Forget Veganuary, Buy an Indulgence: How to Eat Meat, Pay Cash, and Call It Ethics

FarmKind’s new campaign, charmingly titled “Forget Veganuary,” arrives with the air of a bold realist crashing an idealist party. The message is disarmingly soothing: relax, nobody is asking you to stop eating meat. Just keep doing what you’re doing, send some money to animal welfare charities, and voilà—moral crisis resolved. Veganism, we are told, is too demanding, too alienating, too pure. What we really need is a pragmatic compromise, one that allows us to care deeply about animals while continuing to consume them. A win-win!

It is true that many people feel overwhelmed by the demand to become vegan. It is also true that many of these people genuinely care about animal suffering. FarmKind positions itself as the understanding adult in the room, patting us gently on the back and saying: “I get it. This is too hard for you. Instead of changing your habits, you can outsource your conscience. Donate, feel better, move on.” In this sense, the campaign does not deny the moral conflict; it monetizes it. The problem begins with the fact that “Forget Veganuary” defines itself against veganism. It does not simply propose an additional strategy for reducing suffering; it actively leverages veganism as a foil, portraying it as impractical moral absolutism.

Veganism becomes the unreasonable parent whose rules everyone secretly resents, while FarmKind plays the cool uncle who slips you cash and says rules are overrated anyway. This rhetorical move is not accidental: the campaign needs veganism to appear rigid so that moral compromise can be marketed as realism.

We are told that FarmKind wants to reach the 99% of people who are not ready to go vegan. Fair enough. But instead of encouraging gradual change, or even modest reduction, it reassures people that no change at all is required. In fact, it goes further. The campaign mobilizes so-called “competitive eaters”—what is this?!? I didn’t even know that such a “job/sport” existed… it sounds like satire but is, astonishingly, real—who are tasked with eating as much meat as possible in a single day while donating money. At this point, the line between ethical innovation and moral farce becomes extremely thin.

The slogan makes the logic explicit: “Like carbon offsetting, but for your diet.” Help as many animals as (nay, more animals than) vegans, without any changes to your diet. In fact, what FarmKind is offering is not a new ethical framework, but a dietary version of medieval Christian indulgences. In the late Middle Ages, indulgences allowed believers to reduce punishment for sin through monetary contributions to charitable causes. Over time, this slid into a system where forgiveness appeared purchasable, detached from repentance or genuine transformation. You sinned, you paid, you were absolved. “Meat offsetting” works the same way. You eat, you donate, you are cleared. Ethics becomes a transaction, guilt a line item. Like indulgences, this system relies on distance and abstraction. The beneficiaries are far away, the effects are calculated, the moral discomfort neatly neutralized.

What disappears is any meaningful engagement with one’s own complicity. The animal remains a number, suffering becomes a metric, and ethics is reduced to a spreadsheet.

This is not merely a matter of ignorance. It is a matter of bad faith. The campaign obscures the truth that industrial animal suffering exists because of demand, not despite it. By framing ethics as a problem that can be solved without sacrifice, it reinforces a vision of the moral subject as an isolated consumer who relates to the world primarily through monetary exchange. Politics and ethics collapse into calculability. Meaning, pain, and responsibility are flattened into equivalent units of cost and benefit. The real issue, then, is not saying “there are ways to help even if going vegan feels impossible.” That is compassionate and reasonable. The issue is building an entire campaign on the claim that it is perfectly fine to continue eating animal products as long as you pay. We remain, as always, comfortably positioned on the side of human convenience, carefully managing the costs borne by animals.

So yes, forget Veganuary. Forget discomfort, forget contradiction, forget the messy business of ethics and self-scrutiny. Just eat your steak, calculate your offset, and rest easy. After all, nothing says moral progress quite like turning ethics into a receipt.

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Take some time to learn about the original Veganuary campaign. While it too has received some critique, it remains focused on animals and finding innovative and plausible ways of achieving dietary change including.

FarmKind's co-founder Thom Norman appeared was on The Animal Turn in March 2025 to tell us what is meant by Effective Altruism and the work of his organization. When asked if FarmKind was against veganism he explicitly said no, the recent campaign - as Carlo highlights in this post - raises many dubious and ethical concerns. Give it a listen and let us know your thoughts.

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Carlo Salzani is a research fellow at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, Austria, where he leads the project “Animal Suffering and the Politics of Shame,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He is also a member and co-founder of the Vienna Animal Studies Group. His latest book, Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination, was published in open access by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025.