Vegetarianism, Environmentalism, Animal Welfare… Which Kind of Eater Are You? | Who Decides What You Eat, Part 2

“We want our food to be delicious, varied, cheap, convenient, sustainable, protective of animal welfare, local, and low in chemicals. But these values often conflict with one another.”

What to eat is a complicated question. To say “food is a belief” is no exaggeration.

Whenever a food goes viral or a way of eating gets championed, a crowd of interest groups is involved — scientific, professional, commercial, political, even philanthropic.

Sometimes their voices agree. More often, differing interests pull them into argument. And in the arguing, they get tangled up with environmentalism, naturalism, vegetarianism, animal welfare and every other “-ism,” until what you end up with is a belief about food. Companies may profit from this, but they can also be swept along by it.

Either way, the end result seems to be some kind of trend — a trend in what to eat, or in what not to eat.

You think you choose what you eat. You don't, really.

Just yesterday, the news that Britain's new plastic £5 note contains animal fat — tallow — angered vegetarians. They petitioned to “stop adding animal products to a currency we have no choice but to use.”

A survey published this past May put the number of British vegetarians at 542,000.

And in July this year, a one-year-old in Milan weighing just 5 kilograms and severely malnourished was taken to hospital. Both parents were strict vegans, and even afterward they refused to change the child's diet as the doctors advised.

In Italy alone, four similar cases occurred within 18 months — enough that the Italian MP Elvira Savino proposed a law under which parents who put children under 16 on a vegetarian diet would face a year in prison, rising to four years if the child became malnourished and seven years if the child died.

Parents who stand by the diet they believe is ideal at the cost of their child's health; a law needed to make parents safeguard that health — both sound bizarre. But once you see that this loyalty to a way of eating is really a belief, neither is so surprising.

As you know, the moment anything becomes an “-ism,” controversy follows, and vegetarianism is no exception. But one fact is not in dispute: more and more people, by choice or by circumstance, are becoming vegetarians, and the numbers are growing at a startling rate.

Ten years ago Britain had only 150,000 vegetarians; now it has more than 540,000, a growth rate of 350%. Veganlife magazine has called it “the fastest-growing lifestyle movement.”

And according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, even in the United States, the country fondest of meat, 7.3 million people are already vegetarian and another 22.8 million are eating a vegetarian-leaning diet.

There is no hard data yet for the Chinese market, but you have probably noticed that whether at social occasions or among colleagues and friends, the odds of meeting someone who says “I'm vegetarian” have gone up. A lot of people now seem to have a view on vegetarianism.

Besides more vegetarian recipes and vegetarian restaurants, chocolate and candy labeled “vegetarian” or “vegan” have grown fast too: their share rose from 1% in 2009 to 9% in 2013. Figures released in October 2014 by the consultancy Mintel show that 12% of food and drink products worldwide now advertise themselves as vegetarian. Another consultancy, Visiongain, forecasts that by the end of 2016 the market for meat-free products will reach $4.126 billion.

It looks like a booming new market.

But vegetarianism goes back a long way, and the research and books about it are beyond counting. In Deep Vegetarianism, Michael Allen Fox reads it as a worldview, a moral aspiration, and an integrated set of beliefs and practices.

Also published in 2005, Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Vegan With a Vengeance is treated by many people switching to a vegetarian diet as a practical manual.

The categories within vegetarianism are fairly complicated. Broadly, there are strict vegans and less strict vegetarians. Deep Vegetarianism breaks them down like this:

-Lacto-ovo vegetarians: eat eggs and dairy, but no meat

-Lacto-vegetarians: eat dairy, but no eggs or meat

-Ovo-vegetarians: eat eggs, but no dairy or meat

-Vegans (strict vegetarians): eat no meat, dairy or eggs (and generally no honey either)

-Macrobiotic eaters: live on whole grains, sea and land vegetables, beans and miso

-Natural hygienists: eat plant foods, combine foods in particular ways, and believe in the benefits of periodic fasting

-Raw foodists: eat only uncooked, non-meat foods

-Fruitarians: eat fruit, nuts, seeds and certain vegetables

-Semi-vegetarians: eat small amounts of fish and/or chicken

Data from Top RN to BSN shows that in the United States, 42.01% of people became vegetarian because of a film or a video they watched and 69.16% because of animal welfare; in Britain, 52% of vegetarians think the diet is healthier and 48% think it is better for the environment.

As you can see, vegetarianism comes bundled with animal welfare, environmentalism, even naturalism — and to a large extent with religion and morality. Whether or not you agree, you have probably heard the line that “eating vegetarian is a virtue.” Hinduism has the deepest ties to a vegetarian life and has done much to nurture and sustain it; roughly 20-40% of Indians eat vegetarian (the figures vary with how “vegetarian” is defined).

One trend worth watching is that young people are driving much of vegetarianism's rise.

Among Britain's 542,000 vegetarians, surveys show, nearly half (42%) are aged 15-34, while only 14% are over 65.

Unlike in the past, social media has played an active part. Elaborate, appetizing vegetarian recipes have multiplied across social networks: on Instagram, the photo-sharing platform of the moment, photos tagged #vegetarian number 10.8 million and those tagged #vegan reach 33.34 million. Finding and sharing information has become easier, and eating vegetarian is no longer a hard thing to do. Some more interesting things have happened too.

We once reported, for instance, on a vegan blog called Thug Kitchen. Its two founders are both vegans; they started it on Tumblr in 2012 and won a young following with their fondness for swearing. The book they later wrote, Thug Kitchen, reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed on the list for 48 weeks. They now have close to 740,000 followers on Facebook.

Young people's enthusiasm for vegetarianism in fact goes back further. In the 1980s, punks who did not take drugs or drink took up strict vegetarianism as a moral stand against the industrialization of everything, and the hippies who followed inherited the mantle. It still works that way: many young people start paying attention to vegetarian food purely for health or weight loss, but over time it ties itself more and more to animal rights or environmental protection. They will all say they have become healthier, of course — and whatever lies beyond health makes them feel better too.

“101 Reasons to Go Vegan” is treated by many young vegetarians as the introductory video; it has close to 1.7 million views on YouTube. An animal rights foundation in Florida released it in 2013.

“Meat eating is the most oppressive and extensive institutionalized violence against animals,” says the American animal rights advocate Carol J. Adams. For many vegetarians, highly industrialized, intensive farms are repellent: the animals raised on them spend their whole lives penned in very tight quarters, forcibly impregnated, separated from their families, and killed painfully. These people value animal rights and see the meat on the table as an animal that was once alive rather than a commodity.

A 2015 report by the polling firm Gallup shows that 32% of Americans believe animals should have the same rights as people, while 62% believe animals may be used for human benefit but deserve some protection. In a 2008 survey the two figures were 25% and 72% — meaning more people have come to care about animal rights.

This also shapes how consumers shop. A Mintel survey shows that 70% of Americans regularly consider a company's ethics when buying something, and 56% will stop buying a company's products once they find ethical problems in how it operates.

So you see one company after another giving ground here. This past July, Britain's largest retailer, Tesco, announced that it would stop selling eggs from caged hens entirely by 2025 at the latest. Walmart, McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, Nestlé, Starbucks and others have all said they will stop using eggs from caged hens. Perdue, the fourth-largest meat producer in the United States, has promised to let its chickens see sunlight and have more room to move, to become “happier chickens.”

These are reactions, not initiatives. Tesco made its promise because Lucy Gavaghan, a 14-year-old British girl, posted a petition on change.org asking the chain to stop selling eggs from hens kept in cages and warehouses; 280,000 people signed it.

More companies followed the example, of course, because they later found it made a useful label to charge a premium on.

Vegetarians who care about the environment also oppose factory farming, but they read it differently. Industrial farming systems use large quantities of chemicals, which go into feed, enter the food chain, stay in the soil and seep into rivers and aquifers. The Tropical Rainforest notes that to meet developed countries' demand for meat, huge tracts of rainforest in Latin America have been turned into pasture: “measured in forest area, every hamburger sold costs more than 6.25 square meters of forest.”

The United Nations Environment Programme has urged people to give up meat and dairy: “To really reduce the impact (of population growth), diets worldwide need to undergo substantial change, away from all animal-derived products.”

Another problem bound up with the environment is world hunger and social injustice — yet one more motive for supporting vegetarianism. Vast amounts of land and resources in poor countries are used to produce meat for rich ones. According to figures in Diet for a New America, a given plot of land can feed 20 times as many vegans as people eating an American diet.

Every “-ism” has its own position, but tangled together they make what looks like an interlocking effect. Some have questioned these arguments. Last year a study from Carnegie Mellon University found that if Americans shifted to a more vegetarian way of eating, US energy use and water use would rise by 38% and 10% respectively, and greenhouse gas emissions would go up 6%. The researchers argued that food passes through production, transport, sale and other stages before it reaches the table, and different research bodies handle the data differently and count different stages, so the results differ.

The argument will probably go on. But as an AEON essay on vegetarianism put it: “We want our food to be delicious, varied, cheap, convenient, sustainable, protective of animal welfare, local, and low in chemicals. But these values often conflict with one another.”

Which is to say, there is no perfect food.

You may also notice that most vegetarians live in cities or their suburbs. In the British report mentioned above, 88% of vegetarians live in cities, and London is where they cluster most thickly, at about 22%.

That is not hard to understand. Big cities are better educated, and social questions there draw attention more easily and build into waves. To Michael Allen Fox, vegetarianism is a phenomenon “caused by urban living,” “a product born of distance,” or a product of having no contact with animals and the land.

There is no denying that we live in a consumer society that urges us to cultivate a personal character and display a personal taste. Consumers see themselves as buyers with a certain power in the global market, and their preferences get read as labels of identity.

Either way, among the many things that influence what you eat, the various -isms attached to eating look like the hardest to shift. Companies stand inside all this: they gain by catering to the sentiment, but they can also be swept along by it and put on moral trial by consumers. That is the question we will take up in the next article.

Cover image: Pexels