Let’s get this out of the way, because I’m itching to tell you (again): I’m vegan, and this is our time, Veganuary! Imagine me doing a weak, vitamin B12-depleted dance. Unlike gym-goers, vegans are thrilled when newbies sign up each January, for planetary and animal welfare reasons, but also, shallowly, for the shopping. This is when we can gorge on the novelties retailers dream up: Peta’s round-up for this year includes the seductive Aldi pains au chocolat and M&S coconut kefir.
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, 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.
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. There’s also the influence of US health secretary RFK Jr, saying what the seed oil-eschewing, raw milk-swilling “crunchy” tradwives and Maha cranks want to hear. His weird new inverted pyramid of dietary guidelines majors on making steak great again. The American Heart Association was underwhelmed, highlighting the link between red meat and animal fats and “increased cardiovascular risk”.
Beyond RFK Jr’s tallow-fuelled obsessions, there’s a wellness angle to ebbing interest in veganism. Plant-based eating fits poorly into the relentless protein cult: you can hit your protein goals with plants (even the new, higher US-recommended amount; RFK Jr won’t rest until the entire country can bench press Greenland), but it’s harder. There’s valid concern, too, about UPFs: making “meat” or “cheese” from plants inevitably involves some ultra-processing. You can be vegan and avoid UPFs (I do! You simply have to live like a 1970s hippy!), but it’s not a no-brainer.
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?
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. Not supporting ecologically disastrous factory farming, not contributing to the regularly reported acts of abuse and cruelty in the meat industry, and making a – yes, infinitesimally tiny – contribution to cutting carbon emissions helps ward off my sense of impotence, and despair.
More cheerfully, something else is warding off despair right now: this daft new craze for “fibremaxxing”. Because if there’s one thing vegans know, it’s fibre. So hold on, comrades, keep the mung beans soaking. Our time will come again.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
