[Blog] Vegans should target the corporate food system, not just dairy and meat!

The rise of veganism represents a step change for campaigners who have long sought to highlight links between the food we eat and the fate of the world’s environment. Headlines such as ‘Avoiding meat and dairy is the ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth’ point to the immensely damaging impacts of mass meat production upon the environment. The modern concept of veganism (the term is derived from the first three and last two letters of ‘vegetarian’) was coined by Donald Watson in the UK in 1944. While vegetarianism represents a dietary choice based on not consuming animal flesh, veganism, at least in its initial conception, aspired to a more moral approach to human non-human animal relations. So moral vegans not only desist from consuming animal-based food (including milk and eggs, unlike many vegetarians) but also refrain from wearing animal-based clothing or using beauty products that have been tested on animals. Arguments about the broader impacts of our diets represent a more holistic understanding of global food systems than those before veganism’s rising popularity. They also highlight how public policies designed to combat climate breakdown should seek to change these systems.