18A - Retired Ladies who do Yoga in the Morning

For this assignment, I wanted to create an avatar that reflected vegetarians in the US, not myself. Although I am an American vegetarian, I don't want my target audience to be skewed in my mind to all be exactly like me. I looked up some stats on vegetarianism in the US, and found that 59% are female, 57% were vegetarian for 10+ years, and 42% are ages 18-34 years old. 54% of vegetarians said they chose the diet because they cared about animal welfare, 53% of vegetarians are on the diet for health improvement, while 47% are vegetarian to help the environment. Ranked, Portland has the most amount of vegetarian or vegan restaurants (and no Florida cities make the top 10 list). Single people are twice as likely to be vegetarian. Minorities are more likely to be vegetarian (black people the most) than white people, and the average vegetarian's income is below average, surprisingly.




I pictured an average vegetarian based on this data. My avatar is a young (25 years old, 40 years wise), afro-Latina, liberal woman living in a solid blue state like Oregon, NY, or California. She's an eco-warrior and an animal rights activist, and cares about staying in shape and eating healthy. She's been a vegetarian for over ten years (since she was 15). She loves yoga, meditation, and is a cinephile. She likes cooking and knows how to cook many Latino dishes adapted to her vegetarian diet. She voted for Obama and HRC, and attended the Women's March in her city. She drives a used blue Prius. She's single (with no kids) and focusing on her career. She likes Supernatural, Gossip Girl, The Incredible Jessica James, and anything Marvel. She saw Black Panther 4 times in theaters.

What I have in common with my avatar is that we're both young, liberal, single, career-focused women. I think that makes sense, considering the statistics I focused on. The only statistic I didn't fit in regards to what most vegetarians are is that I'm white/Latina. White people have lower rates of vegetarianism than minorities, so in that aspect I'm actually the outlier (although I am also half-Ecuadorian, so I'm not sure whether I would could in the Latina section or the white section). What surprised me is that vegetarians don't tend to be more well-off than omnivores. Once I thought about it though, if most vegetarians are singles just starting out in their careers living in expensive cities, it also kind of makes sense that they have a below-average household income.

Sources for my stats:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/hal-herzog/vegetarians_b_8059838.html

https://www.vegetariantimes.com/uncategorized/vegetarianism-in-america

https://www.statisticbrain.com/vegetarian-statistics/