Midterm

When Lauren Ulm of Boston started posting pictures, descriptions, and recipes of the food she made on a blog a little over a year ago, she was hoping to show her friends and family that vegans could eat delicious and appealing food. Today, Ulm’s blog, VeganYumYum, gets more than 160,000 hits per month. Ulm, 24, is writing a vegan cookbook that she hopes to have published soon. And, in February, Ulm was a guest on the “Martha Stewart Show,” where she made knitting-themed cupcakes.

The animal-rights/vegetarian movement has found a new platform and eager audience with the growth of the Internet. Vegan food blogs like Ulm’s have been experienced a surge, both in growth of amounts of blogs and popularity. Activists interested in helping the animal rights cause are able to better organize and find information online.

Alyssa Stanfield, a 20-year-old Northeastern University student, became a vegetarian because of the internet.

“I was on someone's MySpace page and there was a link to a video, ‘Meet Your Meat,’” Stanfield said. “I watched it for about two minutes and never ate meat again.”

Clearly the Internet had a direct impact on Stanfield’s eating habits. She is currently in the process of starting a student vegetarian group at Northeastern, and had she not stumbled across that video, she would still be eating meat. The medium that the Internet allows for communication has been vital for the growth of the animal rights movement. Vegan bloggers have large followings, and have been able to use their blogs as stepping stones towards book contracts and television appearances. Animal rights organizations have been able to better organize and better spread their material. Without the internet and its easy methods of exposure and communication, vegetarianism and veganism would be much less widely accepted and practiced.

Lance M.*, 29, is an animal rights activist in Boston. He feels that the internet has helped enormously in organization efforts. Before the wide popularity of the internet, Lance M. was interested in veganism but didn’t feel it was accessible to him. Today, he’s taken an active leadership and organizational role in the animal rights movement, and eats no meat, eggs, or dairy; wears no leather or other animal products.

“Before the onset of the internet, I think that people viewed veganism really as for folks who lived in New York City or who lived in San Francisco or who lived in these sort of metropolises of liberal thinking,” Lance M. said. “I know growing up in a small town in Connecticut, I didn’t know any other vegans, I didn’t know any other vegetarians. I did feel really isolated, and I felt like I’d never be able to make that transition because I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t have that information. And I’d subscribed to animal rights publications , I’d read books and such like that but I certainly didn’t have access to the thousands of recipes or information about the conditions of animals living on factory farms or killed in slaughterhouses and such. So, the onset of the Internet really did raise my awareness, and also raised my awareness of the accessibility of veganism and how easy it is.”

Activist groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have exploited all of the advantages they can off of the internet. The front page of PETA’s website is busy and colorful. A headline names Aretha Franklin PETA’s worst dressed of the year alongside a picture of her in a fur coat (“How 'bout some R-E-S-P-E-C-T for animals, Aretha?”). There are news headlines, a PETA blog (both of which readers can subscribe to via RSS feed), and “lifestyle” and cooking blogs. There are links to action alerts, letting people know what’s going on with PETA’s current campaigns and what they can do. There are Frequently Asked Questions, and current job openings. There’s even a PETA TV feed, featuring the “Meet Your Meat” video that was so influential to Stanfield and other similar videos. For many animal rights activists, the PETA website is a place to visit every day to stay updated.



“I get most of my information from either PETA or the humane society,” vegetarian singer Bree Sharp, 32, said. Sharp uses the internet widely in promoting her music, with her Facebook and Myspace pages, as well as a personal website, and she has links to the PETA website from both her personal website and her myspace page.

Though Sharp finds PETA enormously useful, and Stanfield is a case in point for why PETA uses the shock tactics it does, some people feel like PETA is too extreme to really help promote the cause. Videos like “Meat Your Meat” are graphic and disturbing to the vast majority of people, and some don’t believe that this is the right way to introduce people to the cause.

Mona H.*, a 20-year-old college student in Boston and a vegetarian, strongly disagrees with PETA’s ideas of showing graphic images and videos.

“I have found in discussing vegetarianism, veganism, and animal rights with people, that the sort of forceful shock tactics that PETA tends to use are quite off-putting, whereas a more gentle approach makes people more receptive to what I’m saying,” she said.

Ulm supports PETA’s views, but agrees to a point that their extremity can be overwhelming.

“I think that there are a lot of different things that people need to see,” Ulm said. “So videos like “Meet Your Meat” and some of the PETA things that are out there are really important but not everyone needs to see that all day long every second of the day, and some people react so badly to that - I know I do - that they don’t want to see it at all.”

Ulm uses her blog to try to get an audience and support by promoting vegan food, staying more positive than just slamming the meat producers.

“I meet a lot of people that assume that because I’m vegan I’m judging them, I hate them, and I’m going to tell them that they’re terrible people, so I’m just trying to sort of trying to make the site welcoming for everyone,” Ulm said. “There’s a lot of information on the web for all aspects of veganism, so I’m just trying to focus on ‘hey we eat real food, it’s god food, I’m not deprived, it’s really tasty, you can make it too, it’s not too hard, so I sort of use that as the way I reach out to people and it seems to be fairly successful. I get a lot of people who say that the things that help them are just seeing that eating vegan isn’t mysterious at all. Even people who decide not to go vegan feel more comfortable eating vegan food and have sort of a better outlook about it and I feel really good about that.”

Susan Voisin has been keeping her blog, FatFreeVegan, for two years and maintaining the website itself for three and a half. She is fascinated with blogging itself, and spoke at a women’s blogging conference, “Blogher” in summer 2007.

“I really think that blogs have emerged as the next ‘big thing,’” Voisin said. “You can see it in how newspapers now have their own blogs written by their columnists as well as by readers.”

Voisin said she has more than 100 blogs on her RSS reader, with a handful that she checks very frequently.

The internet has also opened up another medium to animal rights activists: television. Food Network, home of Rachael Ray, Emeril LaGasse, Ina Garten, Alton Brown, and many other “celebrity chefs” does not have a vegetarian cooking show. Different solutions have been offered for this.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz, a vegan living in Brooklyn, New York, offered her own solution. In 2006 she started a public access cooking show called the Post Punk Kitchen. In an interview with Gothamist magazine, she described the show, which she cohosted with Terry Hope Romero, as a response to the lack of vegan cooking shows on Food Network. Today, episodes of the show are available on Google Video. Moskowitz's easy-to-make vegan cupcakes and other delicious dishes have earned her the distinction of “America’s Most Popular Vegan Chef” in her Barnes and Noble biography. She and Romero have written three bestselling cookbooks, including Vegan With A Vengeance, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and Veganomican. She also maintains a website, which includes forums and her own blog.


While Moskowitz’s method of just doing everything herself to create a show gained her a following, vegan blogging and internet presence is slowly pushing animal activists onto mainstream national television. Ulm’s blog actually brought about her recent appearance on the Martha Stewart Show. The show was looking for people to feature in its knitting episode and a production assistant found some knitting-themed cupcakes on her blog.

Ulm said she might have preferred to have a chance to talk about veganism -- she spent most of the segment rolling marzipan with Stewart -- but she still enjoyed the exposure.



“It was a lot of fun, and I hope that people heard me say vegan food blog and looked into veganism if they hadn’t thought about it before,” Ulm said. “But even if it doesn’t convert tons of vegans, which I’m hoping it will, it was a fun experience and the more exposure vegan food gets on mainstream TV, the more people will realize that it’s not something that’s impossible to do. Even if they don’t decide to go vegan themselves, they can at least start to feel comfortable with the idea to begin with.”

Another mainstream media that bloggers are slowly gaining a foothold in is book publishing. Moskowitz’s bestselling cookbooks Vegan With A Vengeance, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and Veganomican, were produced in part with enormous help from people all over the world testing the recipes and emailing Moskowitz with feedback.

“I think the line between amateur bloggers and published authors is starting to blur, with bloggers getting book contracts and authors writing blogs,” Voisin said. “Bloggers are turning up in lots of mainstream media -- magazines, T. V., newspapers -- proving that traditional media is taking notice of blogging as a powerful force.”

The blog that Ulm started for her family now has a life of its own. In the 2007 Blogger’s Choice Awards, VeganYumYum was named Best Food Blog. Voisin’s FatFreeVegan Blog, which currently has over 3,000 subscribers, took second place. What is the pull here? Why do these stand out so much? Are they answering a specific need in the vegan community?

“I view my food choices as both personal and political,” Mona H. said. “I feel like these blogs make animal rights personal by exploring how normal people go about living their activism day to day.”

“There are so many vegan blogs out there now, and it’s awesome,” Ulm said. “I love being able to read what other people are eating, it’s really fun. We all get inspired by each other. I do it because I enjoy it, and I think everyone else does it because they enjoy it too.”


*Names have been changed or last names omitted.