Yeah I’m surprised this evidence was easily available, but not included in the article. Very interesting. I have tagged the author in a thread about this article on the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack so I will report back anything he has to say on the matter.
FWIW I do have a lot of respect for the author and this is the first time I’ve found myself puzzled about his output.
@Nicholas Kruus this is what the author, Chris Bryant, had to say:
You are quite right that there has been a tough couple of years for plant-based products recently. I think this is definitely an issue which warrants exploring, but I decided not to go into it here because I was pretty space-limited so I wanted to stick to the main question whether Veganuary has been impactful.
There are some graphs, like sales of vegetarian foods, where I didn’t have more recent data, so they stop in 2020-ish. There’s also a couple of places where I trimmed the graphs, because some data, while interesting, was not relevant to the point I wanted to make and made the graph much less clear.
For example, if you extend the ‘Google searches about veganism’ graph beyond 2020, you’ll see that it starts to go down slightly after 2021, but it still peaks in January. Since my point there is that it peaks in January (and it’s not relevant whether Jan 23 < Jan 22) I decided to go with a graph that would make the point most clearly in the limited space!
That said, there are a few things I discovered when researching this piece that didn’t make it into the publication, but are definitely worth looking at further!
There does seem to be a peak in interest around 2020⁄21, and subsequent years have been more challenging
There may have been a surge in anti-vegan media since around the same time (the media stories per month graph breaks down massively after 2020, and shows so many stories in non-January months that it makes the rest of the graph impossible to read)
In terms of disentangling Veganuary vs. new years resolutions, I would say that the apparent uptick in vegan activity when Veganuary started around 2014 is some evidence that the campaign itself had an impact.I haven’t done this, but it would also be interesting to compare between countries! As you mentioned, Veganuary has been mostly UK-focused, so it would be interesting to compare interest/increase in veganism in January in the UK vs. the US, for example!
Here is the link to the full Slack thread. If you are not a part of the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack, you can join here.
Yeah I’m surprised this evidence was easily available, but not included in the article. Very interesting. I have tagged the author in a thread about this article on the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack so I will report back anything he has to say on the matter.
FWIW I do have a lot of respect for the author and this is the first time I’ve found myself puzzled about his output.
Thanks for doing that! I’d love to hear what he has to say.
@Nicholas Kruus this is what the author, Chris Bryant, had to say:
Here is the link to the full Slack thread. If you are not a part of the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack, you can join here.