Table of Contents
The familiar friend
It begins, as it always must, with a straight address to camera – glassy brown eyes that gaze perhaps directly into the soul of the audience. “I’m not here to listen to your arguments or opinions,” said Jon Venus as he announced his departure from veganism in his heartfelt video “I am no longer vegan”. This turned out to be not entirely true, as he would end up listening to quite a lot of the arguments and opinions that were thrown his way in the immediate wake of his coming out party. More on that later.
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For now though, the moment permits us a “hello, old friend!” to that very familiar cultural firing squad we call the No Longer Vegan Announcement. It’s like parking yourself in your favourite chair, slipping into your favourite pair of slippers, pouring yourself a glass of your favourite cognac and switching on your least favourite TV show that you are somehow still watching after all these years. You know what’s coming, the stories never vary but still you return. In years to come, psychologists will write bestsellers on all this. I can hardly wait.
Who is Jon Penus?
I’m not gonna lie to you, man. I didn’t know this dude existed before he opened his yap the other week. Research reveals he made his bones in the vegan bodybuilding and personal training niche. This means that he spends a great deal of his life with his top off, especially when it’s unnecessary, impractical and inappropriate. He even spent a significant portion of his wedding to Mrs Venus, Kathrine, topless. “In the name of God put some clothes on,” one might say to him. “It looks needy and gives the strong impression that you’re using your weird hairless Action Man torso as a prop when you don’t actually have anything interesting to say.”
But he’s not here to listen to you or your opinions and why would he be? Currently clocking up 371,000 subscribers on YouTube, 200,000 Instagram followers and 81,000 Facebook likes, Jon has no need of your counsel, good or bad. Mock him all you want for his increasingly ridiculous Charles Atlas poses on the Gram. The market has delivered its verdict and that verdict is that he produces worthy, relatable content with significant appeal. You can just chortle his waxed balls if you think that this is some kind of collaborative space between influencer and audience. Jon is going for delf.
Crass confusion
He begins his mea cunta telling us that that nutrition is a confusing and “not really understood” topic. One study could mean one thing to one person, he explains, and something entirely different to another. It is true that a complex subject can be confusing. But “not really understood”? By you, maybe, but that’s likely to apply to a large chunk of human knowledge. The difficulties and nuances of science are part of its strength. ‘Smoking Causes Cancer’ on fag packets didn’t just drop down from the sky one day. It came as a result of incremental gains, furiously and fraudulently challenged by the diseased tobacco lobby via their cunt-for-hire shills. Every study, whether it supports the vegan diet or not, should be subject to peer review, challenge and rebuttal. Science is contested and communal by design. This is something that you have “not really understood”.
‘Smoking Causes Cancer’ on fag packets came as a result of incremental gains, furiously and fraudulently challenged by the diseased tobacco lobby via their cunt-for-hire shills.
He continues that “we are all trying to come from a place of compassion and love and trying to make the world a better place,” which will come as a shock to those of us who are in it for the poontang and the clout. Becoming a father two years ago really changed his perspective. Could you really raise a child healthily on a vegan diet, he wondered. He complains about vegans living in a bubble (fair enough) and worries about getting a neutral point of view on the key issues. OK, but what about the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics?[efn_note] Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets – Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics [/efn_note] You know the drill by now:
“It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.”
All stages of the life-cycle, Jon! Junior’s gonna be fine! Fantastic news – you’re in the clear! Put that lamb chop away you big daftie and get your laughing gear round this Impossible Sausage. “Big organisations like the American Dietetic Association,” he mumbles. Sorry, what was that buddy? The American Dietetic Association, the former name of the aforementioned Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals who just gave you the all-clear on the vegan diet? What about them?
“After looking into the Dietetic Association, you know, corporate ties – different corruptions that are going on.”
OOOOOOOK, expand on that?
NARRATOR: He did not expand on that.
Corrupted files
Look, I know what you’re thinking. “Ahahahahaha! What a thick bag of shit. He seriously expects us to believe that he’s done in-depth research into the problem of food industry funding of food science and concluded that the kale lobby is the culprit, unmasked, Scooby Doo villain style, by him and his shit brain?” Let’s take a look at the Academy’s 2019 annual report[efn_note] 2019 Annual report – Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics [/efn_note] where they declare their sponsors and funding sources. Which vegan giants have they got them on their payroll? Let’s see: National Dairy Council®, Egg Nutrition Center, The a2 Milk Company™, Quaker (parent company: PepsiCo), Colgate-Palmolive, Campbell Soup Company. Hm. Doesn’t look too promising. Wait! There it is in black-and-white: Potatoes USA. Jon was right all along and we were hoodwinked by Big Spud.
I think we can safely file that one away under “STFU you deluded himbo” and move on. Even muntjac killing nonce Ted Nugent at his worst never tried to claim that there were all kinds of corruptions forcing devious scientists to suppress anti-vegan studies. This is about as busted a flush is it’s possible to hold. What exactly is going on with this dude?
In your nature
To be honest, it’s gripping. You wonder what fresh hell he will conjure up next. Disappointingly, he reverts to the classics and slams on that stalwart dancefloor filler, the appeal to nature fallacy. He worries about changing an eating pattern that’s been going on for thousands, maybe millions of years. That one has been dealt with and dismissed so many times you feel embarrassed at the need to do it again. In a nutshell: Captain Caveman had to kill to survive. We do not.[efn_note] The Paleo Movement and the New Naturalistic Fallacy – Big Think[/efn_note] Expect to see Jon on every dipshit ancestral health/paleo podcast for the next two years, sat opposite some Jordan Peterson groupie neckbeard.
He’s already struggling and it’s at this point he chooses to hit the emotional centre of his argument. Not torturing animals is all very well but what about the family? He says he has some question marks because of his “real life observations” and nutritional deficiencies in people “very, very close to me”. He doesn’t have specifics, of course, because the specifics would be scrutinised and found lacking. This is confirmed when he outs his wife in a later video – more of which anon.
“If I’m not comfortable with my kid being vegan, I cannot continue with that lifestyle myself,” he says as if that is the only possible option. Why? There’s no logical link between those two things, even if it were a fact that children needed animal products to survive. Cats are obligate carnivores [efn_note] Why Can’t My Cat Be Vegan? – ASPCA [/efn_note]– should vegan cat owners then chow down on Whiskas®?
Clarified nutter
In a follow-up video, Jon tries to address some of the confusion he created with the first, in the well-meaning manner of a toddler emptying a can of kerosene onto the fire he just started. He is joined in the enterprise by Kathrine who quickly tells the viewers that she won’t try and justify things because people will try and twist and turn what they say no matter what. John chuckles along all “tell me about it!”. They then spend the rest of the video justifying things they just said they weren’t going to. They may look like that couple you can’t get rid of on holiday who talk about Bilderberg, Bill Gates and the coronavirus hoax but Jon assures us they are coming from a place of “compassion, positivity and understanding” which is as encouraging a signal as I can imagine.
Let’s get into the specifics. Mrs Venus is revealed as the person “very, very close” to Jon with some deficiencies (no jokes at the back, please). She took a blood test and was a little low in vitamin A and on the lower side of vitamin K. She acknowledges this is not necessarily because of the vegan diet and even concedes that she “didn’t even get concerned” about it which might prompt a curious person to ask why it’s being mentioned.
As you would expect, she took a vitamin K supplement and focused on getting reliable sources of beta-carotene (the vitamin A precursor) in her diet. So, it sounds like Kathrine got a bit sloppy with her supplementation, noticed it and corrected it. In fact, she wasn’t even concerned about it. That makes two of us. It’s very easy to get beta-carotene on a plant-based diet. Firstly, from squash, spinach, sweet potato or chard, among others. You would have to be a real scrub to not already be getting it from your existing diet. And if you’re not, get it from a shitty dirt-cheap daily multivitamin from Savers which will also take care of your B12, K1, iron, zinc, copper, magnesium and selenium.
Then Jon pipes up to reiterate his objection to B12 supplements. Good God, this is entry-level stuff. Handling B12 as a vegan has been dealt with so many times[efn_note] What Every Vegan Should Know About Vitamin B12 – Vegan Society [/efn_note] it’s sickening. Meat eaters are already eating the B12 supplements pumped into cows so avoiding supplementation on some obtuse principle is a nonstarter. Not so long ago, a barechested influencer tackled the subject, in fact. “Get educated people”, indeed.
All I do each night is prey
Jon and Kathrine stress they are are trying to source everything locally – growing their own vegetables and foraging in the Norwegian forests like the skogkatt. Well, that’s something. Best of all, they will be capturing and killing their own meat. Wait, what? That’s right folks. Like Tim “Cow Killer” Shieff, Jon Venus has segued from vegan to animal murderer in three shakes of the lamb’s tail he is using to choke it to death with. He plans to stalk and kill as many defenceless animals as he can eat. That, in the modern vernacular, escalated quickly.
Mic the Vegan points out that Mrs Venus, Kathrine, comes from a hunting family and this is clearly more of an influence than previously thought. Jon sees himself becoming part of the ecosystem not, as most of us will, by our decomposing bodies providing nitrates for the soil, but by starting up as an unsolicited freelance population controller. Jon announces that the deer hangouts in his neck of the woods are overpopulated, offering no citation because none exists. At this point he’s Joe Rogan without any of the redeeming features.
Like Tim “Cow Killer” Shieff, Jon Venus has segued from vegan to animal murderer in three shakes of the lamb’s tail he is using to choke it to death with.
And he seems incredibly happy about the whole business. Say what you will about Rawvana and Bonny Rebecca (and I have), but at least they felt sincerely bad about their deceptions and seemed to genuinely try to stick to a vegan diet throughout their health problems. Not so for Jon. For him it’s just another step on his wonderful journey where self-discovery and self-promotion are merely two halves of an indivisible whole. How might his magnificent carnivore experiment go?
“Maybe you go back to having acne and being constipated,” Kathrine jokes, the way wives do when they want to humiliate their husbands under the guise of a shared private joke.
“I doubt it!” he says, giving her a look that says ‘the fuck did you say that for?? I’m doing this for you!!!!’
Incidentally, he uploaded another video, since deleted, shot from a room presumably inside Kathrine’s family home, the walls strewn with the heads of killed animals – elk, wendigo, moose, deer – all the antlers lads. It seems that this was his attempt at being an edgelord, trolling vegan sensibilities like that heart-eating wanker. Still coming from “a place of compassion and love”, Jon?
Suboptimal thinking
No one is going to claim that Jon and Kathrine are geniuses but they are being quite clever in how they frame this. Much like Dominic Cummings when he used his child as human shield to deflect criticism of him breaking lockdown to twat around a castle like a little bitch, the Venuses have used their status as parents as a reason for their change in diet.
This puts the critics in a difficult position. Who doesn’t want the best for their child? How can you condemn an infant to malnutrition and even death like those sick fucks we saw last year? The answer of course is that you can criticise them quite well without doing that. The false dichotomy they draw is obvious. They spend some time hammering the idea that we do not know for certain if a vegan diet is optimal. On this, I absolutely agree. To declare that with any certainty would require rigorous long-term replicated studies and those simply don’t exist. I’ll tell you something else – I don’t need to know that it is the optimal diet. I just need to know that it is healthy, something the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has helpfully cleared up for me. Jon Venus knows this. That is why he’s hammering this ridiculous conspiratorial nonsense about the Academy being bought off by shadowy chia seeds interests.
Vacant lot
It’s all so desperate. One of the good things about having preening narcissists like Jon in the vegan sphere is they get a lot of eyes on the issue and we can’t afford to be snotty about where we get our converts. One of the bad things about having preening narcissists like Jon in the vegan sphere is that we’re always going to get moments like this, where the essential self-centredness of their characters are laid bare and it’s pretty grisly to watch.
You could argue that, purely on an individual level, it’s great that Mr and Mrs Venus are predominantly vegan (Mrs Venus says she is 95-98% plant-based throughout the day) – that’s way above average. As I grow tired of saying though, once you’re in the public eye, making your living from your vegan lifestyle and influencing like influencers do, you have a responsibility to not be a crass schlemiel who sways people in exactly the wrong direction. And Jon has failed miserably in that responsibility. With the amount of moose he’s currently slaughtering, I’d say that the 95-98% estimation is on the generous side.
“Friends have divorced themselves from me,” he says and it’s surprising that he’s surprised by this. Venus always claimed to be an ethical vegan but when you watch his videos you realise that everything is “for me”, “in my experience” and “on my journey”. He gets increasingly tetchy when people disagree with him. Hench Herbivore, who appears to have had a positive relationship with Venus in the past, repeatedly challenges[efn_note] Jon Venus Quits Veganism Response – Hench Herbivore YouTube channel[/efn_note] Venus to name the essential nutrients for human adults or children that are not available on a plant-based diet. Hench will be waiting a long time as no such nutrients exists. The realisation slowly dawns on Jon that he can not get by on his looks, as he has his entire life. Unsubstantiated generalisations and simpering inspo speak are suddenly being challenged. Answering difficult questions with a smile and a front lat spread will no longer do.
His vacant heart and barren mind are exposed. Joey Carbstrong called Venus an airhead. He’s not wrong.