To ask what the point of Veganuary is?

[MadToBeMe]

Because it appears to be a load of people rushing out to buy fake processed junk rather than rethinking their eating habits.

It just strikes me that veganism is a life choice to avoid certain foods and products. Are all these faux vegans still wearing their leather shoes, eating avocados and almonds?

I’ve seen threads asking about buying ‘vegan food’. Err, fruit, veg, pulses, nuts, grains...when in reality I think they want the answer to be pulled pork made from soya and 20 different chemicals.

All vegans are evil. Obviously.

Give me a faux vegan over boring bashers any day.

@linkinperk This isn’t about vegans, it is about the people who decide for a month to reach for processed junk in the supermarket rather than a pack of meat. I just don’t get it.

All this talk about vegan food like it’s a separate food group. It’s not, it’s an approach to life. I had cauliflower, carrots, beans and sweet corn with a satay sauce for dinner last night. I wasn’t eating ‘vegan food’ I was just eating.

Come to think of it I don’t think I had any animal yesterday, perhaps I’ve caught vegan

I’m doing Veganuary. Plenty of PP explaining very well and politely why it’s a good idea.

I have bought a few vegan ready meals as well. That’s because I work long hours and I want to have something easy to grab when I get in. I notice, though, that most take 30-50 minutes to cook in the oven rather than a quick microwave.

Feel free to sneer, I honestly don’t care.

You may not like to hear it, but I think this is an argument “the vegans” have won and we will have to allow ourselves time to process it and come to terms with it and join them.

I’d rather it was an ‘eat ethically’ month (no snappy name though so it probably won’t take off).

Eat local where possible, organic, fair trade, free range, nonolasrics and overpackaging etc.

It's things like knowing how much PUSS is in our cows milk. It's knowing exactly what we do to our poor wee surplus male dairy calves. It's researching the cancer risks associated with eating processed meats. It's realising just how pumped full of drugs and infections and god knows what other nasties our poultry are - and we're ingesting all of them too when we eat them. It's knowing the percentage of antibiotics being fed to our livestock - ask yourselves why. sad You have no idea what you're talking about.

Maybe some people just want to try a vegan diet, why do you care? Are you a vegan? I eat mostly vegan foods, I don't class myself as vegan because I still eat eggs and I like cheese. Not sure if you are annoyed because your a vegan snob or you are a meat eater who hates the idea of veganism

LordFekko - come up with a snappy name! FFEbruary (free range fairtrade ethical) - get on Twitter & start now and you might well get enough people interested by the end of the month to move on to that in February. Yes, it might take a few years for it to get as big as Veganuary is this year but then...so did Veganuary.

I am not vegan (I still eat eggs) but I stopped eating dairy last summer after watching this video. I have been veggie for 30 years and lived in ignorance really about how cruel the dairy industry actually is. I am not militant and rarely talk about my decision but having done some research, I decided that I couldn’t support the dairy industry anymore. What is wrong with people making conscious decisions to do something positive?

There’s also Januhairy www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-46747452

Again, rather than just watching a biased (and American) highly selective and edited propaganda video on YouTube, go and visit a UK dairy farm on Open Farm Sunday and make your own mind up.

I like FFebruary!

So cows in the UK dairy industry aren’t artificially inseminated to keep them pregnant over and over again to provide milk for the population? And their calves aren’t taken off them?

The basic principles are still the same even if animal welfare is better in the UK. And its that basic principle that I no longer agree with.

I think if you want to eat truly ethical and environmentally friendly (which is impossible in our society ) you should adopt a diet that is non processed, sourced locally and seasonal. Everything else is fairy tales and unicorns as are most of the reasons people eat meat every day, are vegetarian or vegan. But this good to feel great about all the lies we tell ourselves... so please continue doing whatever suits you.

@cucumbergin tbf Fairtrade apparently ain't that fair.
There are some controversies around it and I am quite wary of them.
The rest sounds awesome thought!

I tried vegan for a month three years ago because every time I had tried to go vegan in the past I failed because I started thinking ‘oh my god I’ll never have insert food here again’. So I thought a month was a good amount of time to give it a fair crack of the whip and I could stop after without losing face if I didn’t like it.
Three years later I’m still vegan.

I know I’ll be flamed for this as a ‘preachy vegan’ but I’m going to say it anyway.
I don’t want to eat locally farmed animals or dairy, even if hypothetically it was better for the environment (don’t think I agree with that but hey ho).
I don’t see meat as food any more. It just looks like the body of an animal, that used to be sentient and could feel pain and fear and died needlessly.
I didn’t used to feel like that but the thought of eating meat now is completely alien to me, like being asked to eat a dog or person.

I'm just veggie, and not doing Veganuary. I've been veggie so long I can't remember what meat tastes like - and for years fake meats were universally dire.

I now live near a vegan fast food joint. They even do a vacon double cheeseburger. It's quite nice for a change really.

Eating less meat is going to be the only way to feed the world's growing population. About 12kg of food is needed to create 1kg beef - if you sat GCSE biology you may remember the principle of trophic levels. www.simply-live-consciously.com/english/food-resources/one-steak-2-days/

Even where the cattle are reared in fields, they have to come in during the winter when the grass stops growing and they need supplementary foods, and much pasture land could be turned over to arable (hill sheep on unploughably steep slopes being a good counterargument, but that's a relatively minor part of UK meat consumption).

I’d really like to eat more ethically. Not necessarily vegan as I don’t think, outside of animal welfare, it is actually more ethical. Doesn’t production of soya often involve deforestation? I read that somewhere but not sure if it’s true.

I was shopping for veg the other day and actually read the labels for once. Veg was from Spain, Egypt, South America, and this was just basic green veg nothing fancy.
I don’t even know where I would start.

Doesn’t production of soya often involve deforestation? I read that somewhere but not sure if it’s true.

Yes it’s true. It’s also true that the vast majority of soya is grown to feed to animals rather than to directly feed humans. So to produce meat we have to use forest to grow the animal feed and forest to keep the animals. It’s much better to just feed it directly to humans.

Calvinsmam

Great, thank for clarifying.

Nothisispatrick

I was shopping for veg the other day and actually read the labels for once. Veg was from Spain, Egypt, South America, and this was just basic green veg nothing fancy.
I don’t even know where I would start.

I would suggest looking at something like Riverford/Abel and Cole/your local veg box providers.

I get a veg box from Riverford every week for £23 that includes 10 varieties of organic, seasonal and predominantly UK fruit and veg (sometimes 1 or 2 from Europe) and they will only package what they have to, like salad leaves for example. The rest is all recyclable packaging which you can return to them.

I don't class myself as vegan because I still eat eggs and I like cheese

No shit

My first year of being vegan was about getting my diet right and exploring all the options, processed, unprocessed, whatever, for the animals.

My second year was about moving over to low waste living and using sustainable and local vegan materials as much as possible, looking carefully at cleaning products and other areas of my life like travel and clothing, for the environment.

This year I want to focus on mostly whole foods eating, knowing I can have a vacon double cheeseburger any time I want, but recognising that actually there are better options out there, for my health.

I think part of the reason there's confusion around veganism is because meat eaters think all vegans are motivated by all of, or a specific one, of these reasons.

You can have a vegan who is vegan for the animals and couldn't care less about the nutritional make up of a food and loves all the highly processed options available. They may or may not be healthy, but they're still vegan.

There is no point to it, same with dry january. A social media nonsense

There is clearly a point to it.

It’s a way for people to try being vegan with support of lots of other people doing it at the same time and with a get out at the end if they don’t like it.

Of course there's a point to it. DH and I are doing it and already think we'll stick with it permanently. So many ridiculous comments on this thread. Make your own choices and stick by them but those that feel the need to criticise others based on false equivalences and misinformation that could be corrected with the slightest effort at googling clearly point to deeper issues.

Even where the cattle are reared in fields, they have to come in during the winter when the grass stops growing and they need supplementary foods, and much pasture land could be turned over to arable
Have you heard of silage?