Why people in rich countries are eating more vegan food
The further they go, the better
IT IS lunchtime and a queue is forming for
the burgers at Krowarzywa, voted the city’s best in an online poll:
students, families, businessmen in suits. This is Warsaw, where (you
might think) lunch is usually a slab of meat with a side order of
sausage. But at Krowarzywa—which means “cow alive” and contains the word
warzywa, meaning vegetables—no animals were harmed in the
making of the food. The burgers are made of millet, tofu or chickpeas.
The bestselling “vegan pastrami” is made of seitan, a wheat-based meat
substitute.
Warsaw has almost 50 vegan
restaurants. That does not mean it has all that many vegans. Kassia, a
20-something professional in the queue, says she has no ethical
objection to eating meat. She comes to Krowarzywa because she likes the
food. Kornel Kisala, the head chef, thinks that most of Krowarzywa’s
clientele eat meat, but it does not worry him. “Animals don’t care
whether you eat a vegan burger because it is fashionable or because it
is tasty.” Altogether, 60% of Poles say they plan to cut back on meat
this year. Eating vegetarian and vegan meals now and then is one of the
ways some choose to do so.
Interest in vegan food has been booming
across the rich world. Celebrity claims of veganism are everywhere: Bill
Clinton and Al Gore, Serena and Venus Williams, Lewis Hamilton, Mike
Tyson, Beyoncé, take your pick. In America sales of “plant-based”
foods—a term for foods that contain no meat, eggs or dairy that reliably
says “vegan” to vegans but doesn’t say “weird” to the less
committed—rose 20% in the year to June 2018, according to Nielsen, a
market-research group. That was ten times the growth in food as a whole
that year and two and a half times faster than vegan foods grew in the
year before.
McDonald’s is offering
McVegan burgers in Scandinavia. The American restaurants in the TGI
Fridays chain sell soyabean burgers that ooze blood made of beetroot
juice. Tyson Foods, one of the world’s largest meat producers, recently
bought 5% of Beyond Meat, the company which makes them. Waitrose, a posh
British grocery chain, introduced a range of vegan food in 2017,
expanded the selection by 60% in mid-2018 and says sales of vegan and
vegetarian foods in July 2018 were 70% above the level in July 2017.
Some
people see great things in this. Two years ago Eric Schmidt, a Silicon
Valley figure who used to be chairman of Google, called plant-based meat
substitutes the world’s most important future technology; he foresaw
them improving people’s health, reducing environmental degradation and
making food more affordable for the poor in developing countries. The
founder of the first vegan society said in 1944 that “in time [people]
will view with abhorrence the idea that men once fed on the products of
animals’ bodies.” Many since have shared his hope. Perhaps their time is
come at last.
If so, it is a slow
coming. Meat consumption worldwide has been growing consistently by
almost 3% a year since 1960, mostly because people in poor countries buy
more meat as they get richer, and the trend has yet to slow. In the
early 1970s the average Chinese person ate 14kg (31lb) of meat a year.
Now they eat 55kg, which is 150g, or five ounces, a day. But though most
growth in consumption has been in the developing world, rich countries
are eating more meat, too; their consumption is just not growing as fast
as it used to. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation
(FAO), meat consumption in the richest nations has risen 0.7% a year
since 1991.
Polling data is used to claim that the
number of vegans in rich countries is both quite high—around 10% in some
European countries—and growing. But there is reason to doubt at least
the first of these. Some of the best data come from Britain, home of the
world’s first vegan society. A poll carried out by that society in 2016
found that 1.05% of people in Britain never ate meat or animal
products. This is considerably higher than the result the society got in
2007, which suggests real growth in numbers. But it is a far cry from
the 5.3% of the population reported as vegan in a more recent poll. In
general, polls seem to find many more people claiming to be vegan than
they do people abstaining from all meat, fish and animal products.
In
America, Nielsen found in 2017 that 3% of the population called
themselves vegans and 6% vegetarians (people who eschew meat, but eat
eggs and/or dairy products). This proportion seems more or less stable;
the country’s largest polling organisations, Gallup and Harris, both
found 3% of the population calling themselves vegan over the period
2012-18. But more detailed research by Faunalytics, a company which has
been running large surveys of eating habits for 20 years, puts the
numbers at just 0.5% for vegans and 3.4% for vegetarians. Fully a
quarter of 25- to 34-year-olds in America claim to be either vegan or
vegetarian, whereas studies by Faunalytics find the median age of
American vegans to be 42, four years older than the national median. It
seems that a fair amount of aspirational self-deception, terminological
inexactitude or simple hypocrisy is at play.
The
idea that veganism is most widely espoused, if not necessarily adhered
to, by the young seems to be true in many countries. In Germany,
according to Mintel, a research firm, 15% of 16- to 24-year-olds say
that they are vegetarian, compared with 7% of the population at large.
In many countries declared vegans lean towards the political left. In
America polling by Pew has found that 15% of liberals espouse a
meat-free diet, as opposed to 4% of Republicans. American vegans and
vegetarians are also poorer than average, and twice as likely to be
single. Three-quarters of them are women. This all fits veganism’s
association with valuing health, simplicity and low environmental
impact—an implicit rejection of the values and coronary arteries of
older red-meat-eating men.
Veganism is
not a way of life that it is easy to keep up. According to Faunalytics,
for every active American vegetarian or vegan there are more than five
people who say they have abandoned such a diet. The growth in the number
of restaurants catering to veganism and the availability of plant-based
products on shelves may reduce this churn and allow more to stick with
the programme. As it is, a moving target makes it unsurprising that
accurate figures on veganism are hard to come by.
Overall, though, it seems safe to say that
the number of people sometimes or regularly choosing to eat vegan food
is growing much faster than the growth in people deeply committed to a
meat-, egg- and dairy-free life. Patrice Bula, a vice-president at
Nestlé, says he thinks that only a quarter of the people buying his
company’s vegan meals are committed vegetarians or vegans. People in
this larger group are often called “flexitarians”, who shift back and
forth between omnivorous and vegetable diets. Almost two Americans in
five say they fit this category, says Nielsen. The true vegan
efflorescence lies in casual, part-time veganism.
Flexible friends of the Earth
In
rich countries, people become flexitarians as a response to three
concerns: their own health; the health of the environment; and the
welfare of animals. On all three, they have a point; on at least the
first two, though, a lot of the benefits can be captured without strict
veganism.
The direct evidence that
vegan and vegetarian diets are in themselves good for people is mixed.
Between 2002 and 2007, 73,000 Seventh Day Adventists, a religious group
in America, participated in a study of eating habits. The 27,000 vegans
and vegetarians among them had significantly lower mortality rates. A
smaller survey of British vegetarians from 2016, though, found no such
link.
Aspects of veganism do go with
the grain of some health advice. Large studies have shown that people
who eat a lot of red meat have higher overall mortality rates (the same
does not apply to eating poultry). Eating a lot of processed meat is
linked to colorectal cancer. The evidence on this seems clear enough for
various authorities to recommend limits to the total ingestion of red
meat—the World Cancer Research Fund suggests less than 500g a week—and
minimising the intake of processed meats such as bacon and salami.
And the damage to health done by meat is
not all captured in the sort of studies that reliably cast doubt on
diets heavy in red meat. Lots of factors, both dietary and non-dietary,
influence health problems such as obesity, high blood pressure or
diabetes, and it is hard to understand exactly what is responsible for
what. Comparing diets on a statistical basis, though, allows some
striking inferences. In 2016 a study by Marco Springmann and colleagues
at the University of Oxford found that, globally, a transition to
well-balanced vegan diets might result in 8.1m fewer deaths a year.
Universal vegetarianism would avoid 7.3m deaths.
If
the associations on which this computer modelling is based are robust,
those are impressive figures. But much of the benefit they claim to
demonstrate could still be realised if omnivores ate better-balanced
diets with less meat. If the world adopted what the study called a
healthy global diet, with less sugar than most in the West consume,
plenty of fruit and veg and just 43g of red meat a day, the number of
deaths avoided would still be 5.1m.
Red
meat is typically a quarter to a third protein by weight, so just 43g
is nowhere near enough to supply the 50-60g of protein a day that people
require (the exact amount depends on a person’s weight, amount of
exercise and several other factors). The global healthy diet thus has
people relying on quite a lot of plant protein, too. Rich-world diets,
though, tend to get all their daily protein requirement from animals,
and then some. Americans eat 90g of protein a day, Europeans 85g, and
most of it comes from animal products.
Because
meat is energy rich, eating more than your protein needs dictate means
taking on a lot of calories, which may well be stored as fat. Vegans
both eat less protein and get it from less energy-rich and potentially
fattening products. In 2017 a French study found that both vegans (62g
of protein a day) and vegetarians (67g) were healthier than the meat
eaters wolfing down 81g. They were also eating more varied diets, and,
perhaps crucially, fewer calories overall; it may have been those
choices, rather than veganism per se, that made the difference.
On the environment, too, vegans and
vegetarians have a point. Growing their food requires less land than
raising meat does. Animals do not turn all the energy in the crops they
eat into calories in their muscles. They need some of that energy to
stay alive—and while that overhead is good for the animals, from a
food-production standpoint it looks like a waste. This waste means you
need more land per calorie of food if you are producing beef than if you
are producing broccoli. Admittedly, a lot of grazing is on land that
would not necessarily be suitable for arable farming. But the FAO’s
finding that raising livestock takes about 80% of all agricultural land
and produces just 18% of the world’s calories is still telling.
Alon
Shepon of the Weizmann Institute and colleagues have looked at this in
terms of opportunity costs. Choosing to make a gram of protein by
feeding an egg-laying hen, rather than getting the equivalent of a gram
of egg protein from plants, has an opportunity cost of 40%. Getting the
gram of protein from beef represents an opportunity cost of 96% (see
chart 1). They argue that if America stopped paying these opportunity
costs and got the protein from plants in the first place, it would be
equivalent to increasing the food supply by a third—or eliminating all
of the losses due to food waste.
Being so land hungry means cattle farming
changes the climate; clearing land for pasture creates greenhouse gases.
On top of that, the bugs in ruminant digestive systems produce methane,
a fairly powerful greenhouse gas. Once it gets out of the cows—by
belching, mainly, not, as is commonly thought, farting—this warms the
world. The FAO calculates that cattle generate up to two-thirds of the
greenhouse gases from livestock, and are the world’s fifth largest
source of methane. If cows were a country, the United Herds of Earth
would be the planet’s third largest greenhouse-gas emitter.
Mr
Springmann and his colleagues calculated that in 2050 greenhouse
emissions from agriculture in a vegan world would be 70% lower than in a
world where people ate as they do today; in the “healthy global diet”
world they would be 29% lower. The savings are not all owing to cows;
but a large part of them are (see chart 2). Raising cattle produces
seven times more in terms of emissions per tonne of protein than raising
pork or poultry does, 12 times more than soya and 30 times more than
wheat. Giving up beef captures many of the benefits of going vegan.
Other animals make a lot less difference. Getting your protein from
insects—very efficient converters—might be almost indistinguishable from
veganism in environmental terms.
Except,
that is, to the insects. One of the main things that motivates many
vegans and vegetarians is a belief that killing and eating animals is
wrong. The vegans also abstain from milk and eggs because there, too,
they see a lot of exploitation, death and suffering (the question of
honey remains a point of contention). In dairy herds calves are
typically taken from their mothers within 24 hours, compared with the
nine months to a year they would suckle if left to themselves. Male
calves are killed or reared for meat. In industrial egg-production
day-old male chicks are killed and simply discarded. Even if one keeps
strictly to meat, though, the death toll involved is immense. Over 50bn
farm animals are killed for meat every year.
#MooToo
The
best known proponent of the case that this matters is Peter Singer, a
philosopher at Princeton University. Mr Singer argues that treating the
interests of humans as superior to those of other animals is a
prejudice, analogous to treating men as superior to women or whites as
superior to blacks. It depends on an arbitrary distinction between two
groups, one of which has the power to make the distinction stick.
What
matters, he says, is not what species an individual belongs to but its
capacity for suffering. If an animal suffers as much as a person, then
things that it would be impermissible to do to a person—killing and
eating him, immobilising him in a cage—are unacceptable if done to the
animal, too. “In suffering,” Mr Singer writes, “the animals are our
equals.”
This moral point would seem to
depend in part on an empirical point; to what extent and in what manner
do animals suffer? Animals’ brains contain regions clearly analogous to
those correlated with consciousness, perception and emotion in humans.
What that reveals about their suffering as compared with a human’s is a
subtle question. But they definitely feel pain, and some can both
express preferences and, it would appear, hold beliefs about the
preferences of others. That would seem to have some moral salience.
But
would it be better for animals that suffer not to exist at all? A vegan
world would have no need of cows, happy or sad. The genus Bos
currently numbers some 1.5bn. Should those lives be valued less than the
lives of the wildlife which might repopulate their overgrown pastures
when they are gone? When it comes to wild animals, people tend to abhor
population collapse; are things that different when it comes to domestic
animals?
Mr Singer’s project of
seeking legal rights for animals is certainly going to be a tough row to
hoe, if not an impossible one. Neither courts nor legislatures seem
very interested. Reducing the cruelty that animals suffer, though, is
more plausible, both through legislation—battery cages for hens have
been banned in the EU since 2013—and through consumer pressure, such as a
preference for free-range products, cruelty-free certification,
transparent sourcing and the like. This second route, though, is not
available to vegans.
Though biology is
not destiny, humans, like their relatives the chimpanzees, evolved as
omnivores; the evidence is in the teeth and the guts. If people’s
diet is otherwise restricted, for example to staple starches, meat does
them good. As the increasing consumption of meat worldwide shows, a lot
of people in most cultures really do like eating it; the vast majority
will do so, at least a bit, when they get the chance. The great
exception is India, where, mostly for religious reasons, about 30% of
the population has a vegetarian lifestyle.
None of that makes veganism, full- or part-time, and the spread of
plant-based foods irrelevant. A mixture of ethical concerns, innovative
cuisine like Mr Kisala’s and more convenient vegan shopping at
supermarkets could yet see the rich world reach “peak meat” and head
down the other side. If so, and in particular if reduced consumption of
red meat is part of the process, there will probably be substantial
gains in health and happiness. And if the world improves standards in
the meat-rearing operations that remain, some of that may even be shared
with animals.