If you met me this time last year, at some point during our conversation I’d beam with an irritating sense of pride as I told you that I’d been a vegetarian for four years. “Oh, I could never be vegetarian!” you might respond, to which I’d whip out my go-to response: a smile and a cheery, “Each to their own!”. Internally, however, I’d scoff at your selfish lifestyle choice and clear disregard for the environmental implications of eating meat.
But unbeknownst to me, over the course of 2024 I would slowly become the person I once turned my nose up at. What started with a few drunken chicken tenders after a night out turned into a visit to In-N-Out burger in California. A Madrid stay consisted of nightly charcuterie boards, which has now thrown me onto a slippery slope of ordering a meat dish whenever I’m out for dinner. January 2024 Jordan would be shocked, disgusted, aghast.
The stats would seem to imply I’m an anomaly in my U-turn. Recent research by Finder tells us that vegetarianism and veganism have never been more popular in the UK. 11 per cent (an estimated 6.1 million of us) plan on being veggie in 2025, while 2.3 million say they’ll follow a vegan diet. Unsurprisingly, Gen Z leads the pack: 50 per cent plan to be meat-free this year, followed by just over a third of millennials.
However, while more people are becoming veggie or vegan right now, it feels like there’s also a growing number of people — especially in their 20s and 30s — abandoning meat-free lifestyles. Once a stronghold of being “in”, is vegetarianism joining the likes of BeReal (remember that?) and the short-lived phrase “very demure” in firmly being “out”? How could this be, when we’re more aware of the health and environmental impacts of eating meat than ever before?
When you hear that the top one per cent burned through their entire 2025 carbon limit in 10 days, what is me eating a bit of chicken really going to do?
After five years of vegetarianism, 26-year-old Charlie Hardcastle hopped back aboard the meat train in November. His reasoning? A lack of decent choice in restaurants, an attempt to up his protein intake and thirdly, what he calls his “exasperation with the climate situation”.
“One of the reasons I went vegetarian was for environmental reasons,” he says. “But when you hear that the top one per cent burned through their entire 2025 carbon limit in 10 days, what is me eating a bit of chicken here or there really going to do?”
Daniel Brown stopped being vegetarian after eight years in 2024, and shares the same frustrations as Charlie. “I feel like there is no way back now with the environmental situation,” the 32-year-old tells me. “The world feels like it's in the pits. I feel defeated.”
Take a look at the headlines of the year so far and it’s no surprise why we’re feeling so deflated. Los Angeles is currently experiencing the most destructive wildfires in its history. On the first day of his presidency, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate deal. Last week, it was announced that 2024 — the hottest year ever recorded on earth — was the first to surpass the prominent global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees.
While these headlines may inspire an influx of us to give up meat, for many who have forsaken animal products in their diets for years, they make their efforts feel futile. It’s much like how we gave up plastic straws to save the turtles, but the likes of Elon Musk, Taylor Swift and the Kardashians seem set on boiling them alive anyway with the carbon emissions released during their frivolous private jet journeys.
Of course, returning to eating animals isn’t going to do much good, either. However, the environmental devastation caused by decades of meat production and the deforestation that enables it is no longer inescapable — it’s happening right now. Many of us believe that we are simply too late to make a dent in our fate, let alone reverse it. It’s easy to understand, then, why the saying, “I’m here for a good time, not a long time” might flitter through our minds when we choose a fried chicken sandwich over a limp-looking falafel wrap on our lunch breaks.
Daniel and many others I speak to cite the high price of meat alternatives as a factor that influenced their lifestyle change, too. Last year Sky News found that plant-based alternatives to sausages, burgers and milk were on average a third more expensive than their animal-based equivalents in UK supermarkets. Making our food bills cheaper (especially during a cost-of-living crisis) seems an understandable reason to dip back into animal products, but hey, at least there’s more choice of plant-based products for all of these new veggies and vegans to choose from, right?
Wrong: just take a trip to your local supermarket. What were once entire aisles dedicated to plant-based options have now been reduced to a couple of shelves (if you’re lucky). A report by consumer intelligence firm NIQ found that in the year to June, the sales of chilled and frozen meat alternatives dropped by 21 per cent compared to the same period two years earlier.
Falling sales have seen Heck reduce its plant-based sausage range, Innocent and Oatly pull several of their products and Nestle’s Garden Gourmet range disappear into thin air in the last few years. And despite being one of the most prominent plant-based brands, I can’t remember the last time I saw a Beyond Meat product without a yellow sticker plastered on it. While Veganuary — which feels noticeably subdued this year — arrives, new and exciting seasonal plant-based options tend to arrive with it. But as soon as February strikes they disappear, leaving plant-based shoppers with the few choices they began with.
On top of that, all of London’s Veggie Prets — which exclusively served vegan and vegetarian food for eight years — have been reverted back to traditional Pret a Mangers, and other chains like Greggs have seemingly ended their experimentation with vegan products. When eating out, as Charlie mentioned, choice feels limited. After a while, it becomes painstaking to pay for yet another Moving Mountains burger (which you can easily buy and cook at home) or mushroom risotto in a restaurant.
Of course, age-old vegetarians and vegans who have been devoted to the diet since before pea protein tuna or coconut oil cheese will argue that plenty of natural options exist: legumes, tofu, pulses, beans, vegetables. Plenty of chefs and content creators have made it their mission to prove you can make quick, healthy meals that don’t revolve around meat, but in a time where we’re constantly exhausted — whether from the pressures of everyday life or the headlines that assault us with a sense of impending doom — even pressing and marinating a block of tofu can feel like too big a task sometimes. “I don’t massively enjoy cooking, and I don’t have the time, or the energy, to make something from scratch after a long day at work,” Daniel says.
Lucy D’Urso was vegan for four years before hanging it up in 2022. “I was thinking way too much about food, it becomes so boring and it takes over your life in a way,” the 27-year-old says. She believes that her vegan lifestyle eventually became a big part of her identity: “My whole Instagram feed was vegan recipes. It’s quite a controlled and conscious way of living, and that’s not always a good thing.”
In my case, I now allow myself to eat meat when I go out, but at home, I stick to vegetarian meals. My original reason for going veggie stemmed from wanting to live more sustainably and to be more health conscious, and there’s plenty of hard evidence to back this reasoning. Now, I’ve loosened my grip a little — my view is that I offset the carbon footprint of my occasional meat consumption in other ways. I’ll always take a bus or walk over driving. I buy most, if not all, of my clothes secondhand. I’ve vowed to never use AI — which uses a large amount of raw materials and emits harmful electronic waste — in any capacity.
And I’m not the only one — some of my friends eat meat once a week, whereas others will live sustainably in other areas of their lives. Rarely has anyone I know that’s gone back to meat eats it as often as they did before turning vegetarian.
Keri Platt, a nutritionist and wellness coach, sees the future of vegetarianism as being far more flexible than how it’s been approached before. “While the rise of flexitarianism may herald a decline in strict vegetarianism or veganism, many young people are just finding a middle ground that works for their health, lives and values,” she says.
With flexitarianism many young people are just finding a middle ground that works for their health, lives and values
Young people, Keri notes, are more likely to experiment with food trends, try global cuisines and adapt their diets based on whatever situation they find themselves in. A rigid avoidance of all things animal-based, then, doesn’t always suit. “For some committed vegetarians, eating meat occasionally no longer feels like ‘failure’, it’s just another choice.”
Vegan dietician Jennie Norton understands why people may lose motivation concerning their planet-based diets where the environment is concerned. “It doesn’t mean they’re giving up entirely on plant-based eating, though — it seems more about balancing the challenges with what feels realistic for their lifestyle,” she says. “What I always tell people is that plant-forward eating doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach. It’s about balance, not absolute rigidity.”
Like many, being a vegetarian (and nearly for a year, a vegan) became a large part of my personality when the pandemic kicked off. I hugely admire anyone who is totally committed to being vegetarian or vegan, but the particular mindset I clung to for years aligned with stereotypes of non meat eaters being self-righteous and pushy. Now, it seems more and more of us are approaching plant-based lifestyles on a personal basis that works for us — and we’re not being too hard on ourselves about it, either.
“For a lot of young people, that shift in perspective makes all the difference,” Jennie continues. “It makes plant-forward eating maintainable and something they can stick with for the long run.”
