From theguardian.com
Back in 2011, Jane Land, then an English teacher, was single and aware that her next partner would have to be a vegetarian. In Grimsby, where she lived, the prospects seemed quite slim. “I remember being in a restaurant, and ordering a vegetarian meal, and I got chatting to the waiter, asking, ‘Do you get many vegetarian blokes in?’ He was laughing,” she recalls. “‘You’ll probably need to go on the internet for that.’”
Acting on that advice, Land got talking to Matthew Glover on a vegetarian dating site. “Actually, he was on the sister vegan site, which was even more niche.” At the time she wasn’t sure about veganism – worried about all the fallacies about nutrient deficiencies and so on. “I think on our third date,” she recalls, “I ordered pizza with cheese on it, which upset him. That was the start for me.”
“I remember being quite worried about dairy contamination through snogging,” Glover says, laughing.
Since their first vegan kiss, Land and Glover have become the power couple of a plant-based revolution in the UK. A couple of years after they met, they got married and launched the charitable campaign Veganuary, which invites a commitment to a meat- and dairy-free month at the beginning of the year.
What started life 10 years ago from the dining table in Glover’s mother’s front room has become an annual international event with getting on for a million converts – and onboard influencers including Joaquin Phoenix and Billie Eilish. They say that when they started there were around 250,000 vegans in the UK. Now, according to figures cited by the Vegan Society, there are roughly four times that number.
Glover and Land are reflecting on that decade with me in their local Wagamama in York. There were independent vegan restaurants they might have chosen, but they are interested in the ways their revolution can be brought into the mainstream. Wagamama, with its long-term commitment to making at least 50% of its offering plant-based, is a good example. “The great thing here,” Glover says, “is that they have just integrated it all with the main menu. With some places vegan options are still a bit under the counter but here it’s all up front.”
Glover is drawn to what he likes to call “vegan junk food” on the menu – bang bang cauliflower, vegan K-dogs, sticky ribs – all of which live up to their billing. We order side plates of each, and mains including the Veganuary special, a noodle dish made with lion’s mane mushrooms, grown for the chain specially at a farm in Wales, full of complex flavour and intensely moreish.
There is a likable evangelism about Glover and Land, who talk while they eat. They were both, Land says, used to hard sells in their former lives: her teaching Shakespeare to teenagers, Glover in double-glazing sales. They came to their conviction in different ways. While Land had a lifelong aversion to meat – she’s never eaten a steak – Glover has more of the zeal of the convert. He had been vegetarian for a decade approaching his 30s, he says, when he came across a video Paul McCartney shared on Facebook on some of the horrors of the egg and dairy industries. “That one video really changed my outlook on life,” he says. “I became vegan overnight. I just started researching the animal rights movement, started looking into species-ism – all our prejudice against animals.”
To find out more, he attended an animal rights conference in Washington DC. “I was the only English person there – and in my salesman’s suit while everybody else was in jeans, T-shirts. I knew I wanted to act on all this information I was getting but I wasn’t sure how. I got talking to this one woman, who asked me: ‘What are you good at?’ And I said: ‘I’m good at sales and marketing.’ And she said: ‘Well, do sales and marketing for animals.’”
On his mother’s side, Glover comes from a family of butchers, so family was his first challenge (his mother, he says, is now vegetarian). When he met Land, they talked about different strategies for spreading the word: shock tactics highlighting the cruelty and abuses of factory farms; data showing the catastrophic effects of meat-eating on the environment and climate; the promotion of plant-based alternatives. Veganuary brought all these ideas together.
“I did Movember a couple of times,” Glover says, “and we just wondered if we could capture the spirit of that. It seems obvious now, but it wasn’t at the time. People told us: do it as a vegetarian month, a vegan month is too hard. But I think the difficulty of it worked in our favour because it made it media-worthy.”
January was the obvious month for this kind of resolution and it appealed to restaurants and supermarkets who saw a marketing opportunity for their slowest month of the year. Glover and Land have watched their idea spread across the world. Land remains in the thick of it. The day we have lunch is the day before the launch of their Veganuary cookbook, designed to help initiates stay the course. “When people sign up we start them off with all of the practical resources, the shopping list, the recipes, and then as we go through the month we introduce some of the environmental and health issues in our emails and communication, and then we might end up with more of the hard-hitting messaging about animal cruelty.” It is hard to measure exactly how many people keep up their commitment beyond January, Land suggests, because the surveys tend to be completed only by people who make it to the 31st, but they reckon at least half either give up meat and dairy for good or at least make fundamental changes to their diet.
Glover stepped away from the day-to-day of the charity a couple of years ago in order to concentrate on commercial ventures. With a business partner he has just announced plans to rebrand their business VFC – a range of finger-lickin’ vegetable protein products – to VFG (Vegan Food Group) . “We salute those who take to the streets or lock themselves to railings” the VFC mission statement reads. “Our way is to dismantle this destructive system with great food. This is our sit-down protest.” The plan is to invest in other plant-based start-ups” to create, he says, a cluster of like-minded brands, “a sort of vegan Unilever”.
Alongside that business, and as part of its marketing strategy, Glover has made a series of undercover reports and films in the UK and elsewhere that expose some of the practices of the big meat and poultry conglomerates – including revealing the conditions in which chickens were kept at one of KFC’s big suppliers. Glover sees this kind of activism as a necessary component of the overall campaign.
It’s all about showing the reality and presenting alternatives that are – like our plate of sticky mushroom ribs – as full of taste as what is being replaced, he suggests. “The whole concept of Veganuary,” Land says, “is that it is non-judgmental. It’s bright, it’s colourful, it’s positive, it’s an upbeat campaign. It’s a lot about health. I think it worked because that was in contrast to a lot of the other vegan activism that was going on at the time.” Having said that, they are aware that their commitment was spurred by witnessing the brutal realities of global food production. “We sort of know in our hearts that the graphic stuff also really works,” Land says.
For all their gains, they never lose sight of what they are up against. “In the UK, it’s still the case that 99% of chickens are factory farmed. Most eggs are factory farmed. Most pigs are factory farmed,” Glover says. And the resistance to change is both deep-rooted and increasingly part of a political divide (the right to consume steak has become a “wedge issue” for the American right). Glover and Land don’t stop thinking of new tactics. In 2019, Glover launched the “million-dollar vegan” challenge, which pledged to donate that sum to charity – from private donors – if high-profile carnivores made a commitment to change their diet. Donald Trump never returned their calls. The pope more politely declined.
I wonder if, in their commitment to the cause, they ever feel as if they may have bitten off more than they can chew?
Glover, who is bright-eyed, reed-thin, relates it to the marathons he runs as an escape from the pressures of campaigning. “We’ve certainly suffered serious burnout at times,” he says. “And the fact is, we’re not going to see the world we’d ideally like to see in our lifetimes. We’re in a relay race. We’re not going to see the finish line – but we will pass the baton on.” They believe they take great energy from their diet – and you don’t doubt there are a good few miles in their legs yet.
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