Recent anecdotes and news on the vegan front suggests that plant-based diets may be more than just trendy.
On the anecdote front, a number of senior experts in our network (out here in Southeast Asia) doubt they can cut meat, but some muse that they could trim meat to a meal a day. We have been regularly showing our ‘Vegan Map of ASEAN’ and asking about diets during lulls in meetings and at meal gatherings. We are hearing more about a spouse, a child or a grandchild going plant-based; with some knock-on effects. There is also awareness that such diets have to be carefully researched (so as not to be deficient key amino acids and such), and we just heard a grandparent assure that his 12-year old grand daughter has done this thoroughly (and convince her siblings too).
In fact, it is my parent’s (the war) generation who told us stories that having chicken was a treat; and they sometimes used to carry around a (raw) fresh egg in their pockets rather than pay more for an egg to the street food vendor frying up their ‘char kway teow’ (friend rice noodles). Now, the ‘haves’ in Southeast Asia, can afford to eat chicken three times a day - at breakfast (with a nasi lemak, porridge, noodle, sandwich; depending which ASEAN food culture you are tapping), at lunch and at dinner.
On the news front, there are plenty of things to read. This year, 400,000 people around the world signed up for Veganuary, pledging to practice a vegan diet for the whole month of January—in comparison, only 250,000 signed up in 2019, and 170,000 in 2018. The growth in the number of vegan practitioners is eliciting response from the market, with various food chains, including KFC and Burger King, now offering plant-based products and menu items. There is even an app called Pay-a-Vegan that credits users for every vegan meal consumed in effort to encourage restaurants to offer more vegan options and connect vegans to eateries that cater to their dietary lifestyle.
Several celebrities and prominent businessmen have also lent their support in the vegan way of life. Joaquin Phoenix recently led an animal equality protest in London urging people to switch to a vegan lifestyle, and successfully convinced the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to serve its first all-vegan menu at the Golden Globes in January 2020.
In ASEAN, Malaysian tycoon, Tan Sri Vincent Tan (who turned vegan four years ago), shared his strong beliefs about the health benefits of eating greens during the 9th Malaysian International Conference on Holistic Healing in Cancer in August 2019.
All in all, it is clear that plant-based diet habits are getting a lot of mind share (and possibly taking root), especially among the younger generations. This is consistent with the findings from our survey on diet habits among the Khor Reports network and friends: “Knives Out? A Nibble on Food and Diet Habits”. With new relevant terms such as flexitarians, i.e. a person that has a primarily vegetarian diet but still occasionally consumes meat, cropping up, it would be interesting to see how this vegan movement will develop in future.
But let’s not forget there are also negative social media conversations on vegans. There is also research suggesting that plant-based diets may not be as environmentally beneficial or health friendly as it may seem—meat-alternatives, for example, have been criticised to be heavily processed and containing high levels of salts, while nutritionist Dr Graeme Coles alleges that a plant-based diet emits the same amount of nitrogen as a meat-based diet. Moreover, in the UK, vegan activists are among the groups included on the UK’s counter-terror list (which seems surprising to many). Does this portend more contestation to come as farmer segments really start to worry? Does this indicate that some important folk reckon that plant-based is getting more than just flash-in-the-pan trendy?
(20 Feb 2020) Edited to include article from the Food Navigator on research suggesting that plant-based diets may not be as environmentally and health friendly.