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How Vegan are Gen Z?
2 Dec 2020

How Vegan are Gen Z?

What does your diet consist of?

The ubiquitous falafel and hummus wrap: beacon of our time, the original forward thinking choice of the meal deal purchaser, culturally historic and often-debated food propelled into the 21st century stardom because of its vegan-tastic qualities.

There are more jokes we could make but they’ll keep skirting around the fact that your attitude towards eating meat and animal products has become one of the staple scales of the woke-o-meter.

What started life as culturally related eating choices, has, working its way through animal rights issues activism, since become a much more mainstream practise: not eating meat or animal products (or cutting down both) is a must for reasons as widespread as personal health, climate change, animal wellbeing, or connecting with culture.

But how many young people do follow these sorts of eating habits?

National Youth Trends research found that only 48.1% of Gen Z now self-define as meat eaters. Outside of a further 2.4% who follow religious diets, we can clearly see that just under half of all young people, are conscious to some extent of their consumption of animal products.

Hover of the different parts of the pie charts to get deets on why.

How Vegan are Gen Z?

48.1%

Meat eaters | 48.1%

What has been traditionally associated with the 'norm' in the UK has taken a huge hit. Where 15 - 20 years ago thinking twice about consuming animal products would have been a less common lifestyle choice, it's now teetering on the edge of the majority. By no means are we saying that consuming 0 animal products is the norm, rather that people are thinking much more about the implications of doing so than ever before. As the other statistics show - this is having a knock on effect on Gen Z's long term eating habits. Don't forget: eating a plant based diet is simply not possible for some people, whether that be for health, religious or cultural reasons.

32.5%

The only meat I eat is fish (4.2%) & I eat meat but I am cutting down (28.3%) | 32.5%

Since the popularisation of documentary films like Cowspiracy an increasing number of people have become wise to the fact that our farming industry is one of the leading causes of climate change in the world. As such the environmentalism movement is one of the largest motivations for people giving up, or cutting down, eating meat. As such, we see a much broader range of young people adopting more conscious approaches: just eating fish or eating less meat and animal products.

2.4%

I follow a religious diet | 2.40%

Lots of people in the UK follow a religious diet: some of which involve animal product-free living. As mentioned above, eating meat is sometimes part of a person's religion or culture. Therefore, sometimes the choice to eat meat or not is not simply a weigh up between the moral implications, but rather a little deeper.

16.9%

I am a vegetarian (11.5%) & I am a vegan (5.4%) | 16.9%

There are lots of statistics which float around about the number of people who follow vegan and vegetarian diets in the UK - we've gone to those who we think would probably know for our answer. The vegetarian society estimates that 2-3% of the current UK population strictly follow vegan and vegetarian lifestyles. We can therefore see, that when compared to the general population, Gen Z are streaming the way out in front. Comparing our findings to those at the vegetarian society: young people are 6x to 7x more likely to be following a vegetarian or vegan diet.

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