SUNDAY, 13 JULY 2025

Veganism has a much stronger presence online than it does in the mainstream media. This is partly because diet in general is a battleground in the virtual world, particularly on YouTube, where a gaggle of self-declared health experts slug it out with each other about the boons and evils of a range of foods and diets. The debate often becomes rancorous, especially in the comments sections below. These various food regimes, including a plant-based diet, form part of a poster’s self-identity and people settle into their tribes and yell yah-boo at each other. This makes me nervous about entering this minefield, but veganism is a subject that interests me and I don’t want to be bullied into silence, by either its opponents or its advocates. We should be able to have an honest conversation without resorting to ‘soy boy’ insults or ‘meat is murder’ accusations thumped out in upper case.

There is an expectation, I think, that people divulge which tribe they belong to before joining this melee, so I wish to make clear that I’m not vegan. I’m an omnivore who eats very little meat but lots of cheese and yoghurt (mainly for reasons of taste rather than health or the environment).

I’d like to start this piece with a fundamental question: is veganism a philosophy or a lifestyle? On this issue, I agree with those vegans who make a distinction between vegan and plant-based, and I think it is a crucial one. Veganism is a set of moral principles based on minimising cruelty to non-human animals, whereas a plant-based diet does not require this ethical foundation: it can be done purely for personal health reasons without any concern for either animals or the planet. However, I’m not sure I’d go as far as calling veganism a philosophy since it often seems unwilling to enter difficult philosophical arguments about the relationship between suffering and existence, and will switch back and forth between consequentialist and deontological positions depending on their rhetorical utility at any given moment. For that reason, I’d call it a behaviour and an approach to life grounded in personal ethics rather than a philosophy per se.

This brings me to my first broad disagreement with the vegan movement: I wish it would present veganism as something people do instead of making being vegan into something people are. As a person who defines myself as a gay man, and took part in the gay movement in the 1970s, I’m well aware of the advantages, and often the political necessity, to create an identity as a way of forming a community which can act collectively to change the world. So in the early days of the modern vegan movement, it made sense for it to model itself on things like the civil rights, feminist and gay activism of the last century. I feel, though, that the advantages of this identity may now be outweighed by its drawbacks. A binary has been created – vegan versus non-vegan – and an individual is required to commit firmly to one side. In my estimation, on balance this polarisation is now working against veganism.

Firstly, it puts pressure on anyone thinking of going vegan to make a giant leap and take on a new identity at once, and therefore probably limits the number of people who do so. Secondly, it can make following a vegan lifestyle so exacting that it is easy for people to crack and revert to their former omnivorous selves. Even a tiny slip – eating a milk-based icecream, say, once on a hot day – is often viewed as an irredeemable fall from grace and makes people who slip feel they have abandoned veganism and must leave the vegan community. Also, other vegans are sometimes quick to castigate and ostracise them. Over the last eighteen months or so, there has been a glut of hosts on YouTube who once declared themselves vegan but now announce that they no longer identify as such, creating a fear among some long-term proponents of veganism that the recent movement was just a fad and has peaked. I feel this is overstating a counter-reaction that was bound to happen after a period of rapid growth, and, judging by what they themselves say, many of the people who have switched back seemed to have gone vegan in the first place mostly for health reasons. They were plant-based rather than vegan all along.

Interestingly, one of the key operators – perhaps the most important operator – in the online vegan world, earthling Ed, seems to have responded lately to this split between plant-based and vegan. Over the last few months, I sense that his position has subtly moved. Whereas before a lot of his energy seemed focused on converting omnivores to a plant-based diet, using whichever arguments best suited the moment to achieve this, including a concentration on health if necessary, he has now gone back to stressing the need for veganism to return to its ethical roots and to distance itself from the plant-based movement. He realises that the avalanche of health and environmental concerns is threatening to swallow the rights-based veganism he espouses. I must be honest and say that I personally read him as an ideologue who will do whatever is required to advance his cause and that his apparent openness to argument is a tactical veneer, but he’s definitely one of the smartest operators in the online vegan world, and rhetorically the most skilful, and he has recognised the threat of a vegan movement being watered down by the health obsessions of the plant-based and wants to decouple them from each other. His difficulty is how to do this without damaging veganism’s mass appeal if it edges back towards the politics of animal rights.

One underlying problem he faces (and arguably helps to create) is that the perfect is so often the enemy of the good in the vegan movement. The focus on issues like honey and backyard eggs and creatures like oysters and mussels that have no central nervous system is creating a theory and a practice which is so fastidious and demanding or even onerous that many feel unable to follow it. This purist urge propels vegans towards eliminating obscure animal sources from their diets at the cost of losing focus on the issues that need immediate attention such as factory farming. It can also inspire committed vegans to dislike, or even feel enmity towards, vegetarians, pescatarians and omnivores. Just as in far-left circles many activists appear to hate liberals more than they do neo-fascists because they see the former as fakes or betrayers of the one true faith, many of the vegans who comment below the line on YouTube seem to reserve their bitterest bile for vegetarians – people who are much closer to them in spirit and might one day move to a vegan lifestyle – rather than the carnivores who advocate eating meat to the exclusion of almost everything else.

For me, this is a failure of strategy, and ideological purity is trumping practical reason. If you care about the suffering of non-human animals and your primary aim is to reduce it, surely in a world of eight billion people, it makes more sense to persuade a billion people to eat even a little less meat and do everything they can to avoid the products of factory farming than it does to convert a much smaller percentage to an all-or-nothing veganism which is hostile towards potential allies and squabbles with itself over backyard eggs. I recognise the danger that this gradualism can slowly erode commitment to the cause as people without the backing of a strong self-identity slide back to their previous behaviour, but I still believe it will be more effective in the long run than a world in which a small minority of vegans face an overwhelming mass of omnivores, most of whom are strongly attached to eating meat and see it as normal or even essential. If a critical mass of people begin to eat less meat and also refuse to eat that which is factory farmed, the industry will have to reform. In contrast, a veganism that remains on the fringe will be easy pickings for the pro-meat lobbying which can further marginalise it.

This brings me to something that must be addressed even though I know it’s highly contentious: the motivation behind going vegan. There is a feeling among the general population that people who identify as vegan are preachy, self-righteous, privileged and first-world/urban-centric. I don’t see how anyone can deny that this strain of vegan activism exists: it is only necessary to read some of the comments below YouTube videos to know that the stereotype contains a grain of truth. For example, I read one commenter stating that the Inuits in Siberia had a choice not to eat seal meat and fish but they were selfishly refusing to take it; they should give up their culture and lifestyle and move to cities like Moscow and go vegan. This kind of imperialistic arrogance does veganism no favours. Ditto those who rail against meatless Mondays on the grounds that this is like saying it’s OK to murder on the other days of the week. This doctrinaire fervour must put off so many people who might otherwise be interested in exploring veganism further.

I’m not suggesting that the people who make these kinds of statements are anything other than a tiny minority of the vegan population. The vegans I’ve personally known are nothing like these evangelists certain of their own cause, intolerant of opposing ideas and insensitive to the feelings of everyone else. But these keyboard warriors are vocal and loud and must do a lot to create the unfair public perception that all vegans are strident and sanctimonious. I know I shouldn’t make judgments about others, especially if it involves assumptions about their personal reasons for doing what they do, but, if I’m honest, I suspect that many of these vegan crusaders are motivated more by a desire to feel morally superior to other human beings than by a genuine concern to reduce animal suffering. And by making veganism repellent to so many people, these voices, ironically, are almost certainly helping to perpetuate a horrendous life for animals who are incarcerated in factory farms, the very creatures they claim to be fighting for.

Nor am I impressed by the efforts of some vegans to paint themselves as victims on account of their beliefs. Being vegan is not the same as being discriminated against because of race or gender or sexuality: it is not a self-protective reaction to a biological reality but a choice to join a project to change human behaviour. Worthy as this may be, at times it can edge close to a cultish desire to convert, with all the danger for extremism that this entails. I understand that vegans may counter with the argument that they are acting on behalf of non-human animals because these animals have no power to act on their own behalf. But for me this reveals a contradiction in veganism at a philosophical level: when it suits advocates of veganism to see humans and non-human animals as equals, as in the argument that human beings are just another species so should not be entitled over animals in any way, they will use this; when it suits them to say that human beings have a unique moral capacity and therefore bear the responsibility to act as guardians of the earth and all its creatures, they’ll switch to that. The theory of speciesism is internally inconsistent in that it contends that human beings should be regarded in the same way as every other species, yet every other species acts in its own interests in what is surely a biological imperative, so why not human beings? Only we, it seems, are somehow able to transcend this parochialism, so it turns out that we’re a special species after all.

One thing I don’t understand about the vegan movement is its fixation on veggie versions of carnivore food like burgers, bacon, sausages and chicken nuggets. I realise that these products can play an important role in helping new vegans transition to a vegan diet, and can also be as convenient as their meat equivalents, but this ultra-processed junk sends out a subliminal message which consolidates an idea that is deeply rooted in western culture: if you haven’t eaten meat, you haven’t had a real meal. Food which is vegan is often delicious. For example, even as an omnivore, if I had to choose between fried tempeh with a spicy sambal (chili sauce) and a stir-fry of mushrooms and zucchini on a bed of cumin rice, or a steak with chips, I would choose the former. Why is there so little focus in the YouTube vegan world on things like bean dishes and vegetable stir-fries and dips such as humus and baba ganoush and tasty salads (and I don’t mean the unimaginative, anaemic-looking salads without any dressing that so often appear in the photographs), and so much focus instead on ersatz meat? To me this is a crucial point rather than a peripheral gripe. It is often said that the key to winning a debate is to get it taking place on your own ground rather than on the territory of the opponent. By focusing so much on fake meat products, I feel that vegans are handing the initiative to the carnivores. Even in the vegan world, it seems, the template and the default remains meat.

I will turn only briefly to the other two main arguments for veganism – health and the environment – because, as I said at the beginning of this essay, veganism is based on a moral position that is not essential to plant-based eating, so health and the environment can only ever form ancillary reasons for its adoption.

In general, I’m not convinced by the health arguments for plant-based eating. I know there is a growing consensus among nutritional scientists that eating meat is linked to higher rates of cardiovascular disease and conditions like metabolic syndrome, but the history of nutrition shows that it is a field in which the herd instinct is strong and intellectual fashions come and go – yesterday’s nutritional certainties (the food triangle) become today’s discarded theories – and I fully expect nutritional advice to swing wildly again in the future. I have little doubt that eating meat in excessive amounts is bad for health, but so is existing on Oreos and ultra-processed vegan junk. On the other hand, I feel it’s safe to say that there is no evidence at all that eating meat is essential for good health as long as one deals with issues like iodine and B12. Almost all the contending voices cherry-pick research when it comes to disputes about diet, and much of the research available has the problems of small sample size and/or methodological issues and shortcomings. The history of nutritional science to date suggests it should never be a hill for anyone to die on.

The environmental arguments sound strong in theory, but many of them don’t offer solutions which are even remotely practical. When we are told, for instance, that if we switched all meat production throughout the world to growing plants, we could massively reduce our carbon footprint and combat climate change and also feed the world so that no one ever goes hungry and still return a lot of land to its pristine state, this ignores that such a change would require unrealistic global co-operation plus superb administrative acumen to get off the ground, lead to immediate economic crises and mass unemployment in many countries (often the poorest), disrupt or destroy local cultures, and wipe out populations in geographical zones such as the far north and mountainous areas where raising sheep or goats is the only option for survival. Adding together all the acres in the world and then dividing this total to prove that the earth is capable of feeding us all if only all agriculture was switched to growing soya beans is the kind of quantification for its own sake (because it’s got numbers so it looks like science) that is doing so much to damage disciplines outside of fields like mathematics and physics.

I will finish by admitting that I will never go vegan. Apart from the selfish reason of losing the pleasures of foods like gorgonzola and brie de meaux and full-fat Greek yoghurt, my going vegan would make so little difference, especially considering my age and the fact that I eat very little meat in the first place, that it would feel like something of a pointless gesture. If I was younger I might consider it (I was vegetarian for about two years a couple of decades ago) because I recognise the strength of the ethical arguments, and also I wouldn’t have built up my food tastes to the extent that I now have, so changing my diet would be much easier, but at my age I don’t want the disruption it would cause to my life. And even if I moved to a plant-based diet, I definitely could never become the kind of person who spends his time researching whether my bottle of wine was made by using gelatin or isinglass and scouring labels to spot any offending tinge of animal pollution. Eating should be a pleasure, not a chore. I know this lays me open to accusations of hypocrisy and for choosing personal preference and taste over ethical integrity, but there’s no point in pretending otherwise and coming out with vague intimations that I might consider a vegan diet in the future when I have no intention of making such a change. As with so many things, we must do what we feel we can and not become hostages to perfection.

Ultimately, I suspect that the future of modern veganism will depend not on the things I have discussed but on larger social, economic, technological, geopolitical and even climatic changes. I certainly don’t think the vegan idea, and the idealism behind it, will ever die, as is proven by the fact that there are cultures spanning thousands of years which were and are vegetarian or occasionally vegan. Perhaps lab-grown meat and dairy could render traditional products obsolete and generations which picture happy cows chomping grass in Swiss meadows will no longer exist and people will therefore accept a world where food comes from a lab, not ‘nature’. After all, most of us already think that food comes wrapped in plastic from a supermarket. But ever-spreading mega-cities with restored patches of ‘wilderness’ between them for tourists on vacation to encounter ‘nature’ is not a world I would want to live in, especially if that included food which tasted like protein powder. I fear, though, that this is perhaps our future if civilisation somehow manages to survive.