In our podcast about the vegan pledge we talked about reasons that people did or didn’t decide to remain vegan after the vegan pledge including the tricky issue of biased respondent samples. The followup questionnaire was given after a month of the vegan pledge and people who fell off the vegan wagon were unlikely to make it to that meeting. In this blog I’m going to talk about how reasons that people cite for going vegan might influence whether they are choose to continue after the pledge and the paradoxical effect of unsupportive friends and relatives.… more

In our last podcast I ran some analyses on the vegan pledge data that Chrissy from London Vegan Campaigns was so kind to give to us. To summarize, LVC has been running a pledge every year since 2008. Each year pledgers come to the first meeting and are introduced to vegan food and nutrition including health checkups and cookery lessons. You can see more about what the campaigns do for pledgers at the London Vegan Campaigns website. Pledgers are all assigned mentors who will help them during their month long pledge. Data is collected on pledgers during the first meeting, during the end of the month meeting and, for past pledges, one year after.  I divided a lot of these analyses between 2009/10 and 2011 because the questionnaires changed quite a bit. The seduction of dairy Ever talked to someone about a vegan diet and they say “I could never give up cheese!”? Well, we found some longing for dairy in our data.… more

We’re starting at the beginning – when people choose The Vegan Option. Every year Vegan Campaigns in London supports over sixty people through potentially their first month as vegans. Many vegan groups – from Baltimore, USA to Victoria, Australia issue similar challenges. I talked to pledgers who took that challenge, asking them what the challenges had been. Ananthi is a mother of two adorable daughters. Bryan and Cliff are a middle-aged gay couple. They took the challenge, and you’ll find out how they found a month of veganism in our first programme. But there isn’t a boundary between (proto-) audience and contributors. Here’s a question for vegans (and ex-vegans). How was your first month as a vegan? What was most difficult when you went vegan? We’ll likely mention some of your answers in the programme.