When Oceana Mackenzie, Australia’s top female sport climber, was growing up, she remembers her then-unconventional lifestyle being met with scepticism.
“When I was younger and I’d say, ‘I’m vegan,’ my competitors’ parents would always comment, ‘Oh, you must not be very strong,’” she recalls. “Which was always really confusing to me because I would be at the competitions – winning them. Well, obviously I do OK.”
Mackenzie is in fact doing far better than just OK. At 22 years old, she is heading to Paris for her second Olympic Games, after representing Australia in sport climbing’s debut at Tokyo in 2020.
She is the type of committed vegan who lists it in her Instagram bio. She bakes vegan, gluten-free muffins to take to training sessions. She sprinkles nutritional yeast “on everything” because, although it looks like fish food, it’s her secret weapon in keeping her B12 levels high (yeast on avocado on toast, yeast on pasta, yeast on a buddha bowl).
One of six children – all girls, all home-birthed, all home-schooled – the Melbournian was raised vegetarian before adopting a vegan diet because “I’d just copy everything my older sister did.” Today, she is committed to a plant-based lifestyle for environmental and health reasons, and she is not the only vegan in the arena.
In the lead-up to the Paris Olympics, which kick off on July 26, it was announced that 60 per cent of the food available for spectators will be vegetarian.
At La Place de la Concorde, the public square where many of the “urban” events will take place, catering will be 100 per cent vegetarian. So you can watch Olympic breakdancing while chowing down on a “vegetarian hotdog” – how progressive!
In the Olympic Village, where the athletes eat, there will also be a focus on plant-based offerings – and they are certainly in demand. In the Australian Olympic team, plant-based athletes include climber Campbell Harrison, who describes himself as a “passionate vegetarian” and is driven by environmental reasons.
“As an athlete who travels so much, my carbon footprint is on my mind,” he says. “I think it is a really good diet for climbing as well, because we have to have muscle and power but also be lean – it’s a good balance.”
But what about the rest of us, non-athletes, who aren’t scaling cliffs or leaping off 10-metre-high diving platforms? Well, a lot of us are turning to plant power too.
The Green Scene
According to market research company Roy Morgan, vegetarianism has been steadily rising in Australia for the past 10 years. Nearly 2.5 million Australians (about 12 per cent) now have diets in which the food is all, or almost all, vegetarian.
As for veganism, well, let’s look at the stats for #vegantok.
At the time of writing this article, the TikTok hashtag had over 207 million views, including recipes and videos of sexy farmers cuddling baby cows to pull at your heartstrings.
More than 270,000 people dropped a heart on a three-minute video of Lizzo eating a vegan chicken sandwich. And an Instagram collaboration between Kim Kardashian and vegan meat company Beyond Meat got everyone talking (mostly because in the ad she didn’t appear to eat a bite of the burger).
In July 2023, a vegan supermarket called Greens opened its doors in the Sydney suburb of Newtown. It is said to be the city’s first fully plant-based store, and the largest in the country. Current specials include cashew cheese and vegan pork bites.
Women are more likely to be vegetarian or vegan than men, with a research paper from the University of California highlighting a link between meat and our gender identities. Men are particularly likely to exhibit “strong emotional attachments” to eating meat, and vegetarian women are less likely to cheat and eat meat than are men, because they are more “prosocially motivated” (in other words, they think about the impact on other people and society).
The reasons people “go veggo” include the potential benefits to their health (reduced risk of heart disease, obesity and diabetes), and the benefits to the planet. Research from a team at Oxford University found that vegan diets result in 75 per cent less climate-heating emissions, water pollution and land use than diets in which more than 100g of meat a day was eaten.
Sounds good, right? You could say it’s a Vegetarian Revolution. But as with all revolutions, there are two sides to the argument.
Plants, but Make it Posh
Interestingly, despite vegetarianism being on the rise, “plant-based makers” are struggling. The company Beyond Meat (yes, the one that hired Kardashian as chief taste consultant in 2022) reported a revenue decline for the first quarter of 2024. Across the board, plant-based meat sales are falling. Partly, this is down to taste; partly, it’s down to cost.
The “gentrification” of veganism has also been criticised. Yes, you can be vegan on a budget, but it’s not very Instagrammable. “The modern vegan – forced to endure the cost-of-living crisis and food inflation – is cash-strapped and time-poor,” wrote Dr Jennifer Yule, a lecturer in marketing, in a commentary for The Guardian. “Cooking Instagram-inspired dishes, such as a tofu veggie scramble for breakfast or jackfruit tacos for dinner, is a time-consuming process. For some, vegan alternatives are simply too expensive.”
Of course, it is possible to be plant-based without a high price tag. A blog called The Stingy Vegan is popular with plant-based eaters looking for cut-price alternatives.
You can even buy merch with snappy slogans like “Spread hummus, not hate”. As the blog’s Canadian creator, Melissa Copeland, writes: “There’s this pervasive myth that eating a plant-based diet is expensive, and it drives me up the wall.”
She encourages people to ditch pricey meat-alternatives and instead think of fresh, colourful vegetables, grains, potatoes and tofu. This brings us back to Olympic climber Oceana.
When she is travelling through Asia and staying in a remote location, her go-to meal is rice noodles mixed with veggie stock, boiled in her hotel room kettle. “Social media can be really great for finding people whose food you like the look of, following them and trying their recipes,” she says. “Even switching up a few meals now and then is better than nothing.”
One of her favourite vegan influencers is Liz Miu, who has more than 465,000 followers on Instagram. All her recipes are vegan and plant-based, and she’s committed. There is, however, a group of vegan influencers who are falling off the wagon – publicly.
If you search on TikTok for “vegan Tiktoker eats meat”, the category has more than 96 million views. The videos have titles like “eating meat for the first time in seven years” and “vegans try meat for the first time”. For some people it’s for the likes; for others it’s a serious, health-related decision.
In one video from 2023, New Zealand influencer and long-time vegetarian Caitlin Wiig reveals that after transitioning back to meat, her body has “never been happier, never been functioning better”. Diagnosed with glandular fever in 2020, she was struggling with constant tiredness, but after rediscovering meat, she isn’t.
Eating-disorder charities have also warned that there can be a link between veganism and disordered eating. According to a fact sheet from Eating Disorders Victoria, “there is evidence that more people with eating disorders report being vegetarian or vegan compared with the rest of the population”. To be clear, they’re not saying veganism causes anorexia, but it can be a risk factor and a way of hiding a problem.
This is why I’ll never call myself vegetarian, despite eating a mostly plant-based diet for years. After overcoming anorexia, I know that labelling myself as anything is a danger zone, and instantly gives me an excuse to cut calories. When it comes to any lifestyle choice, being honest about your motivations is crucial.
The fast-fashion of foods
There’s an intriguing parallel between our consumption of processed meat and fast fashion. Researcher Benjamin Wurgaft, author of Meat Planet, points out, “You have these two industries that make money by doing something as cheaply as possible with very undesirable environmental externalities, but both have an important ‘signalling’ function for people.”
For our ancestors, eating meat was a sign of abundance because a grain-based diet was associated with poverty. Meat is also used to create a sense of belonging, and nowhere more than in Australia, where friends and families bond over barbecues.
So perhaps we should challenge our eating habits in the same way we’re shifting our shopping habits. We might still grab a Kmart T-shirt or a Big Mac sometimes, but more and more we’re choosing sustainable fashion and food sources – even if they are more expensive.
In her book Live More With Less, Australian sustainable-living researcher Dr Kate Luckins recommends a “plant-enthusiastic” approach to food to significantly shrink your food footprint. She says one of the reasons we waste food is “aspirational clutter”.
You know, when you fill your fridge with all the dark, leafy greens on a Sunday only to chuck out their rotting remains the following Friday, after you’ve ordered takeaway. We see you, we are you!
“It’s easy to get carried away buying for the aspirational version of yourself rather than actually matching your product requirements to plans that fit the real version of you,” explains Luckins. She recommends embracing the “shade of green” that’s right for you – whether you’re cutting back on meat or trying to dress more sustainably. It’s worth noting that even our life-long vegan, Oceana Mackenzie, will eat honey when she’s sick (but only if it’s high-quality manuka).
Could the answer be a flexitarian diet? Also called “part-time vegetarianism”, the idea is that your diet is mostly plant-based, but with the flexibility to eat some animal products. According to data from YouGov, about a fifth of Australians now identify with the f-word, and even nutritionists are singing its praises.
Sydney-based nutritionist Lee Holmes is a flexitarian herself. “The flexitarian diet is more achievable and sustainable for most people,” she says. “It can help reduce the risk of nutrient deficiencies that may arise from strict vegetarian or vegan diets, especially for women who have higher needs for certain nutrients – like iron and choline – during certain life stages.”
As the author of the new book Nature’s Way to Healing: A Long Covid Guide, she supports Mackenzie’s approach of plant-based with a dash of honey when you need it. “Incorporating honey during recovery from a cold or flu is an example of how a flexible approach can be beneficial,” says Holmes. “While a well-planned vegetarian diet can support recovery, incorporating some lean animal proteins may be beneficial for certain individuals, especially when recovering from a severe illness like Covid-19.”
For Aussie athletes – and all of us watching the Olympics at home – we’ll be eating “greenish” while cheering for gold.
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