In my doctoral dissertation, Decarbonising energy regimes: Methodological explorations and empirical insights for policy, I advance research on decarbonisation policy and politics by answering methodological questions that help improve synergies between policy studies and energy transition studies. When I set out on my PhD endeavour in the Academy of Finland funded project Defend in 2015, it was widely argued that while decarbonisation presents a systemic challenge to our societies, it can be increasingly framed as a political challenge. In this context, I became zealous about how adopting a policy studies perspective can enrich our understandings of decarbonisation processes. In the energy transition scholarship, many have successfully initiated work on conceptual bridging to take advantage of policy-based approaches developed within the policy studies discipline. Importantly, I highlight in this dissertation that the conceptual advancement is inherently intertwined with and dependent on sound methodological practices. My dissertation therefore critically explores the best practices and added value of textual methods, both discursive approaches and the topic modelling machine learning method, while having decarbonisation as the empirical context. The empirical part of this dissertation yields novel insights into the development of the European Energy Union’s decarbonisation agenda and the discourse surrounding the decline of coal-fired power generation in the UK. This lectio praecursoria presents the main findings of my dissertation and offers advice for policy and practice.

I first intended to begin this speech by stating how urgent it is to tackle climate change, underlining the difficulty of the decarbonisation task ahead of us.

I intended to explain how literature has provided ample evidence of how fossil fuels have become deeply entrenched in the works of contemporary societies. How our lives are largely operated by carbon-intensive systems, incompatible with sustainability goals.

I even wanted to highlight that the challenge of delivering decarbonised energy systems is often attributed to complexity. Decarbonisation necessitates system change, yet, changing entire systems requires simultaneous changes across multiple dimensions, be they socio-technical, economic, institutional or cultural, cognitive and behavioural.

Instead, I wish to start by arguing that decarbonising the energy sector is, at its core, a relatively simple problem. It is simple.

It is simple in the sense that we have scientific consensus over what has to be done. Science tells us, and has been doing so for decades, that we need to act urgently to curb emissions by getting rid of fossil fuels. Moreover, decarbonisation can be viewed as a simple problem in the sense that we today, by and large, possess the technologies and knowhow necessary for fossil-free energy production.

Now, when decarbonisation becomes complex, I argue, is when politics kicks in.

We have seen governments around the world avoiding taking sufficiently ambitious steps to accelerate decarbonisation, and global climate talks being hamstrung by resistance even when scientific knowledge has been clearly communicated to decision-makers, most recently by brilliant young activists. And in places where there has been political will to initiate processes of decarbonisation, as is the case in many European countries including the UK or Denmark and also Finland, the pace of decarbonisation has been insufficiently fast due to political lock-ins.

This ultimately boils down to the characteristics of energy transitions: They are value-laden and highly contested processes, involving a wide range of actors with different views on sustainability problems, and preferences over most favourable policy targets and instruments. Also, given the urgency for rapid change, the literature widely argues that successful transitions will have to be deliberatively steered and accelerated by public policy.

Motivation and research questions

My statement about the decarbonisation challenge, while purposefully simplistic, illustrates the main motivation behind my research. Specialising in the fields of sustainability transitions and policy studies, I took an interest in a relatively recent line of research that has incorporated policy concepts into the existing, traditionally largely socio-technical and economic, frameworks of energy transitions.

In my dissertation, I identified a gap in the existing attempts to take advantage of policy-based approaches when conducting research on transitions. I argue that while conceptual bridging between policy and transition scholars has already been successfully initiated, there is a further need to advance the exchange of methodological insights to make the most of the conceptual transfer.

Identifying this gap led me down a path that was both methodological and empirical at heart. I took an interest in a compelling combination of textual approaches, discursive approaches and unsupervised machine learning methods, in particular that of topic modelling, while having decarbonisation as the empirical context.

Even if the interest in discursive approaches is nothing new in the policy studies circles, it is a relatively novel addition to the energy transitions research field. With discursive methods, energy scholars can refine their investigative tools to study complex and politically attuned phenomena like decarbonisation. Unsupervised machine learning methods, in turn, come with the benefit of scale and scope. We can cover large collections of policy relevant data, time- and resource effectively. It is also possible to both create novel data sets and run a model without imposing human bias to the analysis.

I wanted to explore this arguably tremendous and underutilised potential of textual methods — both discursive and computational — for the purposes of transitions research. I therefore set out to answer the following research question: What novel contributions can textual methodologies bring to the study of decarbonisation policy and politics, both in terms of methods and empirical insights?

To answer my research question, I structured my doctoral dissertation as a two-step process: in the first step, I studied the two groups of textual methods and, in the second step, I applied the methods to empirical cases of decarbonisation. As one case, I analysed public discourse surrounding the decline of coal-fired electricity in the UK, one of the first countries to have almost completely abandoned coal use, in the period of 2000-2017. As another case, I conducted a big data analysis of the European Energy Union, a European energy policy reform project, in its formative years from 2015 to 2018.

The added value of discursive approaches

The results stemming from my jointly-written article [1] reviewing the existing use of discursive approaches indicate that taking a discursive lens has brought about novel analytical standpoints for energy transitions research.

These include, for example, shedding more light on political ideology and state orientation – in other words, how policy salience and legitimacy are developed in different political contexts. Discursive approaches also allow gaining insights into the ‘publics’; helping us understand how actors adopt, react to or influence energy policy alternatives. Another aspect that the results suggest is that discursive methods enrich the analysis of institutional and policy change.

Echoing these findings, our article [2] on coal phase-out in the UK, where my co-author and I conducted an analysis on newspaper data, exemplified how a discursive approach allows us to identify the different ways various actors delegitimize or legitimize coal use in their discourse. We gained an understanding of the different storylines actors used in depicting the possibility of phasing out coal from power generation.

The analysis suggests that coal phase-out occurred much faster and with significantly less resistance than what transitions research would generally give cause to expect. There were some areas of contestation and relevant discursive shifts, like that surrounding the Carbon Capture and Storage technology. Incumbents and policy makers became very active in the discourse and tried to re-establish the legitimacy of coal with this idea of a ‘technology fix’. Interestingly, while the discourse by coal incumbents was for a long time similar to that of the government, their discourse about coal actually shifted before the government’s official phase-out pledge of 2015. Incumbent actors had already been preparing for the decline of coal by developing renewable energy technologies, which resulted in little resistance.

On the whole, the investigation of discursive methods revealed how energy transition scholars can gain added value by applying these methods to analyse policy and politics. Critically, however, the results also clearly show that thus far scholars have mainly relied on a few, well-established methods and that, in order to exploit the full potential of discursive approaches, there would be room to engage in further methodological exploration and development.

This is exactly what sparked my interest in topic modelling and caused me and my co-authors to consider, how, if at all, the unsupervised algorithm could be used in a discourse analytical endeavour.

Topic modelling for qualitative textual analysis

Topic modelling refers to an automated algorithm that organises a corpus into word clusters based on word co-occurrences and probability distributions. The appeal is evident: TM does not require any predefined classification of training data by humans. With the method, we can automatically and quickly analyse large data sets. Interpretation is shifted to a later stage, after the method has produced its output. And this output, clusters of words, represents the latent thematic structure of the documents analysed.

It is no surprise, then, that in recent years, policy scholars have tried to use topic modelling to examine various policy concepts, including aspects of discursive environments, semantic or thematic categories, issue definitions, narratives or frames. However, the results from my dissertation show that there has actually been a mismatch between what the method produces as outcome and the ways this outcome has been interpreted. I argue that seeking to gain straightforward qualitative or policy relevant value from the topic modelling output risks being misleading.

To illustrate this, I want to consider the concept of discourse. Distilling discourse analytical information from text is an extremely complex cognitive task including an understanding of literal, metaphorical, contextual and inter-textual meanings. Conversely, due to its functions, topic modelling is unable to take into account semantics, syntax or place of words in the documents. As topic modelling was developed to only take into account the words contained in the document corpus, so it is also unable to ask the critical question often posed in discourse analysis: is something purposefully left unsaid in the text? As a result, it becomes clear that the topic modelling output cannot and should not be equated with the concept of discourse.

While adopting this critical stance on topic modelling, I do not mean to deny the vast potential of computational methods for policy studies research or even for the use of discourse analysis. On the contrary, I argue with my co-authors that topic modelling brings added value to textual analysis when used in mixed-method designs [3]. To exemplify this, we propose embedded and sequential designs for incorporating topic modelling into the analytical processes of different qualitative textual methods.

On the whole, the analysis of topic modelling shows that when carefully designed to match the real-world phenomena they are applied to, topic modelling can bring about novel angles to a given research topic, contributing to challenge and potentially transcend, current knowledge and practices.

We made use of this possibility to obtain such new takes in our application of topic modelling to European Commission’s policy data on the Energy Union [4]. The case of the Energy Union is, in itself, very intriguing. Prior studies have found, by examining smaller datasets, that the project is used for advancing conflicting policy aims, and therefore risks being unable to ambitiously drive decarbonisation objectives. Applying an unsupervised approach to this phenomenon thus gave an interesting vantage point: It became possible to ask, what a big data angle on policy texts reveals in this case? What are the main policy priorities? And, are there signals of energy and climate policy convergence?

By examining the Commission’s high-level policy priorities before and after the launch of the Energy Union project, my co-authors and I found that the Energy Union’s agenda has in fact been increasingly geared towards decarbonisation objectives. In addition, the evidence suggests that the reform project has also exerted a streamlining effect on the climate vs. security and energy efficiency vs. affordability debates. This is a change from the pre-Energy Union era, which was marked by the difficulty to combine climate and energy policy agendas. Finally, the results also imply that there is little thematic focus on phasing-out incumbent fossil fuels from European energy regimes.

Implications for research and policy

In policy studies, it has, on many occasions, been demonstrated that a comprehensive discourse analysis of environmental policy dilemmas not only requires expertise across different disciplines but also an understanding of diverse epistemological takes on the research topic. While my findings resonate with these notions, they also extend them in showing that there is also a need for diverse methodological expertise in these processes. I argue that as the often very general sounding terms, such as discourse, frame or narrative, each have an entire conceptual literature behind them, solid methodological understanding of these underpinnings is a prerequisite for any attempt to thoroughly analyse policy and politics.

Furthermore, and critically, the results highlight that integrating computational approaches into social scientific research endeavours requires strides to be taken in stepping outside of the ‘algorithmic black boxes’. As the example of the topic modelling method shows, applying powerful computational methods without thorough methodological considerations risks ending up producing unintended false practices, even if the intensions for these analyses were methodologically ambitious.

I call for more in-depth methodological dialogue, as this would make it possible to avoid and overcome pitfalls that combining the traditionally very different approaches of computational and societal research often entails. This kind of dialogue would also be critical and beneficial in the case of topic modelling, as the algorithm is being constantly improved, with aims to make it better account for contextual sensitivity.

Finally, I wish to turn to some conceptual implications and contributions that the empirical cases make for the energy transitions literature.

The lessons learned from the UK case indicate that, unlike what is sometimes suggested, incumbent technology decline does not necessarily have to be ‘a call against all incumbency’. Instead, incumbent power suppliers can be incorporating old and new technologies into their operations, and thus be promoting a reconfiguration pathway for technology decline as opposed to immediately overthrowing coal. While these reconfiguration pathways may be a practical way forward, and can work as an encouraging example for the numerous other European countries that have recently pledged to phase-out coal; I argue that policymakers should pay careful attention to how best to govern the processes of technology decline.

One challenge is the risk of phase-out becoming an oxymoron if coal is substituted by other fossils such as natural gas, which has, to some extent, been the case in the UK. This highlights the importance of how alternatives to coal are presented and defined in policy discourse.

Moreover, recent instances surfacing from the EU seem to consolidate the findings of my dissertation that give encouraging signals of decarbonisation policy integration at the EU-level. Since the time period covered in my data set, the European Commission has been further promoting decarbonisation. Today, through the European Green Deal, it is proposing to address some of the critical areas and limitations of the Energy Union framework that my research pointed to. For example the lack of policy interest in deliberatively phasing out coal and guaranteeing the participation of fossil-fuel reliant member states to advance ambitious climate policy.

Recent instances in the EU have also beautifully demonstrated the power of discourse in policy, and the importance of the ways in which we give meaning to decarbonisation. In May last year, the UK parliament used its voice to declare Climate Emergency, and, a few months later, the European Parliament followed this example. And only recently, the chief executive of BP pledged to cut the fossil fuel company’s emissions to net-zero by 2050.

I argue that these kind of discursive shifts are vital in our attempts to tackle climate change. I therefore urge policymakers to embrace this alarmist discourse to make swift policy decisions, while simultaneously promoting hopeful, fact-based visions of decarbonised and sustainable futures. With discursive action, we could begin reframing our climate crisis predicament, turning devastation into an opportunity filled with hope. Discursive action can prompt us to finally face the reality and start implementing the solutions needed. The solutions that are, at their core, very simple.

KAROLIINA ISOAHO

Literature
[1] Isoaho, K., & Karhunmaa, K. (2019) A critical review of discursive approaches in energy transitions. Energy Policy, 128, 930–942. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2019.01.043
[2] Isoaho, K. & Markard, J. (2020) The Politics of Technology Decline: Discursive Struggles over Coal Phase-Out in the UK. Review of Policy Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/ropr.12370
[3] Isoaho, K., Gritsenko, D. & Mäkelä, E. (2019) Topic modelling and qualitative text analysis for policy studies. Policy Studies Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12343
[4] Isoaho, K., Moilanen, F., and Toikka, A. (2019) A Big Data View of the European Energy Union: Shifting from ‘A Floating Signifier’ to an Active Driver of Decarbonisation? Politics and Governance, 7 (1): 28. http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/pag.v7i1.1731

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The vegan diet and new vegan foods have received a lot of media attention in recent years. The “veggie phenomenon” has grown at a rapid pace following many social media-driven events, such as Meatless October, Veganuary and the Vegan Fair (Vegemessut) (Jallinoja, Vinnari & Niva 2019a, Auvinen 2019). Many restaurants, from fast food chains to fine dining bistros, have also responded to the challenge with new vegan meals.

While in the past, especially in the vegan movement, there has been a desire for an ethically correct vegan diet, over the past few years, vegan activists have encouraged a shift to more flexible plant-based eating patterns alongside veganism (Jallinoja et al. 2019a). In recent years, the image of vegans has become more diverse, for example, in communities such as Facebook’s Chips and Beer Vegans Group (Auvinen 2019, Santaoja & Jallinoja, unpublished manuscript).

Vegetarian diets provide solutions to many of the problem areas of eating, such as health issues related to meat and animal fats, environmental problems caused by the production of animal-derived food, and concerns over animal welfare. Red meat in particular has been in the line of fire, as the carbon footprint of beef and its effect on climate change are large compared to the environmental effects of plant proteins, poultry, and fish (Clark et al. 2019, de Vries & de Boer 2010). Red meat has also been shown to be the most problematic in terms of health effects (Clark et al. 2019, World Cancer Research Fund 2013). Indeed, Nordic (Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2012), Finnish (National Nutrition Council 2014) and Dutch (Kromhout et al. 2016) nutrition recommendations call for a reduction in red meat consumption. On the other hand, vegan activists have criticized the rise in poultry consumption: many chickens must be killed to produce the same amount of meat as is found on one cow carcass.

In this review, I look at the popularity of vegetarian diets among Finns during the aforementioned “veggie boom” and the preceding twenty years. Hence, it is good to highlight some of the related milestones in the 2010s: The first Meatless October took place in 2013 and the first Veganuary in 2014. Posts on veganism and plant-based “milk” products increased markedly on Internet blogs at the beginning of 2015, and activity in discussion forums also increased during 2016 (Isotalo et al. 2019). At the same time, Kesko – a major retail conglomerate – reported a 47% increase in the sales of plant-based ”milk” and a 305% rise in hummus and falafel purchases (Kesko 2017). The first Vegan Fair in Helsinki was held in January 2017.

But is veggie boom really ”everywhere”? Has the number of vegans increased and has meat consumption really started to decline? This article seeks to answer the following questions:

1. a) How has the popularity of vegetarian diets changed in Finland between 1997 and 2018?

1. b) Are there any differences between men and women and between age groups?

c) Based on the answers to the above, can one conclude there has been something of a ”veggie boom” at some point after 2013?

This review analyses self-reported plant-based diets (see the challenges of self-reporting, e.g. Vinnari et al. 2008) and is based on previously published results on special diets among Finns (Table 1). In addition, I was able to complement the “Finland Eats” (Suomi syö) data (Jallinoja et al. 2019b) with new data for 2018 (Taloustutkimus). This report does not include studies where the proportion of vegetarians has been measured for one year only (e.g. Jallinoja, Niva & Latvala 2016, Niva & Jallinoja 2018). I have omitted from the analysis the study by Vinnari et al. (2010), since the results are based on household data, not individual-level data. In this article, I do not report in more detail the survey methods and characteristics of the respondents, as they are available in previous publications (see Table 1).

Table 1. Surveys included in the review

Vegetarians and vegans in population surveys

A first glance at the results of the various data shows that the percentage of followers of vegetarian diets has been hovering around a few per cent for the whole period under review. The fact that the surveys have been collected with somewhat varying methods and study populations makes the comparison challenging. For example, when I compared the results of the Health Behaviour and Health among the Finnish Adult Population survey (2012, 2014) (hereafter the Adult Survey) with the results of the Finland Eats survey collected in the same year, the proportion of followers of vegetarian diets differed by age and gender. Thus, data collected by different methods do not appear to be fully comparable.

The differences between the surveys are also due to the fact that the diets have been labelled in different ways: in the FINRISK, the Adolescents’ Health and Lifestyle Survey (hereafter the Adolescent Survey) and the Adult Survey, the answer option was only “vegetarian diet”. In the Finland Eats survey, “vegan diet”, “vegetarian diet” and “diet that does not include red meat” were labelled separately. Thus, in most surveys, it is possible that some of those recording a vegetarian diet were vegan.

Because of these reservations, I decided to look at followers of plant-based diets by splitting the review into two partly overlapping sections. First, I looked at the 1997–2013 period in the light of the FINRISK and the Adult Survey, since these surveys have been collected around the same time. Then, I looked at the 2008–2018 period in the light of the Adult Population Survey and the Finland Eats survey.

Respondents to the Adolescent Survey were 12, 14, 16 and 18 years of age, and the FINRISK respondents were 15–79 years of age. The results of both surveys indicate that the proportions of vegetarians decreased between the first years of the 2000s and 2007 (the Adolescent Survey) and 2012 (FINRISK). Figure 1 also shows that the vegetarian diet was most popular among 16- and 18-year-old girls in 1999 and 2012.

Next, I looked at the proportion of vegetarians in the Adult Survey and the proportions of vegans, vegetarians and non-red meat eaters in the Finland Eats survey, both of which targeted the adult population. The results of the Finland Eats data for 2008–2016 have been previously reported among persons aged 15–79 (Jallinoja et al. 2019b), but for the purpose of this review, I calculated the results for respondents aged 15–64 to match the results of the Adult Survey data.

The results in Figure 2 suggest that the proportion of vegetarians remained fairly stable between 2011 and 2014. The difference between the Adult Survey and Finland Eats data is that whereas the Adult Survey only asked about a vegetarian diet, the Finland Eats survey asked separately about vegan and vegetarian diets. For this reason, I created a new variable that describes respondents who had chosen a vegan or vegetarian diet option (or both) in the Finland Eats survey. Thus, in Figure 2, the vegan and vegetarian diets, and at least one of the following, are reported for the Finland Eats material. Figure 2 shows that after 2014, all reported dietary restrictions on meat consumption increased.

I also looked at age groups separately for men and women in the Adult Survey data for 2011–2014 (Figure 3) and in the Finland Eats data for 2018 (Figure 4). The problem with an age-based analysis is that the response rate was low in the Adult Survey study, especially among young men. In any case, in both studies and in the results reported in Figure 1, young women were systematically more likely to be vegetarians compared to the other groups. The popularity of the diet that excludes red meat was slightly different: it was the most popular among young women, but, for example, 8.9% of women aged 55–64 years stated that they followed such a diet.

What can be concluded from the above figures? The proportions of vegetarians and vegans vary somewhat from year to year, but some of the variation may be explained by different research methods, the age distributions of the subjects, and random variation. However, the results of the Finland Eats data can be interpreted as an increase in the proportion of vegans and vegetarians between 2014 and 2016 and between 2016 and 2018. At the same time, the proportion of respondents who did not eat red meat also increased. In other words, after the so-called “veggie trend” began, the proportion of Finns who follow vegetarian diets and avoid red meat seems to have increased (see Jallinoja et al. 2019b).

Vegetarian diets and meat consumption in other studies

I have not found similar surveys repeated over several years in other countries. According to individual studies, the percentage of vegetarians and vegans in other countries is also a few per cent (see Jallinoja et al. 2019a summary table). However, Djurens Rätt, a Swedish animal rights association, has examined the proportion of vegans and vegetarians in the population in 2009 and between 2014 and 2018 (Djurens Rätt 2014, 2018) (Figure 5). According to these studies, the proportion of vegetarians in Sweden increased by the spring of 2018, while the proportion of vegans declined. It is possible that the phenomenon emphasizing the flexibility of vegan eating is channelled towards more permissive vegetarianism than tighter veganism. According to another Swedish study in 2019, 16% of Swedes reported being “flexitarians”, while 5% followed a vegetarian diet and 2% followed a vegan diet (Matrapport 2019).

Djurens Rätt also asked non-vegetarians whether their interest in choosing vegetarian food had increased or decreased over the past 12 months. The share of respondents who showed a significant or slightly increased interest rose from 26% to 47% between 2009 and 2017 (Djurens Rätt, 2014, 2018). However, the number of these people in the 2018 survey no longer increased (Djurens Rätt 2018).

Alongside the prevalence of vegans and vegetarians, it is interesting to look at the changes in meat consumption in Finland. The Natural Resources Agency’s Nutrition Balance Sheet shows that until recent years, total meat consumption had increased, and for the last three years (2016–2018), consumption has remained at about 81 kg per year (Natural Resources Centre 2019). In the autumn of 2019, the Pellervo Economic Research Centre predicted that meat consumption in Finland would start to decline (Arovuori et al. 2019). According to Swedish Jordbruksverket statistics, total meat consumption in Sweden has already begun to decline (Jordbruksverket 2019).

Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) data indicate that meat consumption had increased in Finland until recent years: according to the FINRISKI study, meat consumption among women in the two top education groups increased between 1997 and 2012. Among men, meat consumption in the lower third of the education classes increased in particular (Raulio et al. 2016). According to the Finravinto study, in 2017, 26% of women and 79% of men ate more meat than recommended (Valsta et al. 2018).

Conclusions

The results of this review show that at the beginning of the 2000s, the proportion of vegetarians decreased in all groups. The share of vegetarians, vegans and those avoiding red meat started to grow after 2014.

Based on these results, can it be said there has been a “veggie trend”?

Late-modern societies are characterized by a rapid cycle of dietary regimes (Jallinoja, Mäkelä & Niva 2018, Jallinoja et al. 2019b). At the same time, food choices are influenced by a number of long-term trends, such as the high value placed on health, naturalness and environmental issues (Jallinoja et al. 2018, Gronow 1997, Mäkelä & Niva 2015). It also seems that the same diets always resurface in slightly different versions and reflect the long-term developments mentioned above. For example, a few years ago low-carbohydrate diets received a lot of media attention (Jauho 2016, see also Knight 2012), but after 2012 the number of followers decreased (Jallinoja et al. 2019b). However, paleo and ketosis diets can be regarded as some kind of throwback because they also restrict the intake of simple carbohydrates.

Interest in vegetarian diets has also fluctuated, and the growing interest in vegetarian diets in the 2010s is not the first wave of vegetarian mobilization in Finland. The first increase in interest lies roughly between the last years of the 19th century and the 1930s: Finland’s first vegetarian cookbook was published in 1894, and by 1910 there were already four vegetarian restaurants in Helsinki. The first association, Finlands vegetariska föreningen, was founded in 1907. The Finnish Vegetarian Association, founded in 1913, justified vegetarianism by the unnatural and unhealthy nature of eating meat (Vornanen 2016, pp. 270–271; see also Auvinen 2019, 49–53) and it had 800 members (Vornanen 2016, p. 272). It is impossible to estimate how many Finns at that time followed a vegetarian diet.

In the 1990s, the vegan movement in Finland was part of the ”fourth wave” of environmental protest that peaked in 1995–1998 (Konttinen 1999, see also Auvinen 2019, 65–67). The Vegan Association of Finland was founded in 1993 and the Animal Rights group (Oikeutta eläimille) in 1995. However, a study of household food choices between 1966 and 2006 shows that the proportion of non-meat households began to increase in the early 1980s, from being less than one per cent in the 1970, rising to 5.46% in 1985, 6.86% in 1998 and 5.81% in 2006 (Vinnari, Mustonen & Räsänen 2010). The impact of the animal rights movement in the 1990s may be reflected in the 1999 and 2001 figures of the Adolescent Survey reported in this review.

The results of this review for 2014–2018 suggest that as conventional and social media activity around vegan eating increased, a greater proportion of Finns began to adopt vegan, vegetarian diets or red meat-free diets. The followers of these diets – especially the vegan diet – were still very few in 2014, and despite the increase, the proportions were still low in 2018. An age-group analysis shows that the popularity among young women is well above these averages. Women are more likely than men to follow either a vegetarian, vegan (see also Vinnari, Mustonen & Räsänen 2010) or red meat-free diet.

Currently, social media plays a central role in spreading various food phenomena (Isotalo et al. 2018) and the Internet can even be considered an infrastructure for many contemporary social movements (Jallinoja et al. 2019a, Stolle & Micheletti, 2013). Social media, however, tends to produce only “instant moments of togetherness” and it is typically weak at generating long-lasting political activity and networks (Poell & van Dijk, 2015). Thus, diets and food phenomena are constantly challenged by critics and proponents of other diets.

In any case, it will be exciting to see how different diets limiting meat consumption evolve. Climate change, environmental problems and animal welfare are constantly on the public agenda, so the central argument for vegetarian diets is not going away anytime soon. In the autumn of 2018, the decision to start a weekly vegetarian food day at the garrison refectories of the Defence Forces sparked controversy (Jallinoja 2018). The same happened in September 2019 when it was announced that canteens providing food to students at the University of Helsinki would stop serving beef. At least for the time being, the question of meat and vegetarian food seems to remain a hot topic in both conventional and social media.

PIIA JALLINOJA

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