The Vegan Issue

Hi All,

Just a few thoughts on the Vegan issue.

So much internal pfaf time has been spent with endless discussion on the vegan issues. It grabs a lot of our attention and to be frank serves as a nice distraction from the real task of plants for a future, providing educational material about plants and conducting research into such.

Some clarity is needed on quite what the role of a charity is. Charity Commission Guidance CC9 – Speaking Out – Guidance on Campaigning and Political Activity by Charities http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/publications/cc9.asp discusses the difference between educational activities and political activities.

Who are the charity’s beneficiaries? Is it just vegan or is it a wider community interested in plants and environmental land management?

The answer to this question is key: it informs the activities it can carry out and how a new governing document is drafted.

We have done some work in the past on looking at our beneficiaries. In 2002 everyone who visited the Blagdon site received a questionnaire which included information on dietary preferences. I can’t remember the exact proportions but vegan formed a significant chunk, but probably less than 50%. The vegan issues does not come up much online, 4 pages out of 100 articles address vegan issues http://www.pfaf.org/leaflets/vegan_organics.php the other pages make no mention. The links pages do have a special section for vegan issues but also link to useful pages which are not vegan. Veganism rarely comes up in the mailing list.

Veganism is more important on the land-based aspects. Both pieces of land have been farmed vegan-organically and The Field will always be run in a vegan manner (it is in the lease and would be a condition in any other legal agreement).

What are the impacts on the charity’s activities?

Research wise: the charity can report on the effect vegan management on our sites, we could commission research into techniques of vegan land management, we could commission comparative research into different land management techniques.

As far as published material it should all be based on findings. Alas there is scant research into vegan land management, we have observed many benefits of vegan land management to the ecology of the sites, but nothing in terms of effective land use or feeding the world.

Following from these it would seem hard for the charity to advocate vegan land use as a solution to all the worlds problems, to do so would seem to me to become more ideology than strictly charitable.

Rich (10 years vegan, not at all strict these days)