The Plant-based universities campaign
- Institutional Change
- Plant-based hospitals
- The plant based councils campaign
- Plant-based Schools
- PBU leaders meeting notes
What is the value of PB unis?
Pro
- More people will eat vegan meals, because it's there and they CBA to go elsewhere
- people eat vegan coincidentally, see vegan food is decent and it opens the idea of veganism in a way they
- Public procurement contracts means that the PB sector for many towns and cities gets a significant stable income stream
- see more on importance of public procurement here
- It expands the sense of the possible: activists and the gen public alike see that a whole institution can be vegan. Knowing something is possible is a critical step in generating further momentum.
- Can be a vehicle to get more incremental
- As universities are competitive, we can harness that competitiveness
Against
- I feel like for decades now students have been going veggie/vegan at uni only to immediately drop it when they leave. So we might not expect it to create tons of future vegans.
- I am not convinced that broader society looks to universities as examples of what to do anymore (see Brexit). We shouldn't expect the change to ripple outwards (though we can use unis as examples to push for other institutions to change).
- Students can and will eat elsewhere, so direct animals saved may be minimal.
- If it goes through some students may be resentful.
- SU catering is actually a tiny proportion
Do students actuually want this?
There was also a YouGov poll which found that 55% of students want more plant-based options at their university, and it also showed that 47% of students were either flexitarian, pescetarian, vegetarian or vegan and that 49% would like to eat less meat and/or dairy (I can find these articles (here and here) which mention these results, yet I can't seem to find the raw published data or the survey results themselves