By Jack Norris, Executive Director, and Rania Hannan, Research and Assessment Specialist

On August 1, Gallup released a poll in which they asked people whether they were vegetarian and vegan, and then compared the results to the same poll they conducted in 2012 (1). Gallup framed their results as, “Few Americans Vegetarian or Vegan,” but that really depends on your perspective—applying their results to the adult population shows that 7.6 million U.S. adults consider themselves to be vegan and that’s a considerable increase from earlier decades.

Gallup found that while the percentage of vegetarians has remained at 5% since 2012, the percentage of vegans had increased from 2% to 3%—a 50% increase in six years. And if you do the math based on the U.S. adult population from 2011 and 2017—the years they used in their calculations (2)—the number of vegans has increased by an estimated 2.8 million in those six years.

There are two caveats to this poll:

• Unlike the Vegetarian Resource Group’s polls of vegetarians and vegans which ask people what foods they eat, Gallup asked people if they “consider themselves to be” a vegetarian or vegan. The Vegetarian Resource Group’s pollsters estimated there to be 3.7 million adult vegans in the U.S. in 2016 based on food frequency data (3).
• The margin of error for these Gallup polls is wide at ±4%.

That said, the trends point in the right direction and reinforce our experience on the ground—the number of vegans is growing. Thank you to everyone working to spread a vegan lifestyle and end the suffering of farmed animals!

References

1. Snapshot: Few Americans Vegetarian or Vegan. Gallup. August 1, 2018.

2. Adults U.S. population taken from U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division (2011). Accessed August 10, 2018. Found U.S. adult population to be 237,734,073 in 2011 and 252,063,800 in 2017.

3. How many adults in the U.S. are vegetarian and vegan? Vegetarian Resource Group. Accessed August 10, 2018.

By Lisa Rimmert, Vice President of Strategic Communications

As the fall semester ends and we gear up for spring outreach, these dedicated campus leafleters have inspired us with their incredible work for animals this semester. They’ve spread a message of compassion to hundreds of thousands of people, making a huge impact in bringing us closer to a vegan world.

Let’s take a look at what they’ve been up to this fall!

Jevranne Martel

Drawing on her experience as a life coach, Jevranne Martel stays upbeat and engages people in thoughtful conversations as she leaflets. As our lone Canada Outreach Coordinator, she keeps her schedule jam-packed, traveling from British Columbia to Prince Edward Island, advocating for the animals. This semester, Jevranne handed leaflets to 26,580 students and showed virtual reality slaughterhouse footage to 198.

Carlos Contreras

Carlos Contreras [above, left] joined Emmanuel Marquez as the two embarked on Vegan Outreach’s first-ever tours in Peru and Ecuador. Encouraged by the positive response in both countries, Carlos finished the semester in his home country of Mexico. He handed leaflets to 25,742 students at a total of 42 schools this semester and he showed virtual reality videos to 220 people.

Emmanuel Marquez

In addition to supporting outreach by numerous volunteers, Emmanuel Marquez personally showed virtual reality videos to 263 people—bringing his total to nearly 5,000 over the past two years! He also handed leaflets this semester to 28,690 people at 54 schools on outreach tours in Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru.

Sarai Garcia

Sarai Garcia wrapped up her second semester of leafleting with Vegan Outreach, covering New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. In the spring, she handed leaflets to 13,200 students at 26 schools, and now she’s more than doubled those numbers! This fall, Sarai handed out 35,004 leaflets at 60 schools.

Sam Tucker

Sam Tucker has handed leaflets to 44,530 people throughout Australia and New Zealand, and he’s shown virtual reality videos to 396. He’s also helped develop leaflets for Australia outreach and was instrumental in creating and launching Vegan Outreach’s 10 Weeks to Vegan program in Australia and New Zealand.

Carlos Yanez

Carlos Yanez completed his first solo tour of the Southeast U.S. this semester. He set a personal record of handing out 1,756 leaflets at North Carolina State University on October 10^th, and overall this semester he handed out 49,436 leaflets at 74 schools.

Richa Mehta

This was Richa Mehta’s second semester with Vegan Outreach India. She handed leaflets to 24,775 people and showed virtual reality videos to 403. On top of that, she was instrumental in working with food companies to reduce their use of animal products and introduce vegan options.

Miguel Marron

Miguel Marron received a Vegan Outreach leaflet at his college, then started an animal rights club, volunteered for Vegan Outreach, and is now an employee. He celebrated his 14^th anniversary as a vegan in October, and we’re celebrating that he handed out 44,818 leaflets and showed 330 virtual reality videos this fall!

Sarah Weldon

Leafleting in the southern U.S., Sarah Weldon uses her experience as a Marine Corps veteran and reformed hunter to relate to people who are initially resistant to the vegan message. As a result, she handed out 53,164 leaflets this fall and has had many hunters and farmers shake her hand and thank her for having a genuine conversation with them.

Brian Chavez

Brian Chavez [above, middle] started leafleting with Vegan Outreach in Southern California and has traveled all over the midwest U.S. to spread veganism. Brian leaflets heavily during class changes, then during slow times he takes the opportunity to have more meaningful conversations with curious students. As a result, he has handed out 58,643 leaflets on 55 campuses, and so many people have told him they’re going veg!

Steve Erlsten

Last but certainly not least is Steve Erlsten. Steve began leafleting in an official capacity for Vegan Outreach in the fall of 2013—and he hasn’t stopped since! While handing leaflets to 71,925 students this semester, he reached—and exceeded—his goal of personally handing out one million pro-veg leaflets! Congratulations, Steve, and thank you for your dedication!

These activists’ work is far from flashy—they wake up early, lug heavy boxes, and remain on their feet for hours at a time. We’re happy to be able to celebrate them any chance we get. Thank you for helping us do so! And thank you, of course, to the donors whose generosity made this work possible!

If you want to honor these activists and see Vegan Outreach do even more for animals next year, please consider making a donation by December 31st. It will be matched dollar-for-dollar for twice the impact!

Thank you!

By Michelle Alvarado, Guest Contributor

Michelle Alvarado is a contributor to Cria Vegano Magazine, and lives in Chicago with her family where the winters seem to never end!

The winter season can be tricky with little ones, especially if you live in places that snow. Personally, it can be painstaking to even get in the mood to leave the house when the weather is in the single digits. Once I do muster up the courage to leave the house, I never regret it. My 19-month-old, Joey, enjoys it, too—we’ve just learned to layer like pros.

We’re fortunate enough to have found a moms’ group where we not only get together with our little ones and chat, but we get a good indoor workout in as well. The best part is that Joey gets the opportunity to socialize and make friends with kids of all ages. If you’re able to join a local moms’ group, whether it’s a vegan, church, or Meetup group, I highly recommend it.

The library has become a favorite go-to during the winter. I must admit that before I had my son, I only went there to pick up books I’d called in ahead of time for my preschool class. When he turned one, a friend of mine suggested a play date at the library, and Joey ended up having a blast!

A lot of libraries have story times, a play area, and even allow you to sip on some coffee while you sit back and talk with other parents. And don’t forget to take advantage of that library card! You can pick up some books to read at bedtime. But don’t be like me, return those books on time!

We live in a city where there’s a nearby children’s museum. When my husband and I took Joey, it did not disappoint! Holy sensory stimulation—it was magical! We played in a huge water table, built structures with glow in the dark tiles, and played house. Our little musician thoroughly enjoyed the music exhibit. And the staff at the small café even worked with us to put together a vegan-friendly snack!

This activity wasn’t free and is usually best to pay for a year membership if you plan on going more than a couple of times per year.

If you like brisk, chilly weather and you are an outdoorsy family, going for a nature hike at the nearest park is a perfect winter activity for you. You get to breathe in the fresh cold air, get a little exercise and can work together to spot different types of animals. Some parks even have nature centers where you can take a break and thaw out.

As Joey gets older and I learn from other mamas about how to stay busy during the cold winter months, I look forward to watching him participate and stay active. There’s so much to explore out there!

If you’re staying indoors today, don’t forget the latest issue of Raise Vegan is out now, and our mini magazine, Raised Vegan, is available to purchase!

Take two minutes to help both dogs and farmed animals!

Los Angeles community members, along with ten veterinarians, started a petition to get all six city animal shelters to feed their dogs plant-based food. LA Animal Services Commissioners voted in December to do a 60-day feasibility study to analyze the benefits and risks of making the switch.

According to the veterinarians, a plant-based diet could eliminate harmful chemicals found in meat-based dog food—which may help prevent canine ailments like cancer and allergic dermatitis*—while also sparing the lives of thousands of farmed animals who are used in the food.

We need your help to make it happen!

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*Heinze, C. R., VMD, MS, DACVN, Gomez, F. C., BS, & Freeman, L. M., DVM, PhD, DACVN. (2012). Assessment of commercial diets and recipes for home-prepared diets recommended for dogs with cancer. Journal of American Veterinary Medical Association, 241(11), 1453-1460.

In this article, Alison Lenton, PhD, discusses the process of making a significant behavior change. Although changing any habitual behavior is difficult, understanding the process better can enable us to put ‘setbacks’ and ‘stagnation’ into context and see them for what they are: not failures, but an integral part of making any significant change.

Faunalytics’ 2014 Study of Current and Former Vegetarians and Vegans asked a mostly-representative U.S. sample of people age 16+ to report on their current and former eating habits and their attitudes toward meat and dairy consumption. Of the nearly 11,400 people who participated, approximately 12% were either former or current vegetarians or vegans. For the purposes of this blog, some of the study’s key findings were:

• The current failure rate of remaining a lifelong vegetarian/vegan (veg•n) in the United States is 84%. In other words, 84% of participants who had previously attempted a veg•n diet reported eventually giving it up.
• By the time the survey took place, approximately one-third of those who attempted to become veg•n lapsed within 3 months, and over half (53%) gave up within 1 year. And there were some (12%) who gave up even after having been veg•n for 6 or more years!
• Approximately 30% of “failed” veg•ns had also experienced previous failures. That is, nearly one-third had failed more than once to become veg•n. Nevertheless, 37% said that they want to try veg•ism again.

Given these results, it would appear that it is fairly difficult to transition from being omnivorous to veg•n, but any big change in habitual behavior can be difficult. Let’s look at why that is.

The behavior change process

Successful adoption of a new habit depends on the following (for a more complete summary, see this document from Faunalytics):

• Motivation, intention, and planning—you have to want the new behavior, you have to intend to undertake it, and you have to make plans to achieve it as well as plans for surmounting the inevitable obstacles
• Know-how—you have to understand how to enact the new behavior—and belief—you have to believe that you can do it
• Resources—e.g., adequate emotional, physical, cognitive resources in both the immediate and longer-term choice environments
• Positive reinforcement and absence of punishment—you have to perceive that the new behavior yields additional benefits and fewer costs
• Social and environmental support—do your friends/family understand or do they sabotage and challenge? does the environment provide you adequate opportunity and resources to enact the new behavior?
• Self-regulation abilities—are you any good at controlling your momentary desires/impulses? are you any good at directing yourself toward longer-term goals?
• Practice—repetition makes challenging behaviors easier and is key to their becoming automatic, which is when the behavior no longer requires conscious intention/thought

Add to this that the new and old habits then compete with one another for dominance. That is, for an old behavior to be replaced by a new behavior, the right internal (intra-person) and external (environmental) circumstances have to be in place. To illustrate, consider the following recent model of behavior change (Kwasnicka, Dombrowski, White, & Sniehotta, 2016):

According to this model, even after an initial change in behavior, the old and new ‘habits’ remain in conflict with one another. This is because the probability of one or the other habit dominating at a given point in time and in a particular situation depends on competition between the two habits’ different motivations, the distinct emotional resources required to enact or suppress them, the particular levels of self-control they demand, and just how automatic the associated behavior is (or has become). As the model points out, the new behavior may ultimately win out if it is practiced again and again, across different situations and over time.

As a result, when one initiates a change in behavior, it is not uncommon to find that the old behavior continues to pop up now and again, at least until the new behavior becomes automatic; as illustrated by the figure below (also from Kwasnicka, Dombrowski, White, & Sniehotta, 2016).

And even then, it isn’t as if the old behavior and all of its triggers are completely erased. Think of it like how computers write files onto the hard drive: Writing a new file does not necessarily overwrite the old one. Remnants of the old file continue to persist and can be brought back into competition with the new file given the right (or, perhaps, wrong) circumstances. So even with everything in place, there will be setbacks: It takes time for a new habit to dominate the old one.

The fact that so many former veg•ns ‘failed’ but tried again—and want to try yet again—may actually be part of the process of becoming veg•n. Indeed, the 2014 Faunalytics Study found that the ‘failed’ veg•ns were more likely to indicate that they transitioned to their new diet over a matter of days/weeks, whereas for the ‘successful’ veg•ns, it was reported to be a lengthier process. In other words, it may be that the ‘failed’ veg•ns in Faunalytics’ study are simply at an earlier stage in their path to veg•nism, and many will still ‘get there’ in the end.

The findings also hint that any attempt at becoming veg•n may be successful to some extent: Those who ‘failed’ the strict test of maintaining veg•nism still reported eating less beef and pork thereafter than those who never tried to be veg•n (though we note that these data are correlational and, thus, causal conclusions are tenuous).

Overall, we suggest that taking a longer view of the process of becoming veg•n is both a theoretically and empirically valid one: For most people, becoming veg•n isn’t like a light switch that is flicked on at full brightness and never again flicked off. The process of becoming veg•n is more like a dimmer switch: Change is incremental and can sometimes move backward. Perhaps, however, once the dimmer is ‘on’ at all, there is at least a glimmer of light.

With that in mind, we recommend that animal rights and welfare organizations focus on informing people that becoming veg•n is a process made up of a series of smaller, achievable steps. This is because goals that are perceived to be feasible are more likely to be set in the first place than are goals deemed too daunting. These organizations should also give people explicit advice as to how to take those initial steps (e.g., simple rules-of-thumb such as “always choose the tofu option” and “when offered cheese, say ‘hold it please!’”), as research indicates that those with concrete if-then plans—especially plans that include strategies for managing potential obstacles—are more likely to achieve their goals.

At the same time, advocates should continue to advance the general message that these small steps lead somewhere: Veg•nism reduces animal suffering and death, not to mention that it improves human health and the welfare of our planet. To the extent that we can make the process of becoming veg•n seem more manageable to people, and get people to understand that it is indeed a process that includes stagnation and setbacks, then we expect that more people will set upon and, ultimately, stay on the path toward veg•nism.

This blog is a variation and extension of one Dr. Lenton wrote previously for Faunalytics.

Thousands of people have told California Pizza Kitchen they want a vegan cheese pizza.

We need your help to keep the momentum going!

We’ve pre-written an email to CPK’s Customer Feedback Department. All you need to do is sign the email and boom—CPK knows yet another person wants a vegan cheese option on their menu.

By catering to the millions of vegan, dairy-intolerant, and health-conscious consumers, CPK would become the largest pizza company in the US to offer a vegan version of one of America’s favorite foods.

Take less than a minute to help get California Pizza Kitchen to add vegan cheese!

You spoke, and we listened.

You want only the best and most relevant information in your inbox, so we’re transforming our Vegan Living and Advocacy Blog into our new Action Alerts email list!

Our Action Alerts will tell you quick, impactful ways to help animals, including requests to—

• Sign a petition for more vegan menu options
• Post on a company’s social media page for vegan versions of your favorite meals
• Volunteer for leafleting, vegan food events, or campaigns
• Much more!

If you’d like to stay up-to-date on new vegan products, advocacy tools, and to receive vegan recipes and updates on our work spreading veganism, sign up for our twice-monthly Vegan Outreach E-News.

Thank you for your support and for doing all you can to end speciesism!

Take less than a minute to ask Morningstar Farms to make their Garden Patty vegan!

Morningstar Farms has been known for making delicious vegetarian alternatives to animal proteins. However, many people are disappointed that most of their products contain eggs and dairy—including the Garden Veggie Burger sold in stores and at Burger King.

Thousands of vegans around the US would love to purchase more Morningstar Farms products, including supporting the hearty veggie burger at Burger King that’s so widely available.

Please ask Morningstar Farms to ditch the egg and dairy to make their Garden Veggie Burger vegan!