When Vegan Icons Walk Away and What It Means for You

We’ve seen this before. A well-known face announces they have gone vegan. The community celebrates. Brands line up. Cookbooks get written. Then, quietly or sometimes loudly, they start consuming animal products again. The comments often fill up with “even they couldn’t stick with it” and for a moment, the whole movement feels a little smaller.

The latest person to make headlines is Gaz Oakley, a Welsh chef who spent nearly a decade building one of the most recognized vegan brands in the world under the name “Avant-Garde Vegan”. Two published cookbooks, a YouTube channel with millions of views, awards, accolades, and a personal brand so thoroughly tied to veganism that the word was literally in his name. His cookbook Vegan 100 was named one of the top 100 vegan cookbooks of all time by VegNews. His most recent book, Plant to Plate, won Book of the Year at the Food and Travel Magazine Awards in late 2025.

Then came a podcast appearance in late May 2026 where Oakley said he no longer considers himself vegan, citing a shift toward localism, foraging, rewilding, and what he calls a desire to step away from the “group” mentality of veganism. He mentioned being open to eating invasive species like crayfish, venison, and pigeon. He also pulled down his original video about why he went vegan and quietly rebranded away from the Avant-Garde Vegan name entirely.

There is a lot to unpack here, and not all of it is about him.

When the Identity Becomes the Brand

What makes the Gaz Oakley situation different from a celebrity who dabbled in veganism for a bit is that he built a creative identity around it. The cookbooks, the community, the platform, all of it was inseparable from the vegan label. So when that label goes, the questions are legitimate. Was the ethics-based foundation always as solid as the brand suggested, or did the identity of “vegan chef” eventually become a cage rather than a calling?

His framing is worth examining. He now calls his recipes “plant forward” on his site and talks about veganism’s “rule set” no longer fitting his life, about extremists giving the movement a bad name, and suggests that if he had encountered a community living off the land rather than documentary films promoting veganism, he might never have gone vegan at all. That last part is revealing. It suggests the foundation was persuasion rather than values, and persuasion, unlike conviction, has an expiration date.

This is also where the plant-based versus vegan distinction matters more than people give it credit for. The two are not the same thing. Plant-based describes a diet. Vegan describes an ethical position about the exploitation of animals that extends to food, clothing, and beyond. Gaz’s entry point was fitness culture and a radio interview, not a settled conviction about animal rights. The vegan community embraced the Avant-Garde Vegan brand enthusiastically, but in hindsight the label may have been applied before the foundation was truly there. When someone is plant-based rather than vegan at their core, the exit ramp was always available. It just took a while to find it.

That does not make his cookbooks less useful as the recipes did not change, but it does matter, because when someone with that level of influence walks away, they take people with them.

This Pattern Is Not New

Gaz is not an isolated case. This cycle has played out enough times now that it’s becoming a bit of a trope.

Miley Cyrus was one of veganism’s most vocal celebrity advocates before announcing in 2020 that she had reintroduced fish, citing concerns about brain function and omega intake. Lizzo followed four years of veganism with a public exit in 2024, saying a shift back to animal proteins helped her energy and mental clarity, while adding she still believes a vegan diet can be healthy. Liam Hemsworth, who went vegan partly through Cyrus’s influence, stepped away after a kidney stone health scare. Anne Hathaway said she felt better after eating fish during a film shoot.

Then there is the softer category. Bill Clinton adopted veganism after heart surgery and later reintroduced animal products on doctor’s advice. Samuel L. Jackson went plant-based after a health scare and quit a few years later. Jared Leto famously called himself a “cheagan,” a cheating vegan, which, to be clear, is just not being vegan.

What links most of these stories is that the starting point was something other than a settled ethical position. It was health, or a documentary, or a partner, or a moment of inspiration. Those are not bad reasons to start, but they may make it easier for some to walk away.

The Wellness Trap

There is a specific version of celebrity veganism that is rooted in optics rather than ethics. It positions veganism as a tool for better energy, clearer skin, athletic performance, and longevity. When it works, they evangelize. When it stops working, or when they decide it stops working, they leave. And because they were never really arguing from an ethical position, the exit does not feel like a contradiction to them.

This is not a criticism of people who came to veganism through health. Many people do, and many of them stay because the ethics follow. But when the public-facing reason is always and only “I feel amazing,” the public exit will always be “I stopped feeling amazing,” and the community gets used as a backdrop for both performances.

The People (Hopefully) Not Going Anywhere

It is worth pausing on the counter-examples, because they matter just as much.

Billie Eilish has been vegan since she was twelve years old. In a recent interview with ELLE, she said that eating meat is inherently wrong and that you cannot simultaneously love animals and eat meat. Her tour through Support+Feed, the nonprofit she runs with her family, funded 7.7 million plant-based meals for people in need. She has partnered with James Cameron, who has been vegan since 2012, on a concert film, with both sharing deeply aligned values around vegan advocacy and sustainability. She is not softening. She is doubling down but nobody’s perfect and she’s been criticized for still riding horses.

Joaquin Phoenix has been vegan since childhood and speaks about it consistently in terms of ethics and compassion, not personal health metrics. Paul McCartney has been an animal rights advocate for decades. These are not people whose veganism is tied to a brand or a trend cycle. It is foundational to who they are.

The difference between someone who will flip and someone who will not may come down to is veganism something they do, or something they are?

What It Means for Me and May Mean for You

I went vegan in 1994. My wife and I were living in London at the time, after our band had signed with a record label there, and the UK was already years ahead of the US in terms of plant-based options. There were substitutes on shelves we had never seen back home. The transition happened over a few years, starting from vegetarianism, and by the time it was complete, it had nothing to do with a trend or a documentary or a celebrity influence. It was simply the right thing to do, and I have never had a reason to revisit that.

I have watched this defection cycle play out now for over thirty years of being vegan. Every time it happens, someone in the comments says it proves veganism is unsustainable. Every time, I think about the people I know who have been doing this quietly for decades, without a platform or a cookbook deal, simply because they believe it’s right.

Celebrity veganism and community veganism are really not the same thing. One is built on visibility and the other is built on values. One is vulnerable to rebranding and the other is not, and when high-profile people walk away, it can do real damage. It may hand ammunition to people who were looking for a reason to dismiss the movement, it may plant doubt in newer vegans minds who looked up to those figures, and it sets back the normalizing work that thousands of quiet, committed people have been doing for decades. That part is worth being honest about rather than brushing aside.

Your reasons are your own, and if they are rooted in something real, no celebrity or influencer is going to shake them.