STL VegWeek 2027: Try Vegan for Earth Week in St. Louis
Monday, April 19 through Sunday, April 25, 2027 • Earth Day is Thursday, April 22 • St. Louis, MO
Hosted by VeganSTL.com / Project Animal Freedom.
STL VegWeek at a glance
What: St. Louis' free annual challenge to try vegan for Earth Week
When: Monday, April 19 through Sunday, April 25, 2027. Earth Day is Thursday, April 22. After that, every Earth Week.
Where: across the St. Louis region, at vegan restaurants, the Vegan Earth Day Market, community events, and your own kitchen
Cost: free. At restaurant meetups, you buy your own meal.
Who: everyone. You don't have to be vegan, and you don't have to know what tempeh is.
What you get: the free STL VegWeek Starter Kit, daily tips, restaurant meetups, event invitations, and a whole city trying alongside you
What is STL VegWeek?
STL VegWeek is St. Louis' annual seven-day challenge to try vegan during Earth Week, which we define as the Monday-to-Sunday week that Earth Day (April 22) falls on. In 2027, that's April 19–25.
For one week, VeganSTL and Project Animal Freedom invite the whole region to take environmental concern from something we believe to something we practice, three meals at a time. There's no test and no purity contest. Come for the climate, the animals, the food, the community, or plain curiosity. We'll help with the rest.
And if seven days turns into something more? Even better.
Earth Day is a vegan holiday. It just doesn't know it yet.
On April 22, 1970, some 20 million Americans filled streets, campuses, and parks for the first Earth Day. Before the year was out, the United States had created the EPA and passed the modern Clean Air Act. The Clean Water Act followed in 1972. When millions of ordinary people change what counts as normal, institutions follow.
More than half a century later, Earth Day asks us to plant trees, cut waste, save energy, drive less, and reuse more. All of that matters. But there's one environmental decision most of us make three times a day that still gets far less attention than it deserves: what we eat. That's where STL VegWeek begins.
What is a Vegan Earth Day?
A Vegan Earth Day is Earth Day celebrated without animal products: no meat, dairy, eggs, or fish. Try it for April 22, keep it up for Earth Week, or use Earth Day as the day you begin something that lasts.
The idea isn't that changing your lunch solves climate change by itself. It's that our food system uses staggering amounts of land, water, and energy, and animal agriculture accounts for an outsized share of those impacts. Changing what we eat is one of the biggest pieces of the response that any one person controls.
This isn't a fringe position. EARTHDAY.ORG, the organization behind the global Earth Day movement, runs a campaign called Foodprints for the Future that urges people to eat more plant-based food and rely less on animal agriculture. Here in St. Louis, the St. Louis Earth Day Festival in Forest Park, organized by earthday365, draws tens of thousands of people each April, has hosted an All Vegan Zone in its Earth Day Cafe, and has included eating vegetarian or vegan among its Earth Day Challenge actions.
The environmental movement is already talking about food. STL VegWeek gives St. Louis seven days to act on it.
Why try vegan for Earth Week?
No single number captures the environmental footprint of animal agriculture; it varies by food, farm, and country. But when researchers look at the global food system as a whole, the pattern is consistent: raising animals for food takes far more land and resources than growing plants for people to eat directly. Five examples:
1. Animal agriculture uses most of the world's farmland
Roughly three-quarters (about 77%) of global agricultural land goes to livestock, either as pasture or as cropland growing animal feed. In return, meat and dairy supply only about 18% of the world's calories and 37% of its protein. Feed a plant to an animal and eat the animal, and most of the energy in that plant never reaches a human plate. (Our World in Data, based on Poore & Nemecek, Science, 2018)
2. Livestock is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that livestock systems produced about 6.2 billion tons of CO2-equivalent in 2015, roughly 12% of all human-caused emissions. A separate global model published in Nature Food attributed 57% of food-production emissions to animal-based foods and 29% to plant-based foods. The estimates differ. The finding doesn't: animal agriculture is a major source of emissions. (FAO; Xu et al., Nature Food, 2021)
3. Beef drives more deforestation than any other commodity
A 2026 study in Nature Food traced deforestation to the commodities that caused it and found beef responsible for about 41% of commodity-driven forest loss from 2001 to 2023, mostly for cattle pasture, and mostly in Brazil. Forests store carbon, regulate water, and hold much of the life on Earth. What we eat decides whether they stay forests. (Singh & Persson, Nature Food, 2026, via Our World in Data)
4. Beef carries an enormous water footprint
The Water Footprint Network puts the global average water footprint of beef at about 15,400 liters per kilogram, roughly 1,850 gallons per pound. That figure counts rainwater along with irrigation and the water needed to dilute pollution, so it isn't 1,850 gallons from a tap. Beef is still uniquely water-intensive: on a calorie basis, the Water Footprint Network puts its global-average footprint at about 20 times that of cereals and starchy roots. (Water Footprint Network)
5. Our appetite reaches the oceans too
The FAO's 2025 assessment of 2,570 marine fish stocks, the most detailed ever, found 35.5% of them overfished, with overfishing rising about 1% a year. Warming, acidification, and pollution all press on the oceans. Fishing pressure is one part of that crisis that comes straight from what we choose to eat. (FAO, Review of the State of World Marine Fishery Resources 2025)
The gap between animal and plant foods is so large that lead author Joseph Poore of Oxford told The Guardian a vegan diet is "probably the single biggest way" one person can reduce their impact on the planet, across land use, water use, water pollution, acidification, and greenhouse gas emissions. The study behind that claim analyzed nearly 40,000 farms in 119 countries. (Poore & Nemecek, Science, 2018)
And St. Louis is connected to all of it
Look at the river. Just north of St. Louis, the Missouri meets the Mississippi, and from here the water flows south to the Gulf carrying nutrients from an enormous watershed. Excess nitrogen and phosphorus feed the Gulf's recurring dead zone, a stretch of water so starved of oxygen that fish and shrimp are driven out or killed. EPA modeling identifies agriculture, including fertilizer and manure, as the largest overall source of the nitrogen and phosphorus delivered to the Gulf.
In 2026, NOAA measured the dead zone at about 1,332 square miles, the second-smallest in 40 years. But Tropical Storm Bertha churned and oxygenated the water days before the survey, after NOAA had forecast a zone of more than 7,000 square miles. The more meaningful five-year average is 3,745 square miles, still nearly twice the federal goal of fewer than 1,900 square miles by 2035. (NOAA)
So when St. Louis talks about food, fertilizer, rivers, and climate, those aren't separate conversations. We live beside the artery that connects them.
What about the animals?
Environmentalism asks what kind of planet we're leaving behind. Veganism asks one more question: who gets to live on it?
About 83 billion land animals were slaughtered for meat worldwide in 2022, according to FAO data compiled by Our World in Data. Fish are counted by weight, not by life, so nobody knows their number exactly. A peer-reviewed estimate built from FAO catch data puts the number of wild fish caught at roughly 1.1 to 2.2 trillion a year on average from 2000 to 2019, and even that leaves out unrecorded catches and other sea animals like squid, crabs, and shrimp. (Mood & Brooke, Animal Welfare, 2024) The estimates are uncertain. The scale is not.
For the animals, veganism isn't a carbon strategy. It's a refusal to treat someone as an ingredient. That's what makes a Vegan Earth Day different from every other Earth Day action: it asks us to care not only about ecosystems and species, but about the individuals living inside them. The planet isn't an abstraction. It's somebody's home.
What happens during STL VegWeek
STL VegWeek is built on a simple idea: trying vegan should be social, local, practical, and fun. Not seven days of staring at lettuce. Three parts:
The Vegan Earth Day Market
STL Vegan Market, St. Louis' go-to vegan market, opens its season in April. In 2027, we're turning the April market into the Vegan Earth Day Market: St. Louis' first-ever Vegan Earth Day Market and the kickoff to STL VegWeek. Expect a lineup of local vegan vendors selling food, drinks, baked goods, cruelty-free personal care, art, clothing, home goods, and more. Free to attend, family-friendly, and the perfect place to stock your kitchen for the week. [FILL: date, time, venue] Vendor applications and updates: stlveganmarket.com.
The Vegan Earth Day Market is a VeganSTL / Project Animal Freedom event, separate from the St. Louis Earth Day Festival organized by earthday365. Go to both.
Vegan restaurant meetups all week long
The easiest way to discover vegan food is to stop treating it like homework. So we'll eat together. Throughout Earth Week, VeganSTL hosts meetups at vegan restaurants across the region: comfort food, brunch, international cuisine, sweets, whatever fits in seven days. Come alone, bring your family, or bring the friend who swears they could never give up cheese. Vegans, vegetarians, omnivores, and the vegan-curious are all welcome, and everyone buys their own meal.
Our Earth Day meetup on Thursday, April 22, and the rest of the 2027 schedule will be announced as events are confirmed. See the latest on our events calendar.
A free STL VegWeek Starter Kit
Sign up and we'll send you the STL VegWeek Starter Kit, built for people who want practical help, not lectures: simple vegan meals, plant protein, grocery shopping on a budget, veganizing the foods you already love, eating out in St. Louis, easy recipes for busy days, handling restaurants and social situations, finding local community, and what to do after day seven. During Earth Week we'll add one tip a day plus reminders of what's happening. [OPTIONAL: free online class]
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Everything you need to try vegan in St. Louis
You don't have to wait until April. VeganSTL maintains these all year:
STL Vegan Guide: vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants across the St. Louis region
Why Veganism?: the case for the animals, the planet, and people
Start Here: practical first steps without the jargon
Vegan Groups in St. Louis: community online and in person
Additional Resources: books, documentaries, apps, and more
Vegan Events: what's happening next
Your seven-day game plan
You don't need to reinvent your life on Monday morning. Start small.
Monday: Build your week. Open the starter kit, pick two or three meals you already like, find the easiest vegan version of each, and make one grocery trip.
Tuesday: Win breakfast. Oatmeal, a smoothie, avocado toast, cereal with oat milk, a tofu scramble. Breakfast is the easiest meal to veganize.
Wednesday: Cook something easy. Pasta, chili, tacos, a curry, a stir-fry. Skip the 37-ingredient recipe.
Thursday, Earth Day: Celebrate Vegan Earth Day. Join our Earth Day meetup, or pick your own spot from the STL Vegan Guide.
Friday: Veganize your favorite. Pizza, burgers, wings, tacos, ice cream. St. Louis has vegan versions of all of them. The goal isn't deprivation. It's discovery.
Saturday: Make it social. Bring someone to a meetup, try a new restaurant, meet somebody you didn't know on Monday. From community, all else follows.
Sunday: Ask one question. Not "Was I perfect?" Just: what could I keep doing next week? Then do that.
STL VegWeek is for you if you:
🌍 Care about the climate and want your everyday habits to match
🐷 Care about animals and have wondered what living those values could look like
🍔 Think vegan food sounds boring and would like St. Louis to prove you wrong
Curiosity is enough.
Restaurants, businesses, schools, and community groups
STL VegWeek should belong to the whole city, not just to VeganSTL.
Restaurants: run an Earth Week vegan special or spotlight the vegan dishes you already serve
Vegan businesses: apply to vend at the Vegan Earth Day Market
Environmental organizations: share STL VegWeek with your supporters or co-host an event
Schools and campus groups: challenge your members to try one vegan day, or all seven
Employers: host a plant-based lunch or share the free challenge with your team
Faith communities: host a vegan potluck or a conversation about stewardship and compassion
We have 23,000+ followers across our St. Louis-focused social platforms, and we'd love to point that audience at the businesses and groups taking part. Email info@veganstl.com.
Who runs STL VegWeek?
STL VegWeek is created by VeganSTL.com, a division of Project Animal Freedom, a Missouri-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2018. We don't parachute into St. Louis once a year to run a campaign. We're here all year.
Project Animal Freedom organized 56 events in the St. Louis region in 2025 and is on track for more than 70 in 2026. In January 2026, 768 people signed up for our St. Louis Veganuary Challenge. We run STL Vegan Market, STL VegMonth every November, and community groups and meetups year-round, and VeganSTL.com launched in February 2025 to give the city one locally maintained home for vegan restaurants, events, groups, and education.
We hire local vegan businesses to cater our events, we spend our budget in this community, and our long-term vision is a fully vegan Midwest by 2056, one heart, one mind, one stomach at a time. STL VegWeek is one week in that much longer story. Read about VeganSTL and our Editorial Standards.
A note on our environmental claims
We'd rather be accurate than dramatic. The figures on this page are global estimates from major research institutions and peer-reviewed studies; impacts vary by food, farm, and place, and no single statistic means every plant product beats every animal product on every measure. The larger pattern is strongly supported: diets built on plants generally require fewer resources and impose lower environmental burdens than diets built on animal products, especially beef. We review this page as new evidence appears.
Sources used: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization; NOAA; the U.S. EPA; EARTHDAY.ORG; earthday365; Our World in Data; the Water Footprint Network; and peer-reviewed studies in Science, Nature Food, and Animal Welfare.
Upcoming STL VegWeek events
A few highlights. See the full calendar for everything.
Frequently asked questions
When is STL VegWeek 2027?
Monday, April 19 through Sunday, April 25, 2027. Earth Day is Thursday, April 22. Future editions run the Monday-to-Sunday week that Earth Day falls on.
What is Earth Week?
Earth Week has no single official definition; some groups count the seven days ending on Earth Day. STL VegWeek uses the Monday-through-Sunday week containing Earth Day so the whole city has one clear challenge. In 2027, that's April 19–25.
What is a Vegan Earth Day?
Earth Day celebrated without animal products: no meat, dairy, eggs, or fish. Take it for the day, keep it for Earth Week, or make it the start of something longer.
Do I have to be vegan already?
No. STL VegWeek is built for people who aren't vegan yet. You don't have to commit forever before you begin. Try seven days and see what you learn.
Is STL VegWeek free?
Yes. Signing up, the starter kit, the challenge, and the Vegan Earth Day Market are all free. At restaurant meetups, you buy your own food.
Where can I find vegan restaurants in St. Louis?
Start with the STL Vegan Guide, VeganSTL's locally maintained guide to vegan and vegan-friendly food across the region, then join a restaurant meetup so you don't have to go alone.
Is eating vegan actually better for the environment?
Across the global food system, plant foods generally require less land and generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions than animal foods, particularly beef. Exact footprints depend on what's compared and where it's produced, so we don't claim every vegan product wins on every metric. The overall evidence for shifting diets toward plants is strong.
How is STL VegWeek different from Veganuary and STL VegMonth?
Same mission, three seasons. Veganuary in January is the global month-long challenge with a St. Louis twist. STL VegWeek in April is the spring sprint tied to Earth Day. STL VegMonth in November is our month-long campaign for World Vegan Month. Together they give St. Louis three chances a year to try vegan with real support. All three are part of the Gateway to Compassion Challenge, our year-round campaign to inspire vegan living in and around St. Louis.
Is STL VegWeek affiliated with EARTHDAY.ORG or earthday365?
No. STL VegWeek is a VeganSTL / Project Animal Freedom initiative. EARTHDAY.ORG leads the global Earth Day movement, and earthday365 independently organizes the St. Louis Earth Day Festival. We cite their plant-based and environmental work because it's directly relevant, but no partnership or endorsement is implied unless we announce one.
Is the Vegan Earth Day Market the same as the St. Louis Earth Day Festival?
No. The Vegan Earth Day Market is the April edition of STL Vegan Market, run by Project Animal Freedom, and it may fall a little before Earth Week itself. The St. Louis Earth Day Festival is a separate, much larger sustainability festival in Forest Park run by earthday365. Both belong in a great Earth Week in St. Louis.
Can my restaurant, business, school, or group take part?
Yes. Restaurants can create Earth Week specials, vegan businesses can apply to vend at the market, and groups can promote the challenge, organize group participation, or propose a collaboration. Email info@veganstl.com.
Ready to try vegan this Earth Week?
You don't need to solve climate change in seven days. You don't need to know every answer. You don't need to promise us forever. Just give yourself one week to ask a different question at breakfast, lunch, and dinner: what if there were a kinder way to eat?
From April 19 through April 25, St. Louis is going to find out together.
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Seven days. One city. For the Earth. For the animals.
Until every animal is free. Until every Earth Day is vegan.
Written by Kyle Luzynski, Founder & Executive Director of Project Animal Freedom and editor of VeganSTL.com. Research reviewed: September 3, 2026.