Doesn't Sound As If It's Working

...you seem pretty loony still.

I need retail therapy, because Veganuary has become quite muted and that’s part of a wider inflection point in vegan eating that I’m sad about. “Where have all the vegans gone?” Dazed asked in November (Ed: Admit it Reader, you sang that in your head, didn't you?), and now New York Magazine has investigated, with the tagline: “Plant-based eating was supposed to be the future. Then meat came roaring back.” It details a wave of vegan restaurant closures (plus the high-profile reverse ferret performed by formerly vegan Michelin-three-starred Eleven Madison Park to serving “animal products for certain dishes”), declining sales of meat substitutes and a stubbornly static percentage of people identifying as vegan (around 1%). It’s not new (rumours of veganism’s demise have been swirling around since at least 2024) and it’s not just a US phenomenon; many UK vegan restaurants have closed this year, including my lovely local.

The world is healing! What could possibly account for this? It can't just be people coming to their senses and rejecting a fad, can it?

What’s going on? For a start, the Trump 2.0 “roaring” meat revival. As the New York Times reported last year, meat sales are up and fewer Americans are interested in curbing their intake. That movement feels partly provocative – an in-your-face rejection of woke orthodoxies around cutting your carbon footprint, consuming mindfully, or, generally, caring.

Yes,  Emma, Chad and Martha from Stallion's Tackle, Arkansas aren't chowing down on a juicy steak at their local diner because they want to, they are doing it purely to stick a thumb in the eye of progressive loons like you. They'd rather be having a mushroom cassarolr instead.

Is there some pychiatric term for people who think this way? 

Oh, yes - narcissists.

I wonder, though, if other things are happening. I’m concerned that we have reached the “shrug and give up” stage of trying to combat climate breakdown and that’s also why fewer people are vegan. People are starting to think it’s too late, so why bother – they might as well be hung for a lamb chop. Plus, on climate, there’s a good argument that what individuals can achieve is exceptionally limited and that making us feel responsible is a cynical trick. Why am I diligently washing out coconut kefir bottles to recycle, when half the world’s climate-heating emissions come from the products of 36 fossil fuel companies?

And that big glowing ball in the sky? You don't think that might have a bigger effect on our planet's temperature and climate? 

More broadly, I don’t think I’ll surprise anyone by venturing that the world feels tremendously, terrifyingly bad right now. People need the odd little treat to face – and keep facing – the horrors. Is it so wrong, relatively speaking, to carpe diem and butter yourself a crumpet now and then? Of course not. All I can say to that, really, is if you’re interested in feeling good – and who isn’t? – it feels good to actually do something. My veganism is basically self-interest, by which I mean, I do it for my health: not physical, but mental.

It doesn't seem to be working, so maybe you should try a beefburger, Emma. 

“We Would Have Got Away With It If Not For Those Pesky ‘Vested Interests’..! ”

A leaked document shows that vested interests may have been behind a “mud-slinging” PR campaign to discredit a landmark environment study, according to an investigation. The Eat-Lancet Commission study, published in 2019, set out to answer the question: how can we feed the world’s growing population without causing catastrophic climate breakdown?

And what conclusions that we'd all otherwise have been fine about except for a PR campaign did it come up with?

The report recommended that if global red meat eating was cut by 50%, the “planetary health diet” would provide nutritious food to all while tackling the harms caused by animal agriculture, which accounts for over 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. It suggested individuals – particularly in wealthy countries – should increase their consumption of nuts, pulses and other plant-based foods while cutting meat and sugar from their diets.

Well, clearly, we'd all be muching on carrots and telling each other we never really liked steak if not for those meddling 'vested interests', eh? 

It may have seemed like a fairly straightforward proposal but the backlash was ferocious, with researchers receiving personal threats and insults. Thousands of negative posts were shared on Twitter (now X), and more than 500 articles were published criticising the report.

Yes, and the ones I saw were spot on.  

A leaked document seen by the climate website DeSmog reveals that helping to fuel this backlash was a PR firm, Red Flag, which represented the Animal Agriculture Alliance, a meat and dairy industry coalition set up to protect the sector against “emerging threats”, and which has staff from Cargill and Smithfield Foods – two of the world’s five largest meat companies – on its board. DeSmog has seen a document from the PR firm which states: “In the two weeks following publication of the Eat-Lancet report, this campaign’s messages have continued to demonstrate remarkable success. Key stories returned time and again in traditional and social media to reach major online influencers, particularly highlighting the radical nature of the Eat-Lancet diet and hypocrisy criticisms levelled at the Eat founders.”

As Tim points out, these 'vested interests' were pushing on a very wide open door, so let them crow all they want. One of his commenters had their number: 

QED, eh, Reader?