Google Trends is a fun little tool. It shows you the popularity of Google searches over the past few years. Plug in "vegetarian" and "vegan", and you get the graph below. Vegetarian (red) looks like it is in slow decline since 2004. Vegan (green) has been climbing.
I exported the data, and added together "vegan" and "vegetarian" to see how vegetarianism, writ large, is faring. (There is some double-counting of people who searched for both terms in the same query, which will now be counted twice in the total. But that's fine for our purposes.) As you can see vegetarianism (blue) seems fairly flat over the past six years. Perhaps a few years of decline from 2004 to 2007, then a slight up-tick since.
It gets really interesting when you plot when you plot the share of vegan versus the share of vegetarian. Vegans are taking over vegetarianism. The vegan share has increased from the low 30s to nearly 50. Vegetarian has declined from high 60s to just over 50. That's a big swing. And keep in mind that for this period, the sum of these two groups is fairly flat.
So I ask any vegans or vegetarians out there -- is this true? Does this match your experience of trends in the vegetarian world? Are vegans taking over? And if so, why? What's going on here?
