Have no involvement in animal testing during development or manufacture
• Contain no GMOs that have animal-derived genes. Plant-derived genes are acceptable but the products must be clearly labelled as GMO
• Cross-contamination with non-vegan materials is kept to a minimum
And to be clear, their definition of “animal” includes insects, invertebrates and any other beings that would be classed in the scientific Animalia kingdom (cite below).
You can find the Vegan Society logo on vegan products around the world. It’s a registered symbol in the USA, Canada, Australia, and across Europe covering more than 16,000 products.
When a product doesn’t have a vegan symbol, it doesn’t mean the food is automatically non-vegan. It just means the manufacturer hasn’t gotten themselves registered. Reading the ingredients can still be a fine way to determine what you’re eating. It just takes longer.
Interested in this whole veganism idea and want to know how it all started? Here’s a little history about the movement.
The best place to find the origins of veganism is with the early history of the Vegan Society, the first organized group of vegans. It was founded in 1944, meaning that modern vegans have been around for more than 70 years. It’s not quite as recent a “fad” as some people think.
The founders include Donald Watson, Elsie Shrigley, and other vegetarian friends. They were discussing the idea of being vegetarian while also eliminating all dairy products from their diet. The term “vegan” was coined, taking the first and last few letters from vegetarian. Donald Watson felt it represented the beginning and end of conventional vegetarianism.
By 1949, this little group had expanded and they officially declared their purpose to be more than about diet, but the complete freedom of animals from being used by man. They formed as a registered charity in 1979, and have been going strong ever since.
The Current State of Veganism:
According to a survey done for the Vegetarian Resource Group (cite below), there are approximately 16 million vegetarians in the USA, and they estimate that about half of those are fully vegan. So it may seem like nobody else you know is vegan, but there are millions who have given up animal products completely.
As for the Vegan Society, their symbol is the standard trademark for vegan products around the world and their website is the main online destination for resources, information, and product details for vegans.
How Veganism Helps Animal Welfare
This is the core issue of being vegan: the treatment and welfare of animals (all animals, including insects).
What distinguishes vegans from vegetarians is that we recognize that there is more to animal treatment than simply not killing them. People get very hung up on the idea that taking eggs or milk isn’t harm, and that it’s just fine. That’s a very myopic view of things, and not accurate at all. In fact, animals kept for wool, milk, or eggs are probably suffering more than those kept for meat because they suffer for many more years.
Since you are already reading a book about veganism, you’re probably very aware of animal welfare issues around a traditional meat-eating diet. But if you’re still on-the-fence about the seriousness of this global problem, keep reading.
Not all animals undergo the same cruelties, but there are some pretty consistent issues across the board in the livestock industry. In almost any case, animals are kept in extremely small spaces living in filth. They are treated cruelly with no concern for their pain or fear. Antibiotics are used almost constantly because livestock would surely die from infection from their living conditions otherwise.
For the “lucky” animals not destined for slaughter, life is not good. Eggs come from chickens kept in tiny cramped cages for their entire lives, and dairy cows undergo repeated pregnancies and constant milking for years until they die an exhausted death. In most dairy operations, male calves aren’t needed so they are sent off to be sold as veal. That means their short lives are spent locked in containers so they can’t move, to keep their muscles tender.
Sheep kept for wool don’t fare any better, though this tends to be a surprise to most people. Careless shearing conditions lead to cuts, scrapes and other bloody injuries that are not usually treated properly.
The situations aren’t just about crowding, disease and dirty conditions either. Staff in many of these livestock facilities treat the animals horribly. There are countless videos that have been taken showing beatings and other violent abuse that goes on in factory farms.
The only way to eliminate all of this abuse is to remove the consumer demand for these products. If people stopped buying meat and other animal products, there would be no need to hold billions of livestock animals captive. That’s how being a vegan helps.
How Veganism Helps the Environment
Being vegan is mainly about the ethics of using animals for our benefit, but there are other important reasons why you might want to give up eating animal products. Besides helping the animals themselves, a vegan diet can help the environment as a whole.
Raising animals for food is a huge drain on the environment, and it uses up many more resources that using the same space to produce plant-based food.
To start with, keeping animals for meat is an enormous waste of water, which is a resource we are starting to run out of in many parts of the world. It will take more than 2,000 gallons of water to eventually produce 1 pound of beef for consumption. A pound of wheat would only require 25 gallons. Add in the use of fossil fuel to maintain the vast amounts of crops for feed as well as everything else (transport, slaughter, and processing). On average, it will use up 11 times as much fuel to produce one calorie of animal protein as it would for an equal calorie of plant protein.
Now, that’s just wasted resources. The bigger shame comes in land use. Not only are millions of acres used for pasture and feed lots, even more land is taken up in the growing of feed crops. Food is grown, just not for us. According to PETA, approximately one third of the entire planet’s land surface is used to house livestock animals or grow their feed.
The problem isn’t just that space is wasted and native ecosystems are razed, but land is made dead and barren by overgrazing and the repeated growing of the same crops. Land used as pasture gets heavily contaminated with animal manure, which can negatively impact the local water supplies too. The EPA estimates that 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states are polluted due to animal waste runoff.
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