The push against plant-based food: What happened at Stirling University?
Source: Vegan and Rights for Animals Society
On Saturday 12 November the Students’ Union at the University of Stirling voted to transition to plant-based food by 2025. Then all media and internet hell broke loose.
Aaron Caulfield is a 19-year-old Law student at the University of Stirling and the person who proposed the plant-based motion at the Students’ Union General Meeting.
“I couldn’t describe being vegan as a diet, I certainly wouldn’t attribute it that. It’s certainly more of an ethical and moral stance,” said Caulfield. “The ethics of veganism as a core belief is that humans are not necessarily above animals morally — animals are beings who can experience pain.”
He is a member of VERA, the Vegan and Rights for Animals Society, where he aims to “reduce animal suffering as practicably as possible”.
By passing the motion, the Students’ Union has committed to serving 50% plant-based food in their outlets by the start of the semester next September and going 100% plant-based by 2025.
Misinformation and misunderstanding
While some students and media personalities like Guardian columnist George Monbiot and BBC presenter Chris Packham welcomed the decision, the motion faced a huge backlash starting on campus and expanding to national proportions.
A post by Brig, the university student newspaper, sparked discussion on Facebook. People in the comments said serving plant-based food would bankrupt the Union; students would buy food somewhere else as it would be “only carrots, cabbage and turnips are on the menu”.
Caulfield denies the notion that vegan food can only be ultra-processed meat replicas or salad: “I feel like a lot of people imagine that the vegan diet is very restrictive or entirely based on these meat replacements but there are whole-food versions available.”
“The student backlash admittedly was somewhat expected, I feel like a lot of students have been misinformed by articles using sensationalist headlines, especially in Daily Mail,” said Caulfield, referring to its headline “Fury as Stirling University bans meat and dairy from campus”.
The headline makes it seem that all 13 of the University’s food outlets will be going plant-based. In fact, only three of them are run by the Union: Studio, Venue and Underground Coffee Shop. The remaining 10 will not be affected.
Going solely by the headlines, one student started a petition on Change.org to stop the University from going plant-based. After six signatures and learning that the motion does not apply to the majority of the food outlets, he closed the petition.
Caulfield and the Vegan Society plan to hold stalls around the campus to try and get other students on board: “A lot of people have seen a lot of fear-mongering around the vegan diet, and we do hope over the transition period to do a lot of campaigning to understand more about what it actually means for students around Stirling.”
Is local better than plant-based?
Speaking to the Daily Mail, the Countryside Alliance said: “Stirling’s Students’ Union would be much better off sourcing sustainable local meat and dairy produce from Scottish farmers instead. How can an avocado flown in from South America have eco-superiority over a piece of grass fed beef from a local farm?”
Hannah Ritchie, a researcher at Oxford, called the pressure to eat local “one of the most misguided pieces of advice” for Our World In Data. Even though food production does make up one quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, transportation is actually just a small part of the final carbon footprint for most foods. “What you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from,” said Ritchie.
Source: Our World In Data
According to a meta-analysis of worldwide food systems published in Science in 2018, emissions from transport are minuscule compared to farming and land use change.
Beef is far above any other food – one kilogram of beef produces 60 kilograms of greenhouse gases, and only 1% of the emissions come from transport.
Ritchie also explains that avocados are mostly transported by boats. This transport accounts for 8% of the 2.5 kilograms of emissions for one kilogram of avocados.
Future expansion
Caulfield thinks that the rest of the University following the Union would be “ideal”, but recognises that it requires lots of research and discussion.
Caulfield says the Vegan Society has “great concern for the needs of disabled students”, and agrees that while the Union going plant-based leaves plenty of options for students, expanding the new rules to the entire university might be problematic.
Getting most of the 17,000 students to agree might prove to be impossible. Even if they did, students don’t have any direct democratic say in running the University. The pressure would have to come from sabbatical officers serving in the Students’ Union, who communicate with the management.
And even the University has little influence over the Co-op supermarket on campus. And Caulfield does not see them turning plant-based any time soon.
