The Vegan Campus Campaign

Motivation

Animal products on campus are abundant and pervasive, and while many Queen’s eateries laudably offer vegetarian and vegan options, making animal-friendly food choices here is not exactly easy.  It is a good start for Queen’s food services to make vegan and vegetarian options clear with their labeling system, but animals still play a starring role on Queen’s students’ plates. Most students are likely unaware of where these animal products come from, or, more generally, of the inhumane and deeply exploitative realities faced by animals who are bred, raised, and killed in the Canadian agricultural system.

Objectives

The Vegan Campus Campaign (VCC) aims to address and correct this (unwilling) ignorance of the Queen’s student body, and to contribute to advancements in food services that will yield a much wider, high quality, and affordable range of veg options.  We also hope to educate students on how easy, tasty, healthy, and affordable vegan dishes can be. Meeting face to face with members of the student body over vegan baked goods and informative materials will help us do just that! But our biggest task is to find out what students really think, feel, and know about veg diets, those who follow them (or don’t), and the lives of farm animals.

In a nutshell, VCC has three central aims:

  • To raise the Queen’s student body’s awareness about the realities of animal agriculture in Canada
  • To identify, analyze, and respond to student attitudes and practices regarding veganism
  • To empower anyone concerned about animals to make animal-friendly food choices

How to get informed and involved

We hope that you will give us a few moments of your time when you see us on campus, and when our online survey is ready.  Completing a survey will take a little time but could make a big difference – and will also make you eligible to win some great prizes! Look out for that soon, as well as for more information on the lives of farm animals in Canada right here on the QAD website.

For starters, please check out these accessible and brief but highly informative fact sheets about the lives and deaths of some of the animals that we raise to eat here in Canada (these fact sheets are made available through the Canadian Coalition for Farm Animals website):