Watch: How Veganism Was Diluted
Veganism was defined by Leslie Cross in 1951 as "the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals." The founders never redefined it. Everything that followed was distortion.
"The object of the Society shall be to end the exploitation of animals by man"; and "The word veganism shall mean the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals." — Leslie Cross, Vice-President of the Vegan Society
Veganism is established as a principle of justice — not a diet, not a lifestyle.
His first publication proposes a "three-fold approach" diluting veganism into health, spirituality, and animal concern equally.
He calls a Special Members Meeting, and the definition disappears from the Constitution.
Editor of The Vegan and BBC face of the Society, Sanderson recentres veganism from the animal to the practitioner — lifestyle, health, environmental stewardship. The victim disappears.
Frances Moore Lappé reframes plant-based eating as resource efficiency. Feeding the world, not freeing animals.
Peter Singer replaces exploitation with suffering as the moral threshold. Use becomes acceptable if painless. Abolitionism quietly swapped for utilitarian calculus.
A new group introduces a redefinition with three fatal insertions:
Kathleen Jannaway founds the MCL. Compassion replaces emancipation.
"Humane" labels, certification schemes, market segments. Exploitation becomes a brand category.
Corporate rebrand surgically removes ethical content. The word severed from the principle.
Tobias Leenaert makes incrementalism official. Exploitation reframed as a dial to turn down, not a wrong to end.
The animals cannot resist, testify, escape, or organise. They cannot read the redefinitions. They experience only the material consequence — while the movement above them argues terminology and congratulates itself on half-measures.
The animals were the only reason the word existed.
The founders never redefined it.
You are here to fix it.