is it about the vegan lifestyle that stirs such strong emotion in those who don’t happen to share it? Why do people hate vegans so much?

Early attempts to establish a vegan utopia did not go well. In the 1840s, the transcendentalist philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott (father of the author of Little Women, Louisa May) founded Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts – a vegan community intended to be nothing less than a second Eden. But Alcott’s insistence that crops had to be planted and fields tilled by hand meant that not enough food could be grown for all of the members (even though the population peaked at just 13); a diet of fruit and grains, typically consumed raw, left participants severely malnourished. Just seven months after opening, Fruitlands closed – derided, in the words of one biographer, as “one of history’s most unsuccessful utopias”.

The timing was unfortunate for American vegetarians, who were already engaged in a pitched battle with public opinion. Vegetarians and vegans in the 19th century – known as Grahamites after the Presbyterian minister and diet reformer Sylvester Graham, who campaigned against meat-eating on the grounds that it was both unhealthy and morally repugnant – were the subject of frequent vitriolic editorials in the popular and medical press of the day, which described them as “cadaverous”, “feeble”, “half-crazed”, “sour-visaged” and “food cranks”.

In the 21st century the terminology may have changed but the sentiment remains much the same. The 2015 study conducted by MacInnis and Hodson found that only drug addicts were viewed more negatively among respondents. It concluded: “Unlike other forms of bias (eg, racism, sexism), negativity toward vegetarians and vegans is not widely considered a societal problem; rather, [it] is commonplace and largely accepted.”

In 2011, sociologists Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan observed a phenomenon they called “vegaphobia”, demonstrating that the British media consistently portrayed vegans in a negative light. In the days after her story broke, Selene Nelson, the freelancer at the centre of the Waitrose magazine row, was called “humourless”, “combative” and “militant”. In 2017, residents of the Swiss town of Aargau reportedly called for a vegan foreign resident to be denied citizenship because she was “annoying”, and the glee with which the global media retold the story revealed a widespread and casual prejudice.

  Beyond Meat’s Beyond Spring burger.

Veganism’s opponents outline a host of objections to the lifestyle to justify their hostility. Per a now-familiar joke (Q: How do you know if someone’s vegan? A: Don’t worry, they’ll tell you), vegans are portrayed as preachy and sanctimonious, a characteristic that rankled among MacInnis and Hodson’s respondents in particular, who viewed “vegetarians/vegans more negatively when their motivations concern social justice rather than personal health”.

There are rational motives to oppose vegan diets on health grounds. They can be deficient in crucial nutrients such as vitamin B-12. This is especially notable in the case of extreme diets (such as fruitarianism) advocated by some vegan bloggers or Instagram influencers with unorthodox approaches to nutritional science. Various supermarket chains have also attempted to meet the burgeoning demand for vegan products with highly processed vegan ready meals – from the Impossible Burger to plant-based meatballs, goujons and hot dogs. As Bee Wilson argued in these pages, the high proportion of processed ingredients in these products means the so-called health halo they enjoy may well be illusory.

Perhaps all we are doing, as veganism truly goes mainstream and companies such as Beyond Meat reap windfalls, is replacing one kind of industrialised system with another. Evidence suggests that intensive livestock farming is a poor solution to world hunger, given its impact on personal health and the environment, but intensive industrialised farming of soya, maize and grains comes at a significant carbon cost, too – as does flying in the ingredients to keep berries and nut butters on acai bowls or avocado on toast.

Veganism, of course, is rooted in social justice – a detail that has faded from view as it has gone mainstream. But even in its dilute 21st-century form, veganism remains confrontational: it casts people’s dietary choices in harsh relief, and people are by nature defensive. In countries where meat is prohibitively expensive for many, people are sometimes vegetarian or vegan by necessity; in the affluent west, not eating meat is an active choice. This makes it a rejection of a lifestyle and a rebuke to the majority’s values – especially in a country (such as the UK) still struggling to escape the long shadow of rationing. We are conditioned to like animals and decry animal cruelty, and yet we are also brought up in a culture that revels in the bacon sandwich, the Sunday roast, fish and chips. One simple explanation for why people don’t like vegans is because they show how confused humankind is about food choices and how illogical its decision-making can be.

And yet none of this really gets to the heart of what it is about vegans that makes people so upset. Calling them humourless or militant, sanctimonious or annoying or hypocrites – all of these terms are just smokescreens for what it is that people really feel, which is fear. Vegans are unsettling and uncanny: they live among us, speak like us, behave like us – but for one significant exception. Meat may be murder, but to some people, the prospect of life without it is even worse.

There is no justification for the amount of meat we eat in western society. The resources that go into humanely rearing and butchering an animal should make its flesh a borderline-unattainable luxury – and, indeed, in the past, it was. Meat always used to be the preserve of the wealthy, a symbol of prosperity: “A chicken in every pot” remained an aspirational but impractical promise across the best part of a millennium, from the days of Henry IV of France (when the term was invented) all the way through to Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential campaign.

It was only through the technological advances of modern agriculture that meat became attainable and available at supermarket prices. From the mid-1800s onwards, farmers could raise animals bigger, better and faster than in the past; kill them quicker; treat their flesh to prevent it from spoiling; transport it further and store it longer. A commonly cited psychological turning point was the second world war, which engendered what Russell Baker, writing in the New York Times, later described as a kind of “beef madness”. GIs were sent to the front with rations of tinned meat; once peace had been declared, there was no better symbol of the brave new world than a sizzling celebratory steak. In the course of just over a century, meat went from unattainable luxury to dietary cornerstone; these days, we feel entitled to eat meat every day.

In March this year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was discussing the Green New Deal on Showtime’s Desus & Mero US TV talk show when she observed: “Maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Like, let’s keep it real.” An apparently innocuous comment, rooted in the same common-sense good science that informed the Lancet report on meat and environmental degradation published around the same time? Not if you asked the Republicans, it wasn’t.

Representative Rob Bishop of Utah seized on Ocasio-Cortez’s comment, claiming that under the Green New Deal the eating of burgers would be “outlawed”. Former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka went one better, using a speech at the Conservative Political Action conference to proclaim: “They want to take away your hamburgers! This is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved!”

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announcing the Green New Deal, part of which would aim to reduce meat consumption. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty

Stalin was, in fact, full of admiration for the American burger, going so far as to send his minister of foreign trade to the US on a fact-finding mission (the result, the so-called Mikoyan cutlet, would remain an affordable Soviet staple for decades). But “they’re taking our meat” is as evocative a rallying cry as “they’re taking our jobs” or “they’re taking our guns” – it conveys the same sense of individual freedoms being menaced by external forces, a birthright under attack. Ted Cruz (wrongly) alleged that his Democrat rival Beto O’Rourke planned to ban Texas barbecue if elected senator in his place: like the personal firearm, animal flesh has become an emblem of resistance against the encroachments of progressivism, something to be prised from your cold, dead hand. Men’s rights advocate Jordan Peterson is famed for following a beef and salt diet; Donald Trump is renowned for his love of fast food and well-done steak with ketchup; there is even a subset of libertarian cryptocurrency enthusiasts who call themselves Bitcoin carnivores.

In the internet age, the consumption of meat is visibly aligned with a certain kind of conservative alpha-masculinity. Before he found infamy eating raw flesh, Gatis Lagzdins was best known for hosting a YouTube channel peddling racist ideology and rightwing conspiracies about the Illuminati. Among the alt-right and affiliated circles online, the derogatory term “soy boy” has been adopted along with other terms such as “cuck” and “beta” as a way of mocking so-called social justice warriors for their perceived lack of vigour. This echoes a finding in the MacInnis/Hodson study, in which respondents from a rightwing background, who seek to uphold traditional gender values, see something alarmingly subversive and worthy of derision in any man who prefers tofu to turkey.

This loaded use of food-derived epithets cuts both ways. In the UK, the term “gammon” gained currency in the early 2010s as a pejorative apparently inspired by the puce skin tone of enraged, middle-aged middle Englanders. Food has always been bound up in personal identity, and thus inextricable from politics. In their etymology, common terms such as “diet” (Greek for way of life) and “regime” (Latin: rule) are metaphors for a struggle over what it means to lead one’s life correctly. The very concept of orthorexia (whose sufferers obsessively exclude foods from their diet that they consider harmful) has at its root a corrupted idea of “correct” eating. It is impossible to talk about diets without also talking about the implied inadequacies of those who do not follow them; to paraphrase Brillat-Savarin, tell someone what to eat and you tell them who to be.

The vegan conversation, then, is a stand-in for much bigger things. When we talk about veganism we are talking about environmental and social change; we are also contemplating the erasure of tradition (Texas barbecue! The Sunday roast! The sausage roll!). We are also tabling a long-overdue referendum on how our food choices affect us and the world around us. And as much as its popularity has been pumped up by concepts like flexitarianism, ultimately veganism’s goal is a world in which the annual per-capita consumption of animal products is precisely zero. No wonder things have got so heated.

Food can be a powerful conduit for our anxieties, too. Half a century ago, a letter published in The New England Journal of Medicine described a terrifying new condition whose symptoms – headache, sweating, heart palpitations – were associated with a common ingredient of dishes served in Chinese restaurants: monosodium glutamate, or MSG. The flavour-enhancing additive was so demonised that it was banned in some US cities. Despite multiple studies conclusively proving otherwise, the belief in so-called “Chinese restaurant syndrome” remains widespread today: Asian-American chefs still find themselves having to justify the use of MSG despite its widespread use in non-Asian foods too. It is a neat example of the persistence of food-related urban legends. There was no doubt a racist element to the way the MSG myth spread; those involved in its dissemination were also motivated by a gnawing fear of obsolescence as a new threat to their existence began to gain popularity.

Those opposing meat-eating have a struggle ahead of them. It is clear that what is at stake here is not steak, but identity. A movement that preaches such wholesale change is bound to stir up anxieties, chief among them the sense that vegan dishes such as the Greggs Quorn sausage roll are being positioned not as alternatives but as replacements.

With a few notable exceptions – most of them religious – meat has retained its primacy in cultures across the world. It originally became a status symbol because it was harder to obtain than plant matter – even a small animal could run away, and if caught, was capable of inflicting wounds that could prove fatal in a world before antibiotics. As society became hierarchical, there was no greater token of status than the ability to eat meat on a whim. In her 2016 book Meathooked, Marta Zaraska records the discovery of Egyptian tombs in which the pharaohs had been buried alongside “meat mummies”, baskets of beef and poultry that had been embalmed in preparation for the afterlife. Our fetishisation of meat has not lessened – on the contrary, forecasters predict rapid increase in meat consumption in developing countries over the next decade. As a ready source of protein, meat remains the great aspiration, the surest proof of prosperity.

As Carol J Adams wrote, the words we use shield us from the moral consequences of carnivory: we eat beef, not cows, pork, not pigs, while a cabbage remains just a cabbage wherever it is in its life cycle. Our language ennobles meat at the expense of veg: strong, muscular types are “beefy”, lazy people are “couch potatoes”, unresponsive ones “vegetables”. Turning our back on meat-eating is not as simple as changing from pork to Quorn: it requires us to reject some entrenched values.

Already, there are signs that a great migration is underway. The UK university caterer Tuco recently reported that record numbers of canteens are going meat-free, describing the adoption of vegan or vegetarian diets among students and staff as a “mega-trend”. On the high street, too, there is a growing recognition that vegan ranges are not just opportunistic cash-grabs but potential best-sellers. After the success of Greggs’ vegan sausage roll, Tesco announced it would be increasing its range of dedicated plant-based products by nearly 50% to keep pace with demand.

Sales may be growing fast, but they are barely making a dent in the $1.7tr global market for animal-derived protein. Certainly, a change of culture will not happen without the involvement of government, industry and science; as the past few years have shown, widespread change is also unlikely to happen without a fight. This makes the current field of conflict an unfortunate one – in the real world, we can practise moderation, emotional flexitarianism. Online – where many of the vegan wars’ most intense skirmishes are currently being fought – we do not find compromise or even look for it. The internet has made communication highly charged and polarised; the only way to be heard in such a screaming vortex is to shout louder.

But the body of evidence suggesting that we eat too much meat is approaching the point where it becomes undeniable. This summer, a UN report identified destruction of forests and emissions from cattle and other intensive farming practices as major factors driving the climate crisis towards a point of no return.

Some are proposing urgent action, such as the QC Michael Mansfield, who recently suggested (in a speech given at the launch of the Vegan Now campaign) that meat-eating could become illegal. He drew a parallel with the smoking ban, and it is indeed eminently possible that in time meat (especially red meat) becomes the new tobacco – a vice enjoyed by a small number of people in full awareness of its negative health consequences.

But in coining the term “ecocide” – and classing it as a crime against humanity – Mansfield framed the debate in different terms. We might portray the current moment as a precipice, and the growing interest in plant-based diets as the surest way back to safety. In this interpretation, the war on vegans is the act of a doomed majority fighting to defend its harmful way of life. Vegans might well be vociferous and annoying, holier-than-thou, self-satisfied and evangelical. But as their numbers grow beyond the margins, perhaps the worst thing they could be is right.

I’ve converted to veganism to reduce my impacts on the living world

George Monbiot in The Guardian

Nothing hits the planet as hard as rearing animals. Caring for it means cutting out meat, dairy and eggs.

Illustration by Nate Kitch


The world can cope with 7 or even 10 billion people. But only if we stop eating meat. Livestock farming is the most potent means by which we amplify our presence on the planet. It is the amount of land an animal-based diet needs that makes it so destructive.

An analysis by the farmer and scholar Simon Fairlie suggests that Britain could easily feed itself within its own borders. But while a diet containing a moderate amount of meat, dairy and eggs would require the use of 11m hectares of land (4m of which would be arable), a vegan diet would demand a total of just 3m. Not only do humans need no pasture, but we use grains and pulses more efficiently when we eat them ourselves, rather than feed them to cows and chickens.

This would enable 15m hectares of the land now used for farming in Britain to be set aside for nature. Alternatively, on a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200 million people. Extending this thought experiment to the rest of the world, it’s not hard to see how gently we could tread if we stopped keeping animals. Rainforests, savannahs, wetlands, magnificent wildlife can live alongside us, but not alongside our current diet.

Because we have failed to understand this in terms of space, we believe we can solve the ethical problems caused by eating animals by switching from indoor production to free-range meat and eggs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Free-range farming is kinder to livestock but crueller to the rest of the living world.

When people criticise farming, they usually preface it with the word intensive. But extensive farming, almost by definition, does greater harm to the planet: more land is needed to rear the same amount of food. Keeping cattle or sheep on ranches, whether in the Amazon, the US, Australia or the hills of Britain, is even more of a planet-busting indulgence than beef feed-lots and hog cities, cruel and hideous as these are.

Over several years, as I became more aware of these inconvenient truths, I gradually dropped farmed meat from my diet. But I still consumed milk and eggs. I knew the dire environmental impacts of the crops(such as maize and soya) that dairy cows and chickens are fed. I knew about the waste, the climate change, the air pollution. But greed got the better of me. Cheese, yoghurt, butter, eggs – I loved them all.

Then something happened that broke down the wall of denial. Last September I arranged to spend a day beside the River Culm in Devon, renowned for its wildlife and beauty. However, the stretch I intended to explore had been reduced to a stinking ditch, almost lifeless except for some sewage fungus. I traced the pollution back to a dairy farm. A local man told me the disaster had been developing for months. But his efforts to persuade the Environment Agency (the government regulator) to take action had been fruitless.

Farms and pastureland carve their way into tropical forestland in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, one of the Amazon’s most deforested regions. Photograph: Planet

I published the photos I had taken in the Guardian, and they caused a stir. Yet the Environment Agency still refused to take action. Its excuses were so preposterous that I realised this was more than simple incompetence. After publishing another article about this farce, I was contacted separately by two staff members at the agency. They told me they had been instructed to disregard all incidents of this kind. The cause, they believed, was political pressure from the government.

That did it. Why, I reasoned, should I support an industry the government refuses to regulate? Since then, I have cut almost all animal products from my diet. I’m not religious about it. If I’m at a friend’s house I might revert to vegetarianism. If I’m away from home, I will take a drop of milk in my tea. About once a fortnight I have an egg for my breakfast, perhaps once a month a fish I catch, or a herring or some anchovies (if you eat fish, take them from the bottom of the food chain). Perhaps three or four times a year, on special occasions, I will eat farmed meat: partly out of greed, partly because I don’t want to be even more of a spectre at the feast than I am already. This slight adaptation, I feel, also reduces the chances of a relapse.

I still eat roadkill when I can find it, and animals killed as agricultural pests whose bodies might otherwise be dumped. At the moment, while pigeons, deer, rabbits and squirrels are so abundant in this country and are being killed for purposes other than meat production, eating the carcasses seems to be without ecological consequence. Perhaps you could call me a pestitarian.

Even so, such meals are rare. My rough calculation suggests that 97% of my diet now consists of plants. I eat plenty of pulses, seeds and nuts and heaps of vegetables. That almost allows me to join the 500,000 people in Britain who are full vegans – but not quite. Of course, these choices also have impacts, but they are generally far lower than those of meat, dairy and eggs. Paradoxically, if you want to eat less soya, eat soya directly: eating animal products tends to mean consuming far more of this crop, albeit indirectly. Almost all the soya grown where rainforests once stood is used to feed animals. Replacing meat with soya reduces the clearance of natural vegetation, per kilogram of protein, by 96%.

After almost a year on this diet, I have dropped from 12 stone to 11. I feel better than I’ve done for years, and my craving for fat has all but disappeared. Cheese is no more appealing to me now than a lump of lard. My asthma has almost gone. There are a number of possible explanations, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with cutting out milk. I have to think harder about what I cook, but that is no bad thing.

Meat eating is strongly associated with conventional images of masculinity, and some people appear to feel threatened by those who give up animal products. An Italian politician this week proposed jailing parents who impose a vegan diet on their children, in case it leaves them malnourished. Curiously, he failed to recommend the same sanction for rearing them on chips and sausages.

By chance, at a festival this summer, I again met the man from Devon who had tried to persuade the Environment Agency to take action on the River Culm. He told me that nothing has changed. When there’s a choice between protecting the living world and appeasing powerful lobby groups, most governments will take the second option. But we can withdraw our consent from this corruption. If you exercise that choice, I doubt you will regret it.

Is vegetarianism and veganism about animal welfare or moral superiority?

Leslie Cannold for the Ethics Centre in The Guardian

‘There is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.’ Photograph: Wong Maye-E/AP




The western obsession with rights makes it difficult to see their limitations. We speak about rights as if they were the only moral value with meaning, ignoring other important moral values like responsibilities or duties. In fact, responsibilities are the counterparts to rights – you can’t have one without the other.

Philosopher Carl Cohen writes that, “If animals have any rights, they must have the right not to be killed to advance the interest of others.” Another way of putting this is that those who assert the rights of animals are in effect asserting – first and foremost – a right to life for all animals.

But for an animal to realise its right to life, farmers, hunters and researchers must collectively accept a duty not to kill them. Similarly, citizens, consumers and patients must refuse to eat, wear or use food, clothes and medicine that require an animal to die.

As I’ll be arguing in the IQ2 debate “Animal rights should trump human interests” in Sydney on Tuesday night, the assertion of an animal right to life is non-sensical. It would require us – just as one example – to stop animals from hunting one another, just like we stop humans from killing one another. But more importantly, it is unnecessary to achieve what is required to improve the lot of animals.

Even Peter Singer, one of the intellectual fathers of the animal rights movement, doesn’t believe animals have a right to life. In his seminal text Animal Liberation he says we must refuse to contribute to – and act to stop – the unnecessary suffering of animals.

But he does not contend that animals have a right to life or that they suffer by having their life taken from them.

Instead, what he claims is that intensively farmed animals suffer because of the cruel and tortuous ways they are made to live and are slaughtered. We have a duty to do what we can to stop this by boycotting businesses that treat animals cruelly.

Having done that, we have a choice. We can go without wearing make-up and without eating or wearing animal flesh that required the torture of animals, or we can source and buy cruelty-free cosmetics and eat and wear ethically-farmed and slaughtered animal products.

In other words, while it might have been true that when Animal Liberation was written in the 1970s, the result of a boycott was a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, this is no longer the case. Today, there is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.

Indeed, given clear, cross-cultural evidence that only around 1.5% of people are willing to try or stick with a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle – figures that have not changed over time – the promotion of an ethically carnivorous life is likely to be a far more effective way to reduce the suffering of animals.

To me, this is so obvious that I have to ask why in 2016 animal rights groups continue to advance vegetarian and veganism as the only legitimate way to end animal suffering. A 2014 study funded by Voiceless, found that 70% of Australians agreed that “human beings have an obligation to avoid harming all animals”. This sort of sentiment had led “substantial proportions” to buy “free range” meat and dairy and cruelty-free products. Despite this, the Humane Research Council – authors of the study – advised animal rights advocates that while they ought capitalise on “widespread support for incremental improvements” they must also continue to press people to “abstain from animal products entirely.”

Why not press people who have chosen to make a difference through buying cruelty-free products to buy more of them more often? Or to buy them exclusively? Is it possible that vegetarianism and veganism continues to be promoted as the sole way of meeting our obligations to animals not because it is, but because it makes the promoters feel morally superior?

If it were, it wouldn’t be the first time the eco-left stymied mass behaviour change with unpalatable prescriptions delivered in self-righteous tones.

Analysis has revealed that mass communications around climate change provoked feelings of powerlessness rather than a desire to act in many people. Often the wrong moral note was struck, too. Environmental activist and philosopher Sarah Bachelard wrote at the time, “There can be a tone of self-righteousness ... a kind of shrill moral indignation ... We know that we are on the side of the angels, and in our own way we can fail to do justice to the complex reality of most human action and motivation. We get something out of ‘being right’ ... (and) satisfaction from making those who do not agree with us wrong.”

The truth is that an ethically carnivorous life is possible so long as we ensure the animals we consume have lived and died without unnecessary suffering.

Do animal rights trump human interests? Not if the animal right we are talking about is a right to life, and the human interest at stake is health. But I join with most people in believing we do have an obligation to stop animal cruelty and to fulfill this duty through the choices we make about what we eat, wear and do every day.