It doesn't really seem honest to me. It ignores all the experiences of people who didn't find it particularly problematic or even positive to do Veganuary.

Encouraging such donations could be good, and advocating for diet change doesn't seem to be favoured in EA. Advocating a "moral offsetting" approach to meat consumption is probably controversial I guess, but within realms of the plausibly reasonable. There doesn't seem to be anything gained by being negative about veganism though, and not doing that would seem robustly better.

Edit - perhaps it could be argued that a campaign against veganism may more effectively raise attention than if no criticism were made. That would still seem to me to be an excessively risky and divisive strategy, though. And it makes claims that don't seem to generally be correct about veganism and says some other silly things, which doesn't seem like a good way to go.

There is a new "Forget Veganuary" campaign, apparently part-funded by the EA Animal Welfare Fund: 
https://www.forgetveganuary.com/
https://www.farmkind.giving/about-us/who#transparency (the "Transparency" link on the campaign page)

Reddit link to news article that calls this a "meat-eating campaign" and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1px018m/veganuary_champion_quits_to_run_meateating/ 

The idea seems to be to promote a message to not give up animal products, but rather donate to organisations that effectively campaign to improve farm animal welfare (including EA favourites like The Humane League, Fish Welfare Initiative and the Shrimp Welfare Project).

Promoting donating to such organisations seems all well and good, but it puts out very negative messages about being a vegan (which apparently means you will have "annoyed friends and family" and "got bloating from plant protein" etc.). This has got a lot of negative attention from vegan groups that I've seen. The website seems a bit ridiculous in places e.g. its "expert" views are just those of some eating champions.

Interestingly the person who seems to be doing the PR, Toni Vernelli, used to do the PR for Veganuary, and wrote on the forum defending it less than a year ago: link. It's unclear if they actually changed their mind or have some other motivation to change their stance.

Anyway, it seems like quite a controversial initiative, unnecessarily negative about veganism and quite poorly put together. As a donor to the EA Animal Welfare Fund, it's not something I'd expect to be paying towards myself.

What do you think it is about going vegan that would prevent you from donating more? I'm still not sure of the causal link.

Out of interest, what is it you consider so effortful about becoming vegan that it would so substantially reduce the effort you could put towards other causes? Do you think it is knock-on effects of enjoying food less, effort required to learn to change your meals, effects from finding it harder socially, or something else?

The actual effort to change to a vegan diet isn't that high in my view, at least if you have access to a decent supermarket (having done it) - it's just learning to make some different foods and remembering to buy some multivitamins once in a while (or at least B12). Once you've done the learning, it's not really an ongoing extra effort (like there's not really an ongoing effort in knowing how to cook omni food), and the benefits accrue over time.

I wonder if people overestimate the effect on enjoyment. First, if you find vegan alternatives that you enjoy, then you don't lose out a lot. Second, I think most EAs are probably familiar with hedonic adaptation, and how your happiness levels seem to be pretty resilient to lifestyle changes in the long-term (hence making donating money seem like less of a big deal) - so switching food also seems unlikely to really make you emotionally worse off. Third, we probably spend less than an hour per day with food in our mouths - it doesn't seem like it should be that important to overall wellbeing - I recall Daniel Kahnemann making a point that we overestimate the impact of certain things because we imagine the effect when we are doing them but not the lack of effect during all the time we are not doing them.

Social is quite situation-dependent. But if it's just that you have friends who take you to restaurants with no decent vegan option, it doesn't prevent being vegan in other meals. Shared meals with family who won't accept vegan food would seem trickier, but again there are surely some meals where a person could normally be independent.

Edit - or I guess worries about health could be another reason? Well, I don't know of good evidence that being vegan with a varied, not-heavily-processed diet whilst taking extras of certain vitamins has substantial negative effects (and if anything physical health seems to be better than with typical omni diets).

I think there are at least two relevant aspects here - the impact of ceasing insect farming and the question of which policies should be supported.

On the impact of ceasing insect farming, a consideration that it's not clear to me has been taken into account is what the land would be used for if not for growing food for insects - it wouldn't necessarily become wild, rather it could be used to grow other crops, and thereby have no large effect on wild animal welfare. Rates of deforestation seem to indicate there is plenty of demand for arable land. Also, biofuels seem to be being held back by land availability and worries over these competing with food crops, again potentially acting as a strong source of demand for land. So the effect of removing one source of demand seems complex, and it seems like it may just result in substitution by another type of farming. The marginal effect may be to affect deforestation rates - but to what degree these are affected by changes in demand for crops is unclear to me.

Re the question of support this gives for insect farming, even if it had an overall positive effect, it's not clear it should be advocated if there would be other uses for that land that would be better e.g. growing biofuels. So it doesn't clearly make a "case" for defending insect farming.

More generally, if an action A involves doing P and Q, where P is good and Q is bad, but there are ways of doing P that don't involve the harm of Q, then the implication would seem to be to advocate one of those other ways of doing P and not to defend A - in this case P = farming crops and Q = farming insects.

It sounds like the benefit under this argument comes from reducing wild land. You could do that without causing lots of other insects (or other farmed animals) to suffer e.g. grow crops and burn them for energy instead, or manage the land to keep insect numbers down. So I don't find this argument very persuasive that we should think of this as a positive benefit to intensive farming of insects or other animals, even supposing that insects (or other animals) have overall negative lives in the wild. Perhaps this isn't the right location to discuss this in depth, though.

Relevant news article from today, on a report saying people are unlikely to be willing to eat insects - just thought I'd share: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/25/eating-insects-meat-planet

One of the main points of the article is that insect farming is bad for insect welfare, so Vasco's comment seems on-topic enough for me. Maybe the link to that part of the argument could have been stated more clearly.

Maybe it seems repetitive if you see such comments a lot, but then it suggests that main posts are repeatedly neglecting the argument. Perhaps it would be better for main posts just to point out that this argument exists in their caveats and link to a discussion somewhere. If it might change the whole sign of whether something is good or bad, it seems like it should be at least mentioned.

For people like me who only come to read the occasional post, it does feel useful to be reminded of these other perspectives.

I had a look, it seems to presume the AI-owners will control all the resources, but this doesn't seem like a given (though it may pan out that way). 

I realise you said you didn't want to debate these assumptions, but just wanted to point out that the picture painted doesn't seem inevitable.