Who Are We Anyway?
by Keith Iding, Northwest VEG President
Northwest VEG promotes the importance of replacing the meat and dairy we consume with plants.
That is our primary mission. We do this by holding vegan potlucks, picnics, and meetups; educational opportunities such as presentations; and field trips to places like farm sanctuaries. Our core outreach event is Portland VegFest—started in 2005 as the Compassionate Living Fair at Friends Hall on SE Stark. We showed the film Peaceable Kingdom, presented cooking demos, handed out vegan food samples, and offered “oodles of information.” It seemed like we were on a roll every year since then, expecting our event to be at the largest venue we could find, the Oregon Convention Center—until Covid got in the way. VegFest is now on hold until we rebuild our organizational momentum to attract enough volunteers to handle all the details, but that is one of the reasons this newsletter exists, to bring us all back together.
We totally trust that Portland has a growing vegan community who support a meatless philosophy for the three often-stated motivations—for the sake of the animals, for the nutritional and health benefits of avoiding animal products, and for the sake of relinquishing habitat used for raising animals and their food, 3/4 of the total agricultural area in the United States. Even now, clearing land for raising animals and their feed is the leading cause of global habitat destruction, the enormous swath of forests cut down to supply the meat marketing industry, so yes, for the Animals, our Health, and the Environment.
National nonprofit Animal Outlook reported last year that Oregon has the most vegans of any US state, and you can see it in the faces at vegan-themed events like the Vegan Night Markets. We have all the old-timers who started revving things up nearly 20 years ago showing up, and now many younger faces who know the issues and have chosen to be here in Portland actively supporting vegan culture. There are new directions of expression, divided further into age ranges and degrees of social media awareness, finding identity in activism, getting together under multiple vegan banners.
The work of changing our culture is far from over, though. As good as we are doing with change, most of America is still clinging to traditional food habits. A recent media poll found that although a third of us have reduced meat consumption, we’re still meat-centric in the world community—27 billion pounds of climate-destroying beef in 2020—the very top of the world chart. According to a Cambridge research report, “Harnessing Moral Psychology to Reduce Meat Consumption,” durable social change requires socially embedded reasoning. Facts and ethical arguments are not persuasive enough to instill change. As social animals, behavior change is a group process we need to experience with others. When we look back at our own reasons for accepting a vegan lifestyle, we can see that shared experience played a huge role. We absorb intellectual persuasion and then amplify that into actual behavior change in the presence of others like us.
Northwest VEG was a concept that a group of very purposeful people started here almost 20 years ago, to build a shared awareness to be passed on to whomever takes part in our focused events, a coming together of community to demonstrate how appropriate and easy it is to switch to animal-free meals. We can be an ongoing bridge to unite all the vegans, to help us be mindful of one another in our mutual intentions. We have the umbrella organization credibility to embrace our vegan diversity, the multiple ways we move in the same direction together. Our intention is to be there with the continuity of our vegan potlucks, dineouts, presentations by leading experts, and most of all, large VegFest gatherings to keep us all united and aware of our growing group strength, to persuade others of the necessity for this change.
Sources:
https://animaloutlook.org/top-10-up-and-coming-vegan-friendly-u-s-cities/
https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-consumption-ranking-countries-164-106879
