Anyone who has recently travelled on the Tube or a bus in London will have seen a deluge of anti-farming adverts, particularly targeting pig and chicken production. Designed to shock, the images carry the strapline “Don’t buy it”. Project Slingshot, the US-based vegan pressure group behind the campaign, is estimated to have spent at least £1.5 million on it so far.
The money behind Project Slingshot is American too. According to The Londoner newspaper, one funder is a group called Vegan Grants, which is bankrolled by hedge fund manager turned vegan campaigner Jay Karandikar. Another is Coefficient Giving (formerly known as Open Philanthropy), a philanthropic fund initially backed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, which now handles charitable investments for other millionaires and billionaires from the world of tech.
Both Vegan Grants and Coefficient Giving are proponents of a movement called Effective Altruism which started with the idea that donations should go to causes where your money has the biggest impact. Effective Altruism has, however, lurched towards veganism and extreme environmentalism. Apparently, the movement is increasingly obsessed with shrimps because they represent the most individual animals that are affected by farming practices. There is certainly something of the autistic hedge-funder about the obsession with numbers.
Project Slingshot claims that opposition to factory farming has risen as a result of its expensive campaign, but the problem for it and other vegan campaigners is that meat eating refuses to die. Chicken meat consumption, for instance, grows relentlessly year after year. Meanwhile, the market for meat substitutes has been weak and companies like Beyond Meat, which attracted support from tech types and celebrities, have proved disastrous investments.
Veganuary, which was created by some of the same team who now run Project Slingshot, has also peaked. The campaign to convert people to veganism was always built on sand and the apogee of this came in January 2024, when research was published that claimed the UK’s vegan population had risen by 1.1 million in a single year and that 2.5 million people - 4.7% of the population - ate a plant-based diet. These figures seemed extraordinary at first glance and even more so when put beside the collapse in sales of vegan food, because in the same year the volume of meat-free products sold actually fell by 12.9%.
Project Slingshot says of its current campaign: “We haven’t proven the model yet, but we think the first five months have shown enough to justify the next stage of the experiment.” Given the usual hyperbole of campaigners, that is not exactly a massive endorsement and on its own figures it has generated just 13,000 emails to MPs. That compares with over 90,000 generated during the trail hunting consultation, and I can assure you we did not spend £1.5 million.
Of course, campaigns against farming in the UK funded by US billionaires are unwelcome, but thus far at least it looks as though the British public is fairly robust in its response. We like our roast chicken and our bacon sandwiches and are not going to give them up at the whim of tech bros and celebrities.