Digital — what’s it done for vegetarian teens?
How has digital influenced teenagers’ eating habits and what resources are out there?
My daughter, inspired by a heroine in a book and a lifelong distaste for meat, is a vegetarian. She is also soon to enter the challenging world of the teenager. Qualities that might lead her to discover Morrissey (an exciting thought!), but she has plain culinary tastes, so I’m constantly on the lookout for simple and tasty vegetarian recipes and ways to inspire her, hoping she might seek out the pleasures of chickpea stew over a diet of baked potatoes and Gregg’s doughnuts.
Naive maybe, but I set myself a mission to discover healthy digital resources for vegetarian teenagers that were both instructional and engaging. It seems I bit off more than I could chew…
Teen food blogs mirror wider trends
I’m a big fan of the new wave of vegetarian cooking led by bloggers such as Anna Jones of @we_are_food, and Ella Woodward, of Deliciously Ella. The recipes use sophisticated flavour combinations and require preparation, so they’re not for teenagers. Jones and Woodward are now columnists for The Guardian and The Telegraph respectively, which tells you something about their market.
So I researched blogs written by and for teenagers. There’s a clear segmentation of the market, driven by digital. As services proliferate, content creators have to come up with ever more niche products in order to get noticed, and there’s nothing more specialised that the differentiation between age groups as children move from primary through to school leaver. There are fun blogs from kids, parents cooking for teens, young bakers, student recipes and young people that have turned their life around with the help of a paleo/non-gluten/non-diary diet and evangelised about it.
The Foodie Teen is one of these, an aspirational lifestyle blog from Alessandra Peters, a teenager diagnosed with Coeliac disease, who taught herself to cook real food and ‘geeked out about nutrition’. These trends mirror wider developments in food and fitness blogging where writers such as Ella Woodward and Angela Liddon, author of the book and hugely successful blog Oh She Glows, have turned their transformation story into a career through digital content creation.
Vegan teens tell their stories on social media
Then there are the vegan teens, a new and growing demographic. There has been a 350% increase in vegans in the last ten years, driven by young people, with almost half of all vegans aged 15–34 (42%) compared with 14% who are over 65. In a Guardian poll about being vegan, more than one-sixth of respondents were teenagers. Social media have contributed to this rise in teens turning vegan, particularly Twitter and the rise of celebrity vegans on Instagram.
This is the visual generation, accustomed to consuming and telling their stories as images, self-portraits and mimed songs on Instagram, Snapchat and musical.ly. The traditional square format of Instagram, the most popular platform with teens , lends itself beautifully to artistically arranged plates of food, or a casually placed smoothie or coffee cup… details of a person’s life as told through their table. And so the argument goes that teenagers see celebrities such as Beyonce and Gwyneth Paltrow flaunting their spirulina and wheatgrass on Instagram and they want that life. Twitter, meanwhile, with its history of grassroots activism and social action, was built to enable the fast spread of news, so it’s the perfect platform for the vegan movement to gather new teenage followers and spread its message.
But it’s YouTube that provides the vegan teen generation with a powerful storytelling medium for their stories and message. Often the spark will be a visceral and disturbing film about animal slaughter, such as Mercy for Animals’ Farm to Fridge. Shock tactics aren’t for everyone so for every documentary about animal cruelty there’s a video of happy cows released to pasture. A strong angle or cute animals are big drivers on YouTube and everyone can share in the collective horror or delight. Young film makers, such as Vegan Activist, with over 50,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, have mastered a campaigning documentary style. Others take a more playful approach — claymation video artist Kyle Kelleher has over 200,000 YouTube channel views for his videos about factory farming and the animal food industry.
Teens seek new spaces to experiment and inquire
This might seem worrying or scary to some parents and carers. Vegetarian or vegan beliefs, combined with social media and the impenetrable mindset of the teenager, create the perfect storm. I have friends who are dumbfounded by the militancy of their vegan teenage son’s views, but it’s the archetypal role of teenagers to challenge convention. We live in a planet whose resources grow ever scarcer, so it’s positive to see them fight for the world that they will be custodians of long after we go.
Much of the appeal for teenagers lies with the network or community — whether they’re a health fanatic, aspiring journalist or social activist, teenagers seek out like minds and new spaces to experiment and inquire. Social media is the modern equivalent of hanging out, but now it’s online rather than on a park bench or bus shelter. These communities lie outside of the parent or guardian’s domain; if they’re distrusted or even scary, that ensures they’ll stay that way.
New platforms offer support and advice
Despite the picture being more segmented than I’d anticipated, if you’re a parent or carer you don’t have to go far to find others just like you, discussing and sharing their recipes on grown-up networks. BBC Good Food has a section on vegetarian cooking with simple recipes. And there are places you can point your vegetarian teens to for information and support. The Teen Vegan Network, a social media network for vegans and vegetarians, offers sensible advice on how to achieve a balanced diet, news on environmental issues and support with emotional conflict, such as how to deal with family when they don’t understand your life choices. One Green Planet, a platform for the ‘growing compassionate and eco-conscious generation’, offers inspiring videos and a large vegan/plant-based food and recipe site.
