Despite decades of advocacy, vegans and veganism remain deeply unpopular, even detested. Many influential animal activists are now debating a question that would have once seemed absurd: Is it worth the movement’s precious time and resources to keep advocating for meatless diets, an apparently lost cause?
One surprising thing
The share of Americans who are vegetarian or vegan is incredibly hard to measure accurately. But one thing is clear: It hasn’t changed much in recent decades, and may have even decreased.
This piece is part of How Factory Farming Ends, a collection of stories on the past and future of the long fight against factory farming. This series is supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from Builders Initiative.
Although people define veganism in different ways, it fundamentally entails avoiding all animal products to the greatest extent possible, including meat, dairy, and eggs, but also non-dietary products like wool and leather. Whereas the more commonly practiced vegetarianism only rejects meat consumption, the vegan movement generally rejects the property status of animals and aims to fully divest from animal cruelty and exploitation.
Vegans are often considered too extreme, especially in a meat-obsessed country like the US — a perception that persists despite the growing popularity of vegan products. The famed late chef Anthony Bourdain once compared vegans to Hezbollah, declaring them “the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.” His aversion seems representative of the public’s feelings. One 2015 study found that, in the United States, negative attitudes toward vegans rivaled those toward atheists.
These social headwinds are making veganism unpopular even among influential voices in the animal movement. Matt Ball, who co-founded the advocacy group Vegan Outreach in the 1990s but has since changed his tune on the strategic necessity of promoting animal-free diets, has argued that the “‘vegan’ brand is damaged beyond repair.” Bruce Friedrich — founder of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that seeks to develop alternative proteins that do not require animal slaughter — has made a moderated version of a similar claim. In a 2019 interview, he lamented that “we’ve tried to convince the world to go vegan, and it has not worked.”
The percentage of Americans who are vegan or vegetarian remains small, though it is a notoriously difficult figure to pin down. This minute figure, juxtaposed with the clearly documented increase in US per-capita meat consumption, suggests veganism seems to be failing. For Friedrich and others, this failure to affect dietary habits signals a need to shift animal advocacy’s emphasis toward larger-scale policy and technological innovations, like cell-cultivated (sometimes known as lab-grown) meat, that can reduce the number of animals slaughtered for food in the absence of dietary change. It also requires that pro-animal advocates tone down their dogmatism, abandon the quest for purity, and compromise more with large corporations.
I suspect that at least some aspects of this weariness resonate with large swathes of people who advocate for animal rights or are sympathetic to their plight: the warning against dogmatism and a call for nuance, a healthy skepticism toward individualism and consumerism, and the sense that something is better than nothing, even if that something is less radical than we’d like. Indeed, on its own, even the strictest veganism can feel like a minuscule choice against the onslaught of the factory farming death machine, which tortures and kills more than 10 billion land animals annually in the US alone. Why spend so much energy convincing people to undertake such a massive life change if it seems akin to using a bucket to bail water out of a sinking cruise liner?
While I sympathize with these sentiments, I worry that they miss the promise and radical force of veganism: It can be an act of solidarity with nonhuman animals. Veganism takes the recognition that animals are sentient beings with lives of their own and infuses it into one’s body and everyday practice. In a world that relies on extracting the literal lifeblood of nonhuman animals, that depends on externalizing the costs of “progress” onto them and distributing the benefits to privileged humans, veganism refuses to pass the buck. It is a way of “saying” to nonhumans, non-verbally and without the promise that the message will be received: The world has turned against you, depends on your flesh and bone. But we will not. We refuse.
This exhortation has profound implications for the animal movement’s future direction. Animal advocates have often been mired in debate over which tactics are the best use of our time, and which ones meaningfully help animals instead of creating a “humanewashing” smokescreen. Promoting veganism need not be the movement’s only or primary strategy, but it should remain its heartbeat. After all, if we’re not committed to fighting for a world free from animal exploitation, then what exactly is the movement fighting for? Veganism as solidarity provides a core commitment and standard that can help set movement priorities.
Society enlists us into war against animals
The strategic case against veganism largely depends on the claim that the percentage of Americans who have gone vegetarian or vegan remains minute — perhaps as low as 2 percent — and has not appreciably increased in decades. But there are more optimistic ways to read the data. Communications scholar Vasile Stanescu argued in 2019 that rates of vegetarianism and veganism in the US have increased, to somewhere between 8 and 13 percent. Even if his figure proves an overestimate — no peer-reviewed work, to my knowledge, exists to settle the question — it seems unwise to throw away a pillar of animal rights when we aren’t even sure of the numbers. One must also consider the counterfactual: How high might meat consumption be if consumers faced a firehose of industry-sponsored, pro-meat messaging without a pro-vegan counterbalance?
Still, one might argue, it makes little sense to invest scarce resources on promoting veganism without evidence of a clear and measurable impact. This objection makes a lot of sense if we understand veganism as primarily a consequentialist, consumer-oriented approach, of “voting with your dollar.”
But reframing veganism as solidarity encourages advocates to think beyond quantifiable market consequences (though these effects are still relevant). Put differently, veganism matters not only because of its economic divestment from animal exploitation, but also because of its less quantifiable political effects. Going vegan builds political energy and connections with other humans invested in animal liberation and with the animals that vegans recognize as sentient and social creatures. It builds glimpses of a desired future in the present.
Perhaps most importantly, solidaristic veganism acknowledges that in today’s world, after centuries of humans’ intense exploitation of animals, it’s nearly impossible to have an ethical relationship with animals without addressing the most direct ways that most people benefit from the destruction of animal life. Animals are not simply mistreated beings. Rather, society is organized around slaughtering, torturing, and dominating animals, as a class, on a massive scale.
A brief look at the statistics evinces this claim: Globally, an additional 70 billion land animals are killed for food on top of the US’s 10 billion. Factory-farmed fish, which are harder to count, may add more than 100 billion. Habitat destruction, primarily driven by industrial animal farming, is snowballing out of control. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of animals are held captive and experimented on in scientific labs. Even dogs and cats, perceived as the most pampered animals in America, are still legal property, living largely at the whims of whoever happens to own them (not to mention the 6 million in shelters, nearly 1 million of whom are killed annually, partly due to the pet breeding industry).
To become politically vegan is to become a conscientious objector
Another way of framing this dire state of affairs, as the social theorist Dinesh Wadiwel does, is that the world acts as if it is at war with animals. Not all humans are equally to blame for the atrocities of this war, but living in and benefitting from a society that, as a rule, marks animals for torture and death, changes the nature of one’s responsibility. For Wadiwel, veganism offers a “truce” to animals.
We can extend this war framework a step further: To become politically vegan is to become a conscientious objector.
Think about those who became conscientious objectors in the face of being drafted for the Vietnam War. Those who refused conscription could claim conscientious objector status only if participating in the war conflicted with their deeply held beliefs, and not merely because they had a self-interest in not being killed. Depriving the military of one soldier was not going to change the course of the war, but conscientious objection had other effects: It made private opposition public, it broke the facade of a uniform pro-war consensus, and it provided a rallying point for further political action. Objectors in the 1960s and ’70s became part of the largest anti-war movement in US history.
Now, imagine that you were talking to a conscientious objector and said: “The data is against you. Very few people want to become conscientious objectors. You are only alienating people, and your refusal to serve is just a drop in the bucket compared to the military’s power. Perhaps you should try more moderate steps first.”
To say this would be to misunderstand the goal of conscientious objection. Anti-vegan critics have a similar misapprehension. The world “conscripts” us in its war against animals in the way it structures our choices when we buy clothes, food, and other necessities whose production depends on violence against animals. To become vegan is not only to try to prevent some animal death and exploitation, but to build political opposition to our forced participation in this war.
The false binary of purity vs. pragmatism
Veganism is sometimes strawmanned as a kind of purity politics that only benefits sanctimonious activists. It’s true that being purely cruelty-free is impossible: organic fertilizers use animal products, pesticides harm many animals, and large-scale plant farming generally kills and displaces animals (though not anywhere near as many as animal agriculture). Similarly, by analogy, becoming an anti-war conscientious objector does not wash one’s hands of all complicity; even paying taxes abets the war effort.
But framing veganism as an act of solidarity can shatter the false binary between purity and pragmatism. There are uses for the public rigor that solidarity demands that go beyond purity. It punctures the smooth surface of everyday life, putting its everyday violence in view.
Consider a scenario Friedrich presents in an older piece of writing, where a vegan dines with omnivorous companions at a restaurant with limited vegan options. For Friedrich, if “you give the server the third degree about the ingredients or about how it was cooked, you are forgetting the essence of being vegan” because you make veganism seem more difficult to others at the table.
I certainly agree that one shouldn’t give underpaid servers a hard time, but not with the scenario’s underlying respectability politics. Yes, veganism may seem more difficult, but demonstrating this difficulty highlights the gap between what the world is willing to provide and what justice demands. Perhaps your tablemates will be put off by this demonstration, but perhaps the situation provides the opportunity for a conversation that would not have occurred if you simply smoothed over the issue. Perhaps they will admire your willingness to stick to your principles even when it’s inconvenient. Perhaps they are more likely to pay attention when vegan options are available.
The fundamental point is that politics is not only about calm, rational persuasion and consensus-building. It can also be purposefully oppositional, concerned with dissensus and agonistic conflict. The great non-violence movements of the 20th century were not primarily focused on easing their opponents to their side but on raising the costs of the status quo via boycotts, sit-ins, and disruptive marches.
From this perspective, if the numbers of vegans truly are small, that is not in itself a cause for worry. Popularity is not the only goal of a movement that seeks to disrupt the public’s “common sense.”
How solidarity with animals can inform movement tactics (and it’s not just advocating for veganism)
This perspective on veganism’s politics affects the movement’s strategy in two ways. First, veganism should remain a core principle. That is not to say that it should be the only strategy: I agree with the need to experiment with different tactics and to focus beyond shifting individual people’s beliefs toward changing social and industrial infrastructures with innovations like “clean meat” and policies that limit animal mistreatment.
But solidaristic acts like veganism serve as the “political fuel” necessary for broader changes to policy and cultural norms, philosophers Alasdair Cochrane and Mara-Daria Cojocaru argue. The political will for new vegan technologies and anti-cruelty policies does not come miraculously from the ether but requires building a critical mass of people committed to a world without animal exploitation.
Solidaristic acts like veganism serve as the “political fuel” necessary for broader changes to policy and cultural norms
Second, veganism as solidarity provides a lens through which to evaluate tactics deployed by the movement, like farm animal welfare laws. For decades, animal advocates have argued fiercely over the value of incremental reforms to the factory farm system like, say, banning the most extreme forms of cage confinement. Do these strategies help us end factory farming, or do they merely give a false humane sheen to the killing machine?
Veganism as solidarity provides a rubric by which to evaluate pro-animal reforms: Does the reform in question come out of a place of solidarity with animals, one that may ultimately lead toward abolishing their status as commodities, or does it ultimately enable conditions that undermine the potential for this solidarity?
We can borrow a helpful framework from the prison abolitionist movement: the idea of non-reformist reforms. Non-reformist reforms help create the conditions for meaningfully shifting the power structure, while reformist reforms may only reify it.
For example, when major animal welfare organizations publicly congratulate (and give free advertising to) large meat producers for signing on to voluntary welfare standards, I question whether this action advances solidarity. True accountability is limited to the corporations themselves, and they get to walk away with a gold star that increases their credibility even as their fundamental business model remains the same. To extend the anti-war analogy, would it be solidarity with the victims of war if Lockheed Martin agreed to use slightly more “humane” methods of war and modern activists went out of their way to congratulate the company?
Further, when activists implore consumers to eat one type of animal rather than another — “save animals by eating more beef and less chicken” or “save the environment by eating less beef and more chickens” — they betray that obligation to solidarity. Even work like that of the famed livestock scientist Temple Grandin, who has designed livestock handling systems that reduce animals’ fear and resistance as they walk down a chute to meet a bolt gun, only helps them acquiesce in their oppression and reduces the friction in the meat industry’s slaughter pipeline.
I feel more sanguine about recent policy victories in which advocates have gotten numerous states, most recently, Nevada, to ban battery cages for chickens. Obviously, these bans don’t challenge the fundamental commodity status of chickens, and chickens deserve far more. But it does impose an external cost on the smooth operation of chicken farming, one that the industry would not willingly adopt for itself.
From this standpoint, I am disheartened when I see animal advocates so publicly decry veganism’s supposed failures. Partly because doing so creates a self-fulfilling prophecy — discouraging individuals from going vegan by making it seem like a lost cause from the get-go, as Stanescu notes. But more fundamentally, it inaccurately frames the present moment. It is not that “promoting veganism has failed, so it is time to move onto new strategies.” Rather: veganism opens the way for these new strategies. The acorn does not negate the value of the oak tree it came from.
Admittedly, solidarity doesn’t provide clean lines that can uncontroversially decide which reforms are or are not permissible. But it hopefully offers more useful criteria than reform for the sake of reform.
The joy of veganism
I have so far emphasized that veganism has broader, political implications beyond individual behavior change. But the way that it shapes the lives of individuals who become vegan can be extremely powerful, too. Political veganism can better attune advocates as they persuade individuals of the practice’s virtues.
Political scientists have observed that political protests change the character of those who protest, even if the protest doesn’t achieve its stated policy goal. If, for example, you attend a protest against a new oil pipeline, what was once an abstract issue on a computer screen becomes alive to you. You learn that you are not alone, and you might find sustenance in community with others who care about climate politics as well.
Veganism as solidarity can have a similar effect. Abstaining from animal products in a world that disavows animal suffering prevents the vegan from forgetting the character of this world; it puts them into constant confrontation with it every time they go to the grocery store, buy clothes, and commune with others. To rework Upton Sinclair’s famous line, it is hard to get a person to think clearly about animals when their everyday life depends on animal slaughter, degradation, and exploitation.
One objection to this individual-level view is that veganism privileges those without gastrointestinal or other disabilities and those who can financially afford these restrictions. You may have an image of a vegan eating organic vegetables and overpriced meat substitutes from Whole Foods. While I would note there is evidence suggesting that plant-based diets can cut food costs in industrialized countries and that survey results find that people with lower incomes are more likely to be vegan, framing veganism as solidarity offers an alternative way of considering this issue. Calling for solidarity with regard to any cause or campaign entails asking potential allies to undertake some sort of sacrifice, whether that be in terms of money, time, or power. Having the resources to undertake these sacrifices is by nature unequally distributed.
The call for solidarity with animals goes out equally to every person, but fulfilling that call may look different for everyone. For those who do not face substantial financial or health barriers, the demands are quite high, in my view. For others, full veganism might be an aspiration, which they fulfill in the present by lowering their animal consumption where possible. This is not an iron-clad, all-or-nothing law. Accidentally consuming animal products, or eating an “emotional-support pastry” in an otherwise vegan diet, is less important in the long scheme of things, because solidarity is a call that can be answered anew each day.
Answering this call is not about purist asceticism; it is affirmatively oriented toward building community. It builds new connections that wouldn’t have otherwise existed; it helps you see new ways of being in the world that weren’t there before. It opens you to the joy of being with nonhuman others, of refusing “species loneliness,” what botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes as “a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation.” You see the world as more enchanted and alive when creatures around you appear as individuals and not interchangeable automatons.
Veganism, thought of in this way, is not the province of dour, dogmatic scolds; it is a practice of joy and creativity that sustains hope for coexistence between species. As Cochrane and Cojocaru write, this sort of solidarity recognizes that “the world in which we live is not the one we must live with forever.”
It’s a vision worth fighting for.
