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Eating
7 min read

Why hold on to Veganuary anymore?

As commercial promotion of plant-based diets falter Trystan Owain Hughes digs for the real roots around a ‘reverence for life’.
A man stands at rest, one arm holding some vegetables.
NordWood Themes on Unsplash.

For many people, the month of January has been rechristened 'Veganuary’. Through this global campaign, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, numerous people have embraced a plant-based diet.  

Founded by a married couple from York, Veganuary has become a worldwide phenomenon, with more than 700,000 making the pledge last year. A YouGov poll suggests that numbers participating informally are far higher, perhaps as many as 4 per cent of Brits, 7 per cent of Americans, and almost 10 per cent of Germans. The campaign has also gained celebrity backing, with Paul McCartney, Joaquin Phoenix, Deborah Meadon, and Billy Eilish amongst the many star names backing the movement in recent years.  

Yet there are some signs that the vegan bubble may have finally burst. The pace of interest in non-animal diets has started to level off and some analysts believe that “peak vegan” in the UK was way back in 2019. Figures by consumer intelligence company NIQ seem to confirm this. UK sales of both chilled and frozen meat alternatives have fallen sharply in recent years and prominent companies, including Oatly, Nestlé, Innocent and Heck, have withdrawn various vegan products. 

Recent years have also seen an increasing number of posts and memes on social media feeds that are antagonistic towards the vegan lifestyle. It seems attitudes towards animals are slowly becoming incorporated into the cultural wars, with veganism often regarded as part of an over-righteous so-called “woke” ideology.  

Some Christians subscribe to such an attitude and are hostile to those who embrace plant-based diets. Others, on the other hand, take a very different stance in considering their scriptures and theological traditions, emphasising the absolute necessity of a holistic awareness of diet, not least in light of animal cruelty, uncompassionate means of food production, and environmental concern. There are, after all, numerous affirmations of the precious and holy nature of the created order in the Bible. This would have differed profoundly from non-Judaic teaching in the Ancient Near East. 

When he was surrounded by suffering and death... he came to regard a transcendent ‘reverence for life’ as the only way of living that made sense. 

The moral imperative to care for the environment and value all creatures is clear from the very first pages of the Bible. After each day in the Genesis account of creation, God regards what he has formed as tov, a Hebrew word meaning good, pleasurable, and delightful. At the end of the creative process, God then looks at the whole of his handiwork, and he sees that the wonderful harmony of the complex, intricate, and balanced ecosystem is tov me’od, meaning ‘very good’. Later, in the New Testament, Jesus asserts that only God himself is good. It therefore follows that creation can, in some way, reveal the goodness of God directly. 

And so there are many Christians who are drawn to an awareness that everything in this wonderful world has value and significance – the strangers we pass on the street, our pets who share our houses, the squirrels who dart across our paths in the park, the snowdrops breaking through the soil in our gardens, and even the slugs in our flowerbeds. No wonder the biblical images of the glorious eschatological, heavenly future are ones in which natural world is at harmony. 

The German phrase that theologian Albert Schweitzer used to express the ramifications of the biblical concept of the goodness of the creation is ‘Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben’, which is often translated as ‘reverence for life’. The word Ehrfurcht, however, expresses far more than its English translation implies. It suggests an attitude of awe and ultimate respect, and so carries with it an overwhelming sense of moral responsibility towards creation. For Schweitzer this was no abstract intellectualism. His principle of ‘reverence for life’ came to him as he worked among the sick in the heart of tropical Africa. While prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry maintain that cruelty in nature is one of the main stumbling blocks of belief in the divine, it was not a sanitized version of nature that led Schweitzer to his God-centred conclusion. Rather, when he was surrounded by suffering and death, both in the hospital in which he worked and in the unforgiving natural world of the jungle around him, he came to regard a transcendent ‘reverence for life’ as the only way of living that made sense. 

We are not only shockingly merciless towards each other, but we extend our cruelty to the creatures with which we share the planet. 

Nature may well be ‘red in tooth and claw’, to use Lord Tennyson’s phrase, but humanity has been gifted with the potential to bring compassion and love to a world of pain and suffering. Most people already regard human life as inherently precious, but Christianity stands alongside other faiths in challenging people to consider the value the lives of non-human creatures. After all, Schweitzer suggested that every creature holds to the importance of its own life, albeit unconsciously, and this should lead people to solidarity with all forms of life. In this sense, an individual’s relationship with nature is far more intimate than we might think. ‘Wherever you see life,’ he wrote, ‘that is yourself!’  

This recognition of humankind’s profound bond with other living creatures allowed Schweitzer to apply Jesus’ core teaching on love to the wider world – ‘the ethic of love widened into universality’, as he put it. This stands in marked contrast to the present status quo which views the only real value of non-human life to be its usefulness. No wonder that so many animals in modern industrial farming experience what Richard Holloway describes as a ‘double-dying’, as their everyday existence is as pitiful as their death. They live out wretched lifespans in disease-prone torture before being transported hundreds of miles in overcrowded trucks to their slaughter. But our society continues to turn a blind eye towards heartless factory farming practices. They are not only tolerated but justified with the argument that animals are little more than unfeeling machines who don’t really ‘suffer’ in the human sense of the word. 

Such attitudes contribute to what the 1995 papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae refers to as the ‘culture of death’ of the modern world. We are not only shockingly merciless towards each other, but we extend our cruelty to the creatures with which we share the planet. In the large global corporations that dominate the food industry, animals are viewed as products to be reared to supply fast-food outlets. They are bred specifically for death. While nature itself is cruel, each creature is endowed with a fighting instinct for survival and a means to achieve it through armour, speed, disguise, poison or odour. We humans, though, offer no chance for such defensive capabilities to be utilised. Nothing is as uncaring and ruthless in nature as the hungry human. 

Not that this recognition necessarily leads us to a purely plant-based diet. Even Schweitzer himself, who was a proponent of vegetarianism, ate meat on occasions. Perhaps the indigenous hunting communities of our world today can help us to bridge the gap between reverence for life and the killing of animals for food. While they are principally carnivores, many of these communities appreciate their utter dependence on the animals that are sacrificed so they might live and thrive. There is, therefore, a deep empathy and affection towards the hunted. In fact, compassionate ceremonies and rituals are often performed to show gratitude to the animals for the gift of their lives. The tribesmen of the Kalahari Desert will, for example, symbolically enter into the suffering of their dying prey by enacting their final death throes. Contrast this with our own food system, which is largely controlled by a small group of multinational corporations who attempt to hide the truth about what we are eating and the harsh treatment of both animals and workers in their factories. 

In a YouGov survey, participants in Veganuary were asked to list their incentives for taking part. The main reason given, above environmental regard and personal health, was animal welfare. The concept of 'reverence for life’ speaks into this concern. As such, in embracing the concept that all life is equally worthy of our attention, respect, and love, Christians could have so much to offer contemporary debate. Their perspective could have huge implications on the moral and ethical matters that we face today – climate change, food production, health care, emerging technologies, animal care, AI, and energy development. ‘Do not do any injury, if you can possibly avoid it,’ the great Welsh Celtic saint Teilo is purported to have said while reflecting on creation. The anthropocentric, human-centred paradigm does not, then, reflect a truly Christian worldview. Instead, Christianity holds that every part of creation reflects God’s goodness and non-human life deserves respect for its own sake, not simply because of its usefulness. The whole, wonderful web of life is considered to be valued and loved by God, not merely one strand of it, and the daily call of the Christian is to live out the compassion, care, and love that such an awareness demands. 

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Masculinity
4 min read

How our social media turns us against ourselves

We treat others differently when our eyes and hearts are forced inwards.
An unhappy father sits next to a scared son in a police interview room.
Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper star in Adolescence.
Netflix.

My wife turned to me this week whilst watching the compelling Netflix drama Adolescence and asked if it was based on a true story. That proves the quality of the acting, script, and storyline. But it also demonstrates the drama’s prophetic nature. Conceived two and a half years ago by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, the perversion of Jamie’s underdeveloped brain and developing masculinity by social media forces has come to reflect real-life extreme violence by young men. With the sentencings of murderers Axel Radakubana and Nicholas Prosper in recent weeks, Jamie’s actions resonate deeply. Adolescence isn’t based on a specific true story, but that doesn’t prevent it from being true. 

What about the role of social media in these narratives? Radakubana and Prosper were radicalised by violent content they had accessed online. With social media, extreme content does well, particularly on sites with no filters on pornography and violence like Reddit and X. We are beginning to discover that content algorithms are not neutral, instead siloing us into echo chambers that are deliberately forming us into better consumers of content, advertising, and objects. Social media harvests our data and sells it on- meaning it cultivates us as the product. 

Yet these manipulations cover over the deepest issue. Social media depersonalises us, preventing us from making genuine human connection and perverting our view of anybody but us. The German philosopher Martin Buber differentiated between two different ways for humans to exist in the world. One was I-It; in a person treats everyone and everything they come into contact with as an ‘It’- something to be used or taken advantage of. 

The other was I-Thou, in which humans approach every other person as a unique being, with resources to offer the I which ensures that a mutual, open, present connection ensues. For Buber, the ultimate ‘Thou’ was God, with whom humans can have the deepest and most transformative connection. 

Social media ensures we see life in ‘I/It’ mode by removing genuine contact with others and providing curated, fake, existences that can never be open to genuine connection with others. Love and affection become commodified; likes, follows, reactions. Our presentation of ourselves becomes more extreme, more perfect, more beautified, to keep mining the commodities. Our eyes and our hearts are forced inwards, and we lose any sense of encountering a ‘Thou’ on the way. We just keep encountering the I: our own thoughts, needs, desires, self-radicalised by our own insular minds. 

This can be our contribution to the conversation on the culture our young people, and particularly young men, are growing up in. To live I/Thou lives.

The great St Augustine back in the fourth century developed the idea of ‘original sin.’ All humans are prone to destruction: it’s in our DNA. The evidence for such an idea is found in every human experience, as the destructor and the one destructed. Left unchecked without genuine connections with others to challenge and expand our hearts, an I/It life digs deeper and deeper into these destructive impulses until our humanity is twisted into violent obsessions. 

The I/It life focuses completely on self-glorification through any means, something amplified by social media. What if we don’t get enough likes, follows, reactions? What if we cannot achieve self-glory through the more banal mediums of attraction, attention, popularity?  

Both Radakubana and Prosper said they wanted to be notorious, attempting to find the most extreme channel for their violence as possible to ensure they are never forgotten. They will not be the last. Jamie continues to deny his crime but in episode three of Adolescence he states that he could do whatever he wanted to Katie, the young girl he murdered. The same impulses come through; others as objects to take advantage of in achieving self-satisfaction. 

The good intentions for human connection that some of those early social media sites were set up for has been largely lost. But the good intention can remain in our own resolution to live an I/Thou life. Putting down social media and picking up connections with humans in the real world by seeing the other with curiosity and openness will ensure that we are constantly turning our heart outwards, embracing genuine relationships, and finding space in our heart to think of the other before ourselves. These are the relationships that will make us more human. 

Ultimately, Buber was right that the ultimate ‘Thou’ connection we can make is with God. The Christian story is full of God’s desire to seek out relationship with humanity, to allow us to find a connection with God that surpasses our own human experience and transforms us to be people that slowly grow away from our destructive instincts.  

What might Christian faith have to contribute to the conversation on the culture young men are growing up in? To live I/Thou lives that are curious, open, and seeking truest divine and human connection. Such a life might even touch those who have been ravaged by social media and ignored by other I/It lives. It might even inspire them to compassion and curiosity that look beyond the content that turns them inwards, to turn outwards and find a healthier future. 

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