2010's Internet Veganism: An Autopsy of a Progressive Movement (2024)

Author’s note: I’m in the middle of writing an overly ambitious piece for this stupid blog that has me sifting through CDC data and so I decided to take a break by spitting out this silly post-mortem on a viral movement I was obliquely part of. This one spiraled out of control too. Sorry about that.

Do you remember vegans? Do you remember when an influencer couldn’tbe seeneating a burger or drinking a cappuccino without getting scolded by hordes of teenagers for being a cold, heartless maniac? I do. But where did these people go? Why aren’t videos of James Corden’s “Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts” spammed with comments from vegans freaking out about platforming the consumption of pork tongue or bull penis? I think I know where they went.

Veganism Before the Internet

I always knew about vegans, but I thought of them as hippies. They wore Birkenstocks, ate granola, anddidn’tbathe much. In the New Jersey of my childhood, wedidn’trespect any of that, so Ididn’tknow any vegans.

The first vegan who went viral was Freelee The Banana Girl. Do normies know who that is? To me, she’s literally more famous than Akon or Dick Cheney, but I wonder if my internet childhood rotted my brain. Here are two pictures of her from a Daily Mail article from 2014 when she was 33.

I think these pictures capture Freelee in all of her glory. She’s the kind of person who was born for the internet - or Youtube, in her case. She was weird, pretty, and a natural born exhibitionist. The article these pictures are from is called “'I eat 51 bananas a day!' Self-proclaimed 'diet guru' says her toned physique is down to the MOUNTAINS of fruit she eats,” and the title pretty much says it all.

Freelee coined the“Raw Til Four"diet, which advocated eating only raw food (mostly fruit) until 4 p.m. More than anything, Freelee was a marketing genius, so her diet had two more names:“High Carb Low Fat”and“Fruigavore.” She argued that this diet could cure virtually any ailment and help the dieter easily shed weight while eating a lot - she claimed to eat between 2000 and 5000 calories a day.

She was fun to watch. Her most viral videos were her reactions to “What I Eat In A Day” videos. She’d watch a non-vegan influencer’s day of eating and talk about howdisgustingtheir food choices were. She was a gifted provocateur, and her Australian accent made her harsh language more palatable to American ears. Years after watching my last Freelee video, I still remember her language. She described eggs as “hen’s periods” and dairy products as “pus.” Even if you were hate-watching, her language had a way of getting stuck in your head.

She cared about animals, but her channel was clearly for entertainment. That’s not a knock against her - she was a professional YouTuber.The biggest knock against her is that she made wild health claims based onvery, verylittle information, and she wasn’t above lying.In Freelee’s world, veganism didn’t require any sacrifice. It was cheaper, healthier, tastier, more satisfying, and more convenient.

In the early 2010s, we were all watching Freelee because she was so goddamn watchable, and even though we were watching her ironically, her worldview was seeping in.

Laying The Groundwork

1. The Obama Presidency - Veganism as a Progressive Movement

The heyday of Internet Veganism was squarely during Obama’s second term (Jan 2013-Jan 2017). Looking back, I’m struck by how weird this moment was.

During the Obama administration, and especially during his second term when the economy had started to recover, there was this kind of end-of-history national sentiment. A lot of Americans saw Obama’s victory as the end of racism and the legalization of gay marriage as the end of hom*ophobia (trans people weren’t on the national radar back then.) We had Dreamers (the end of xenophobia) and Obamacare. Me Too hadn’t happened yet, and Roe v Wade was still the law of the land. We perceived that we were ina globalpeacetime, but the youth still needed a revolution, and so a lot of youths flocked to animal welfare.

Animal welfare is really a peace-time cause. I’m writing this when activism around Israel/Palestine is at a fever pitch1, and the thought of anyone seriously protesting on behalf of a dairy cow is almost laughable. But back then, it wasn’t.

Let me define some terms:

Internet Vegans - the vegan influencers who were part of this movement and this internet scene.

Analog Vegans - the other vegans. They may have been vegan at the same time, and they may have even been vegan on the internet, but they were not part of this social media trend.

Internet Vegans were predominately white liberals. The bedrock of their argument was this:we all agree racism, sexism, hom*ophobia, etc. is wrong. Why do we feel differently about speciesism?This idea - thatwe all agreethat all interpersonal prejudice or discrimination is wrong - seemed true to many in the 2010s.

This is a re-upload, but I remember when this video went viral. It’s stupid, and we all had a good laugh, but the sentiment “don’t be speciesist” was actually taken seriously.

2. Veganism as a Wellness Trend (& the other thing)

It would be wrong for me to imply that veganism only existed on the internet in these years as a progressive movement - that's simply not true. Veganism was so viral because it brought together two of the loudest groups on the internet. It was simultaneously the cause du jour and the wellness trend du jour.

I’m not too interested in dissecting veganism as a former wellness trend, mainly because these trends always come and go in the same way. When the vegan diet first came onto my radar, it was as a miracle cure-all. Did you have gut problems? Migraines? Painful periods? Sleep issues? Depression? Joint pain? You could be cured with a vegan diet.Thiswas backed up by a whole bunch of pseudo-science. I remember vegan doctors talking about how the shape of our teeth proved that we were “created” to be vegan. I remember watching videos about how eating chicken is worse than smoking.

So everybody went vegan to improve their sleep and clear up their acne, and then when everybody still felt like sh*t, everybody gave up on veganism and moved on to the next miracle diet, which I think was a combination of keto and intermittent fasting.

Veganism was also beloved by people with restrictive eating disorders. If you have a restrictive eating disorder, you’re constantly in the market for good reasons not to eat in public, and there is almost no better reason not to eat in public than veganism. In the early 2010s, most restaurants didn’t have a vegan option, and if they did, it was probably the lowest calorie thing on the menu. This was great for Anorexics, and even better because friends/family respected veganism as a personal decision, making it something you didn’t have to defend. If you were thin and wanted to be on a weight loss diet without having to admit you were on a weight loss diet, veganism was a godsend.

A lot of these health/wellness/ED vegans did espouse the ethics of veganism once they were on the diet. I think this raises the question of where our ethics come from. Most of these people’s passion for animal welfare was post-hoc. I don’t mean that as an insult because I think post-hoc ethics are part of human nature. I think we’re basically always subconsciously creating narratives about ourselves that paint us in a good light. An example from my own life is that I don’t eat octopuses. If I go down into the depths of my soul and swear an oath of honesty, then I have to admit that I don’t eat octopuses because I don’t like the texture. But…. everyone agrees that octopuses are really smart, and everybody loved that movie My Octopus Teacher, so I’m not above sort of implying that I don’t eat octopuses because I love them and that I’m a conscientious objector. It’s a harmless fib that gives me a little ego rush. I think a lot of these wellness vegans were doing the same thing.

The Peak

During the height of this movement, maybe 2014-2016, everyone was vegan. There was a whole community of vegan YouTubers (i.e. YouTubers whose content was focused on veganism), but tons of mainstream YouTubers tried veganism too. I’m going to throw out some names that you may or may not recognize: Jenna Marbles, Tana Mongeau, Kalel Kitten, Joey Graceffa, Essena O’Neill, Cammie Scott, and Nikocado Avocado. Veganism went mainstream, too. Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande were vegan! (Billie Eilish might still be vegan, but r/vegan says she’s not. A different subreddit says Ariana Grande isn’t either.)

I found this on reddit and trust me… it’s funny.

Around 2018-2019, the “Why I’m no longer vegan” trend started. These videos were all the same. The influencer would talk about all the ways their health failed on a vegan diet - hair falling out, gut problems, mood issues - and then they would say they’ve added eggs and a little bit of fish back into their diet. They would say that they still care about animals but have to prioritize their health and still plan on eating mostly plant-based. They would assure us that they feel so much better with a few animal products back in their diet and urge us to listen to our bodies and always make the best decisions for our own health.

This happened so frequently that I found a blog post tracking current and former vegans called “Vegan Youtuber Fail Leaderboard.”

So the question is, why did most vegans quit?

The Fall

The first thing I need to mention is that some Analog Vegans have argued that these people were never vegan. Analog Veganism is not about health and wellness. It’s a political movement, and most Analog Vegans, at least as far as I can tell, are in it for the animals. Concerns about the environment seem to be secondary. Analog Veganism isn’t even a diet. Analog Vegans don’t wear leather, fur, or silk. They pay close attention to animal products in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and whatever else they consume. Many Analog Vegans boycott horseback riding, zoos, and exotic pet ownership. Analog Vegans don’t evangelize veganism as a healthy lifestyle - they evangelize it as the only ethical way to live. Many even acknowledge the drawbacks of veganism, agreeing that it might be harder to eat a nutritionally complete diet and that it can be challenging to find vegan alternatives to many products. Still, for them, this is kind of beside the point. For them, the juice is worth the squeeze.

So, sure. A lot of Internet Vegans weren’t technically vegan, but I bet a lot of Analog Vegans weren’t either in their early years. I don’t want to dismiss the faces of Internet Veganism and the thousands of new vegans trying to make the switch as insincere, half-hearted liars. I think a lot of Internet Vegans and their followers sincerely loved animals and cared about veganism as a cause, so let’s take them seriously.

The Elephant In The Room: It’s Hard To Be Vegan

Being vegan sucks - I took a real stab at it in 2015. It takes a lot of research, planning, and discipline, and it can also be socially awkward. You’re always dragging your friends to the vegan restaurant, and you’re always telling your aunts that you can’t eat their food (but you brought your own lentils!) Now, I’m sure any vegan reading this is rolling their eyes. This isn’t that much of a sacrifice. And I agree that it’s doable, but I think that eating and sharing food with people is a fundamental part of our humanity. We have been cooking for each other and feasting together since the dawn of civilization. Culinary diplomacy is a thing, and food is one of the best ways to learn more about a friend’s background. Opting out of these experiences or asking for your loved ones to accommodate you is hard - doable, but hard.

Between the planning, the money (a lot of vegans claim it’s actually cheaper, but for that to be true, you need to do even more planning, and time is money), and the social awkwardness, sticking to a vegan diet is tough. The food is very different and, in my opinion, worse. Some people owe a large chunk of their daily pleasure to their meals. I think for these people, switching to a vegan diet will negatively impact their mental health and overall happiness. It’s hard to willingly give up pleasure, and learning to be a good vegan chef takes years and a lot of effort.

Hypothesis 1: Cars Run Out Of Gas

I wonder if we have something like ethics endurance. I wonder if our ability to stick to a boycott or care deeply about an issue outside of ourselves is a battery doomed to die rather than a perpetual motion machine.

When I was a kid, I read a horrifying book about McDonald’s treatment of their animals. I was so moved and disgusted that I didn’t eat fast food for at least ten years. I love animals as much as ever, but I eat fast food now. Why did I stop my boycott? I’m not sure. Honestly, I don’t feel viscerally passionate about McDonald’s chickens anymore. I can perform passion about animal welfare and form an argument that calls for passion, but I can’t honestly say that, at this exact moment, I feel passion. Strangely, I know I could trigger it. I’m probably a 20-minute documentary away from re-starting the boycott, which seems pathetic. I’m pathetic and unprincipled for being this way, but I have to assume I’m not unique.

It seems as though this righteous passion is a fire that needs to be stoked. Maybe staying committed to a cause for decades requires constantly feeding the flame. This is much easier, of course, when the “cause” affects you directly. Minorities don’t have to be on Tumblr to remember that racism is an “issue” that they should care about. I am not a dairy cow, so to stay emotionally triggered about dairy cows, I have to go out of my way to remind myself of the horrors of factory farming. And I don’t. I remember the facts but not the horror. I bet vegans who work directly with animal rescue centers or for vegan companies find it easier to stay vegan simply because they stay triggered. This sh*t is not in my algorithm, and so I have emotionally moved on.

Also, there are too many things to be upset about. It seems like everyone, from random TikTok teens to the New York Times, can only focus on one or two causes at a time. Is this a strategic decision made by people who actually understand fundraising and politics, or is this a psychological phenomenon linked to the way human emotion, attention, and social pressure work? I care about war, disease, human rights, and the environment, but I also have to shower and call my parents. I don’t have the bandwidth to feel all of the fury I should feel about the state of the world. Poor Things touched on this briefly in the movie’s only unrelentingly bleak scene. The world is horrifying, and we should be horrified. But we can’t stay horrified. At a certain point, it’s maladaptive.

I'm sure you've heard leftists say, "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism." Even if this is true, the idea opens the door for nihilism and moral relativism. If all consumption is unethical, then all efforts to improve your own global impact (consumer habits, carbon footprint, etc.) are futile half-measures. You should instead focus your energy on dismantling capitalism, which is a big ask.

Hypothesis 2: Veganism as a Progressive Movement: A Different Climate & Shifting Priorities

Trump’s election was the beginning of the end for veganism and animal rights being taken seriously as an urgent progressive movement. The Women’s March happened the day after Trump’s inauguration, and that same year, the Me Too movement dominated the national conversation. The Trump administration’s policies forced liberals2 to shift their priorities squarely back to human rights. Activists focused on family separation at the southern border, the Muslim ban, and the transgender military ban. In 2020, we were hit with the COVID-19 pandemic, which started a dialogue about chronic illness/disability rights, and Black Lives Matter protests spread all over the country and to the rest of the world. By then, the conversation about veganism had vanished from activist circles.

But it wasn’t just that animal welfare became less of a concern. The entire perspective of the vegan movement started to seem dated. The way the left thought about political/social movements had completely shifted since the early days of internet veganism, and veganism didn’t adapt.

Declining Emphasis of Individual Behavior

Liberals and leftists stopped focusing on individual action and started thinking about systems of power.

I remember the days of Reduce, Reuse, & Recycle when environmentalism was a group project, and we were all asked to do our part.

This song from Sesame Street encourages you to “use water carefully” by turning off the tap when you brush your teeth and fixing leaky faucets.

My parents are from this generation - they drive a hybrid car, turn off lights when they leave a room, refuse to run an AC in the summer, and compost. My generation would argue that nobody in our tax bracket has the power to make any difference in this crisis and that the burden should not fall on us. We’re a generation of opposite-day Uncle Bens proclaiming, “with no power comes no responsibility.” Instead, we hope to dismantle the systems of power that make climate change inevitable. We should protest corporations with money tied up in fossil fuels and tax Taylor Swift until she can’t afford her jet. Your leaky faucet doesn’t make a shred of difference. (Is this a post-hoc argument to excuse nihilism and laziness? Is this realism? Let me know what you think.)

This video, made by disability-rights activist Jessica Kellgren-Fozard in 2018, kind of blew my mind.

Since I assume you’re not going to watch, I’ll quickly summarize: In the wake of a plastic straw ban, Kellgren-Fozard talks about bendable plastic straws as an accessibility tool. Many disabled people need bendable straws, as drinking straight from a cup might not be possible. She suggests that those who dogmatically demonize plastic straws are failing to think intersectionally (a word that was becoming super mainstream during the end of the 2010s) and are not considering disabled people.

A disabled woman claiming that the well-being of sea turtles was not her problem to solve was somewhat transgressive. As a member of a marginalized group and as a middle-class person, she and others argued that governments and corporations had no right to ask her to clean up their mess.

Cultural Imperialism

As I mentioned 2,000 words ago, Internet Veganism was dominated by liberal white people. In the real world, India has more vegans than any other country, but Internet Vegans weren’t eating vegan Indian food. They were drinking smoothies, eating avocado toast, and using a metric sh*t ton of nutritional yeast to make everything taste “cheesy.” As race politics shifted post-Obama, the way Internet Vegans spoke about their diets and their relationships to food started to sound a little bit imperialist.

Let me give you the most extreme example I can think of. The Yulin Dog Meat Festival is an annual festival in China that revolves around eating dog meat. 🚨🚨 I need to quickly mention that dog meat isn’t popular in China, and its popularity has been decreasing. This is a sensitive topic, and I am certainly not trying to suggest that eating dog meat is common, regardless of whether you think eating dog meat is good, bad, or neutral.🚨🚨 Americans don’t eat dog meat, and we’re pretty squeamish at the thought of doing so. But we’re not a vegetarian country and we eat plenty of animals known to be intelligent (i.e. pigs and the aforementioned octopuses).

When I first heard about the Yulin Dog Meat Festival and dog meat consumption in general, the American sentiment was pretty unanimous: dog meat consumption should be outlawed worldwide. Interestingly enough, a lot of vegans were bothered by American criticism of dog meat, finding it hypocritical. You can still find threads about this on r/vegan. Eventually, things shifted. Yulin has a bad reputation for animal cruelty, and the arguments went from “eating dog meat is unethical” to “eating unethically sourced dog meat is unethical.” Widespread criticism of the food eaten by another culture started ringing racism alarm bells. The idea that the animal products from our culture are reasonable and harmless, but the animal products from other cultures are cruel and unnecessary sounded like cultural imperialism.

During the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen scandal of 2020, fans of food media talked about how the magazine wasn’t inherently neutral and actually presented a specific perspective. People pointed out that naming certain ingredients “pantry staples” and others “exotic” or “specialty” revealed a class/race/culture identity that Bon Appetit might not have even been aware of. In May 2020, then-editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport published an article called “Food Has Always Been Political.” In the 2020s everything is.3

Popular food influencer Half Baked Harvest, aka Tieghan Gerard, has been accused of cultural appropriation many times, usually for inaccurately describing another culture’s cuisine or borrowing from another culture without giving credit. This is online food discourse - food is personal, cultural, political, and complicated. In 2021, the Cornell Daily Sun published “Food Cultural Appropriation: It’s Personal,” by Meridien Mach. Mach says:

“I am first generation Chinese-Vietnamese. Both of my parents immigrated to the United States as a result of the Vietnam War. My closest connection to my Vietnamese culture, like many children of immigrants, is food. Food is part of my identity. Food is personal.”

“When making another culture’s food inauthentically, we fail to respect the culture it originated from, reinforce stereotypes and thus, contribute to oppression known as food cultural appropriation.”

“When restaurateurs take cultural foods and modify them, they disrespect the culture and those that were ostracized for it.”

In the wake of 2020, many people wanted to make an effort to engage with other cultures, and sharing food might be the best way to do so. In 2015, bringing a bag of vegan snacks with you as you travelled to a foreign country or visited a friend’s family home might have seemed principled and reasonable. In 2020, it started to seem f*cking weird and, dare I say, a little problematic.

Classism & Class Consciousness

Young people, particularly young progressives, became quite class-conscious in the post-Obama years. Millennials loved Bernie Sanders and agreed with how he talked about the nation’s class struggle. Eating vegan is expensive and labor intensive. To be a healthy vegan (i.e. to avoid being an “Oreo and peanut butter vegan”), you need to prepare most of your meals at home and stay on top of your vitamin/nutrient consumption. There weren’t many vegan restaurants or speciality foods at the time, so there weren’t quick, healthy, and cheap vegan options. Most young people don’t have the time or money to cook 21 speciality meals at home every week, but this wasn’t a valid excuse in the eyes of Internet Vegans. If you really cared, you would find the time and money. These days, you could practically get cancelled for telling a working-class person how they should spend their resources.

I think the role of class in progressive movements is always fascinating. Being radical usually isn’t cheap, and it’s always interesting to see which movements give working class and poor people leniency and which don’t. The virulent hatred of fast fashion seems to have died down for this reason. A few years ago, people were getting flamed for shopping at Shein, but now, if you try leaving a fast-fashion-is-evil comment, you’ll probably be called a classist.

Conclusion

In 2021, YouTuber Folding Ideas, aka Dan Olson, made a video that perfectly encapsulates the current left-wing political perspective on food.

It is a phenomenal video, and I highly recommend watching it, but I’ll summarize it here anyway.

Olson talks about Jamie Oliver’s hatred of chicken nuggets and his years-long crusade to get kids to stop eating them. Olson rips apart Oliver’s thinking. Olson is thoughtful and nuanced but, more or less, he suggests that Jamie Oliver is classist - he judges the way poor people live and the choices that they make, naive - he doesn’t understand that systemic barriers prevent low-income people from eating more healthily, - and imperialistic - he tells people from cultures & economic backgrounds that he doesn’t understand that they should live and eat as he does.

This is the kind of conversation that leftists are having about food and everything else. Nobody gives a sh*t if you’re vegan, but you better not be telling anyone in the proletariat that they’re the reason the world is on fire.

I’m glad I finally got to tell this tale to someone who wasn’t there. To me, it’s the whole story of a massive shift in American progressive politics, but through a lens that is so Youtube. I find it delightful.

Postscript: Some of the vegans I mentioned in this blog post, including Freelee, are still vegan.

Post-postscript: You should probably know that as the community started falling apart, there were a lot of sexual assault allegations against Freelee the Banana Girl’s then-boyfriend. He evidently took advantage of being a prominent figure in a community dominated by young women. This scandal made it even harder for Internet Vegans to maintain a moral high ground.