Getting Outside the Bubble: How the Vegan Movement Started Disrupting U.S. Culture

A big challenge for those committed to a cause is getting caught in a self-reinforcing bubble, or echo chamber.

Within that bubble, everything makes sense. And why not? Everyone you encounter believes in and accepts the basic suppositions: Foreign aid is important, peace is better than militarism, action needs to be taken on climate change, etc.

The main problem, of course, is that the arguments that everyone accepts inside the bubble often make no sense to those on the outside—the very people who need to be won over if the cause is to succeed.

That’s where the American vegan movement found itself in the early 2000s.

According to Chase Purdy in an article on Quartz, titled How the Vegan Movement Broke Out of Its Echo Chamber and Finally Started Disrupting Things, “the movement was always its worst enemy.”

Members of the movement “made their first impressions bellowing into bullhorns, desperate to make a difference by willing it with a loud enough voice,” he wrote.

But actual engagement with non-vegans “was a weakness as people tended to ignore the passionate subculture with a rigid gospel prohibiting use of any and all animal products.”

For the most part, he wrote. “the only marks left by their efforts throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s were those scuffed into their shoes as police officers dragged them off the streets.”

And then, he says, something changed.

A small group of vegans decided to take a different, a controversial—within the movement—tack.

The 2001 schism splintered the vegan community into two camps: absolutists who tout veganism as an all-or-nothing moral imperative, and pragmatists who quietly advocate for incremental change.

Over the past 20 years the pragmatic side has won out, with the result, according to Purdy, that “the movement has morphed into one of the biggest disruptors of the American food system.”

The key message behind the effort was that getting people to eat less meat was easier than getting people to eat no meat—and that you might be able to spare more animals by doing that.

To propel this message forward, the small group decided on an inside strategy or trying to change farm animal welfare policy, pressuring companies to improve housing conditions for pigs and hens, and drafting legislation and ballot measures to get the issues in front of voters.

They also enlisted the support of groups like the Humane Society of the United States, which has enough money, smarts and political power to influence policy in that country, along with sympathetic CEOs of various companies.

Today the work of that small group of radical pragmatists has led to the creation of The Good Food Institute, a lobbying shop in Washington that represents the interests of meat-alternative food products.

According to Purdy, all of this has resulted in a force that is “a legitimate threat to meat industry practices.”

How did it do this? Instead of throwing red paint at places like McDonald’s, they picked on farm animal production techniques that appealed to consumer emotions, got issues on to ballots, and forced companies to “defend practices that can seem draconian. Should piglets have their tails cut off without anesthesia? Should egg-laying hens and farrowing sows be crammed into cages in which they can barely move?”

Despite the success, not everyone in the movement is happy or onside.

Says Purdy: “The 2001 split in the vegan movement was painful, leaving behind feelings of resentment that never healed. From the absolutist point-of-view, the pragmatists diminished the importance of fighting for animal lives by concentrating their energies on farm animal welfare.”

Those absolutist tactics might make true believers feel good, but they estrange the movement from the mainstream culture, and fails to change behavior, Purdy says.

Or, as he put it, quoting one of the pragmatists, “when you ask people for all or nothing, typically you get nothing.”

The story of the vegan movement in the U.S. has parallels to other many causes that people dearly believe in. As long as true believers stay in their bubbles, and demand all-or-nothing in terms of commitment, they will forever be sidelined and ineffective.

Playing the insider game has its dangers, of course, but not working with the culture and the political structure is also a dangerous proposition. And isn’t getting something better than getting nothing?

That’s the big question facing social change groups. What’s your answer?

For more on this topic, see my post What NGOs Can Learn from the Success of the Gay Marriage Movement.