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TheOn Sunday, a video clip of YouTuber Yovana Mendoza, a vegan, alone has brought down the career of this brilliant girl of 28 years. You will see the Raw Food Defender, nicknamed "Rawvana", smiling at a restaurant in Bali while she prepares to take her meal. But in an instant, the face of the health guru changes, as she realizes that her friend's camera is dragged on her plate. She moves to cover him, but it's too late. Detectives on the Internet who watched the vlog 10 minutes later would quickly find out what Mendoza was trying to hide: a piece of fish.
Mendoza is rushed to upload a video claiming that she only ate fish for two months, to address the health problems she's developed after six years as a vegan. But the damage was done. Former fans have descended on his YouTube channel, Instagram and Twitter, posting fish emojis and taunting it as "Fishvana". Dozens of vegan comrades, YouTubers, have posted horrified reactions to the scandal, nicknamed Fishgate.
"I felt like someone was dead," Mendoza told the Daily Beast. "It was one of the worst days of my life."
In addition to showing many ways that you can reuse the word "fish," the incident has brought another revelation to the surface: the vegan YouTube community is crumbling.
For the uninitiated, the popularity of vegan YouTube could be a shock. Some chains attract hundreds of thousands of subscribers, while there are only one million vegetarians in the United States. And these channels are not run by vegan celebrities (although there are many, including Miley Cyrus, Beyonce and Ariana Grande), but by celebrities, people whose online character is based on lack products of animal origin in their diet. Their feeds on social networks are filled with clips showing that they are traveling, doing exercise, and meticulously documenting every herbal item that goes on their mouths – up to now.
In the past few months, many of the most famous vegan YouTubers have announced that they are consuming animal products, triggering a flood of online scandals and abuses, while asking a philosophical question: What happens to a vegan YouTuber who is not vegan?
The rise of celebrity vegan YouTuber began with Freelee the Banana Girl (real name Leanne Ratcliffe), an Australian who claimed to have overcome drug addiction and lost tens of pounds by eating almost entirely carbohydrates – including up to 50 bananas a day. She has collected millions of views on videos of herself and her boyfriend, Durian Rider, "crushing" pounds of fruit, rice and potatoes, then marching in front of their camera.
Freelee was not the first vegan channel on YouTube, but it's definitely the most important. It has spawned dozens of copied channels run by wealthy, twenties, who all seem to have met at what is called a "fruit festival" in Thailand. Today, reading a Freelee video will quickly drive viewers into an infiltration pit of vegan "vegan" influences, who seem to spend their entire lives at the beach, denouncing the benefits of their lifestyle based on plants.
However, over time, the power of the stars of Freelee and DurianRider has faded. The mainstream media have heard about their extreme regimes and have been thoroughly debunked and have begun to separate their most controversial comments. (The couple once claimed that more thin people would have survived Sept. 11 if fat people did not block the stairwells.) Freelee's retired in what appears to be a South American jungle – where she can still download videos on her new "offline lifestyle" – while DurianRider has met another vegan girlfriend in Australia.
While Freelee and DurianRider disappeared in the foreground, their all-carb diet was also in vogue. Vegan YouTubers has started proselytizing about the benefits of healthy proteins and fats, and some have even turned to the oxymoron-based "vegetable keto" diet. Others have decided to completely give up the way of life.
In a January 14 video titled "Why I'm no longer vegan," YouTuber Bonny Rebecca set the tone for a mass of upcoming defections: unearthing videos of half an hour in which ancient herbivores s'. excuse in front of their fans and out of breath explain the health problems that drove them to eat meat. In the case of Bonny Rebecca, it is the extreme digestive problems that, according to the 26-year-old woman, caused bacterial imbalances in her intestine and pushed her boyfriend, the vegan YouTuber SlimLikeTim, to lose more than 30 pounds .
"I've been a vegan for a long time and I think part of myself wanted to believe so much in this diet – because I had such a strong ethical connection – that I turned a blind eye to my problems and the seriousness of my problems. of health, "Bonny Rebecca said in the video. "It was a huge slap for me."
From there, the dominoes began to fall. Stella Rae, a former member of Freelee's diet program, announced she was giving up veganism because of bloating and digestive problems. Tim Shieff, a YouTube star and former vegan athlete, said he had ejaculated for the first time in months after eating raw eggs and salmon. After her friend's video, Rawvana revealed that she secretly ate fish and eggs because of a proliferation of bacteria in her small intestine, revealed by media such as BuzzFeed and The Washington Post.
Perhaps hoping to avoid such a dramatic outing, RawAlignment, another spokeswoman for the raw food industry, announced the next day that she was also eating fish since December.
"Without sharing our truth and living in our truth, we have nothing," said the vlogger in his 36-minute video. "We must liberate ourselves."
There is a certain sadness in watching a self-proclaimed moral authority fall – especially a person who looks like these YouTubers: young and supple, with perfect skin and seemingly endless vacations. It's like watching the The Varsity Blues scandal continues, but if these rich and beautiful people also publish offensive captions on "enslaving animals for the benefit of our taste buds".
There is also some satisfaction in catching a scammer in the act, discovering an influencer who has eaten meat while taking advantage of a #PlantPowered image. Many commentators have pointed out that Mendoza started selling his "Raw Detox Challenge" at $ 69 in February, more than a month after secretly starting to eat fish. Others said that in March she had subtitled a photo of her at the gym: "VEGAN BOOTY GAINS". Just a week ago, a fan said his body was "proof that a vegan diet can work wonders," Mendoza replied with an Emoji of kissy face and heart.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Mendoza said she's not regretting promoting an herbal diet in recent months. She still believes that it is a healthy diet for a person without her health problems and she could even go back there in the future. She also insisted that she had always intended to talk to her followers about changing diets, but in her day, once she had discovered the foods that suited her best.
"Even if I said it from the beginning, I would have retaliation," she said. "It was going to be too hard for me, with the comments and reactions of the people and at the same time, trying to heal my body. I had to focus on one thing.
Whether one accepts Mendoza's reasoning or not, the backlash she has suffered is objectively horrible. Commentators have described it as "disgusting", "fraud" and "hypocritical", and others have told him to kill himself. Her mother had a public Instagram account, but decided to go private after receiving messages saying that she should never have brought Mendoza to the world.
This type of online abuse is typical of old vegan influencers. Bonny Rebecca heard commentators calling it "pathetic" and "silly" when she gave up her herbal diet, and others told her to leave YouTube because "nobody cares about his complex superiority and lack of personality ".
In an illustrative commentary on Tim Shieff's veganism cessation video, a viewer wrote, "Oh, well … that explains why you look so lost, so old and so swollen in your videos. recent. It's so sad. "
Some of the worst abuses come from other vegan YouTubers. Many of these vloggers find what they do best to respond to what other vegans do. So, when a person has flaws, it's not just a moral scandal, it's good content.
That's how we end up with an avalanche of indignant response videos to people like Mendoza, including former friend Freelee the Banana Girl. (She claims they have never been friends.) DurianRider has made an answer video titled "Why has Rawvana never had this skinny skin?", Which consists mainly of showing the body of her new girlfriend. And a person named RawVeganGinger, who claims to know Mendoza personally, wrote a 60-part story for Instagram, tearing the tattered health guru before declaring his "true intention is love."
This is not the worst. When Bonny Rebecca announced that she was eating fish and eggs, a pair of vegan twins, Nina and Randa, created an all-encompassing "breathtaking song" that featured them frolicking in fake furs and dressed as a policeman vegan. The twins then shot a follow-up video claiming that the div song did not specifically pertain to Bonny Rebecca, but that she repeatedly fell under her characteristic Australian accent imitating the "anonymous" target of their nuance.
"One of the things I liked in the vegan lifestyle and diet, is the feeling that it was very welcoming and very inclusive," said Mendoza. "But as soon as you decide to make a change, they turn against you, which is really sad."
"It does not make people want to become vegans when they see all this hate," she added. "It's scary.I hope all this, and all this press that my case had, that people can see it."
Even after the end of all the cruel comments and response videos, it remains to know how a former vegan, YouTuber, can make a living by eating. Or more precisely: how can they convince people to follow their health advice, while they now claim the advice they vomited for years have made them sick?
Different stars have taken different bugs. Shieff, founder of the vegan vegan clothing brand ETHCS, left the company after his colleagues told Plant Based News that they were "very shocked and upset" by his conduct. Bonny Rebecca has made sales of her vegan recipe eBooks, although she continues to make "What I eat in a day" and "Get Healthy With Me" videos featuring fish and eggs. His personal website simply reads: "Something fresh is coming soon".
For Mendoza, it may still be too early to know. His website is still online and sells products like his "21 Day Raw Challenge". Vivo Life, the vegan protein powder company that she approves, has not responded to a request for comment, but still posts her photo on her website. She told The Daily Beast that she wanted to continue sharing her journey to health and healing, but not focusing so much on food.
In December, the vlogger created a separate Instagram account based on "a conscious life". He presents pictures of his frolics in the desert, showing his outfits and dancing with his husband, but none of his plate. It already has nearly 83,000 followers.
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