Icelandic Facebook Groups: Vegan Ísland

Vegan Ísland was selected for this issue’s spotlight due to some beautiful drama that went down there only last week. Drama that will illustrate better than anything why Iceland’s Facebook culture is so irresistible. Sit down. Grab some popcorn (no butter). Here’s the recap:

First, remember that Iceland has 320,000 people and that 120,000 of those people live in Reykjavík. The Vegan Ísland group contains 15,000, meaning that if a member, say, calls out one of the only “vegetarian-friendly” restaurants in Iceland, the owner of that restaurant might also be a member.

Such was the fate for Vigdís Ósk Howser Hardardóttir—who has given us permission to use her name—when she decided to post a rant decrying the “vegetarian” chain restaurant Gló. For context, Gló calls itself a vegetarian/vegan restaurant, but it also has chicken and beef on the menu. The TL;DR of Vigdís’s post is that Gló used pictures of chicken in their paid Facebook ads and Vigdis did not want to see images of what she described as “dissected corpses slathered in cream sauce” on her Facebook wall.

Only seven hours later, a representative of Gló responded inviting Vigdís and other interested parties to visit their kitchens in order to get a better idea of how their food was being prepared. Vidgís immediately fired back that she would go to the kitchens only if they would take her to the slaughterhouses as well. Then they sort of fought back and forth for a while.

Anyway, this whole situation made national Icelandic news with articles on all major Icelandic news outlets. Yes, this is a true fact. Facebook is no joke in Iceland. I mean, hey—you’re reading this.

Read more ‘Icelandic Facebook Group’ posts here.