5 minute read
Highlights
The Future Normal campaign video has exceeded over one million total views
Future Normal
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In November we ran the first ever Vegan Society TV advert. The advert featured the Future Normal campaign film, which encourages viewers to look back on how they viewed animals when they were children, and to remember those feelings of compassion, regardless of species. The advert ran on Sky on Demand and All 4 alongside nature, documentary and entertainment shows.
Thank you to everyone who has donated to Future Normal and helped us to reach even more people. We are relaunching Future Normal very soon, so keep an eye out on our social media channels for plenty of new resources to share and visit futurenormal.org.uk to keep up with the latest developments.
Live Vegan for Less
In 2020 we launched Live Vegan for Less, our campaign to support those following a vegan lifestyle who find themselves living on a budget or facing food poverty. We put together a hub for resources on our website at vegansociety.com/liveveganforless, where you can find budget recipes, tips, infographics and more.
At the end of 2020 we partnered with Sustainable Kitchen Consultants, a team of chefs who specialise in healthy plantbased recipe development, on a series of delicious budgetfriendly recipe videos. These recipes made use of healthy and affordable staples such as oats, lentils and chickpeas, also focusing on using seasonal produce and showing how to avoid food waste.
VegAPPG
The Vegan Society is a co-sponsor of the vegAPPG, the AllParty Parliamentary Group for vegan and vegetarian issues. In December we held an online event entitled ‘Is food security an issue for vegetarians and vegans?’
The World Food Summit of 1996 defined food security as existing “when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life”. During the pandemic, issues around access to food have become more widespread, including governmentprovided food parcels that did not cater for specific dietary needs.
The event was chaired by Christina Rees MP. Speakers included Nathaniel Harper from Worthing Vegan Food Bank, Jen Elford from The Vegetarian Society and Yasmine ElGabry from V for Life.
You can find the video stream at shorturl.at/lS079. Keep up to date with the vegAPPG at vegappg.org.uk.
We’re delighted that so many people took advantage of our Youth Membership offer
Youth membership
We have been working to improve accessibility to our membership for those who would like to support our work. As part of this, in the autumn we launched our new Youth Membership, open to vegans and vegan-curious people aged 25 and under. For a limited time, new members within this age range could sign up for just £5 for their first year.
We are pleased to say that many of you took us up on this offer and purchased memberships for yourselves or as gifts to friends or family members.
All new Youth Members were given the option to be entered into a prize draw for the chance to win a chocolate hamper from Moo Free Chocolates. Thank you to Moo Free Chocolates for supplying an amazing prize!
Website updates
Several of our webpages have been revamped recently, making the experience of visiting the website much more user-friendly.
The Vegan Trademark webpages have been given a makeover and it is now much easier for companies to take the first steps to register their products. In 2021 we will focus on improving the trademark search function, simplifying the process of searching for products registered with our trademark.
The new Vegan Trademark area of he website
Visit vegansociety.com/campaigns to see our new and improved online campaigns hub, where you can stay up to date on all our latest initiatives and find out how you can get involved.
Catering for Everyone
To further our Catering for Everyone campaign, we are working to secure manifesto commitments from various political parties taking part in devolved elections in May. We are also continuing to engage with individual councils to encourage them to include our campaign ask as part of their climate mitigation plans. The team is also working to develop a Continuing Professional Development course, to support health professionals in learning more about veganism.
Nutrition outreach
Dietitian Heather Russell delivered a webinar organised by MyNutriWeb to over 700 health and nutrition professionals about person-centred practice in relation to veganism and vegan diets. Heather also gave an online lecture on veganism and plant-based diets to Solent University students.
We delivered kitchen skills training to Birmingham City University student dietitians, who came away from the session with more knowledge about plant-based food preparation.
As we now have another staff dietitian on board at The Vegan Society, we are excited to expand the nutrition service and take on more outreach to educate health professionals and the general public about making the most of a vegan diet.
The Vegan Society fed into the discussion around the proposed EU ban on ‘meaty’ language. We highlighted the fact that banning food producers from using traditional words such as ‘sausage’ and ‘burger’ on their products would place unnecessary restrictions on the growing plant-based food market and inconvenience consumers looking to make more sustainable choices. After reviewing the evidence, the EU strongly rejected the proposed ban, deciding that consumers are not misled by vegan ‘meaty’ names.
However, conversations are ongoing about wording that compares plant-based items to dairy products such as ‘milk’ and ‘butter’. Head of Campaigns, Policy and Research Louise Davies said, “We are perplexed by this decision by MEPs who should be doing all they can to support the consumption of plant-based products to address the growing climate crisis.”
Grow Green
As part of the online political party conference season, we sponsored an event with SERA, the Labour Party’s environmental society. The event, Growing the Right Food Policy, resulted in a meeting with Daniel Zeichner, the Shadow Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries, at which we met with industry experts and put forward ideas for transitioning UK agriculture towards producing more plant proteins.
The Grow Green campaign makes the case for a shift towards UK crop growing
