He began his career as a model, but quickly turned to acting. He starred in multiple popular shows, like Baywatch and Game of Thrones, but he’s most known for his role as Aquaman. Besides being a successful actor, he also writes, directs, and produces. But is Jason Momoa vegan?
No, Jason Momoa is not vegan. Although he has spoken up for the environment and even against specific instances of animal cruelty, he still eats meat. He also consumes and uses other animal products. Apart from that, he’s into fishing, and he has used a captive bear for entertainment once.
Jason’s diet
Jason changes his diet depending on whether he’s preparing for a role or not. When he is, he unfortunately eats a lot of meat. He has summarized his regimen like this: “Just eat my meat, drink my Guinness and lift some heavy weights.”
Of course, his training requires him to increase his protein intake, but he doesn’t need meat for this. The incorrect idea that meat is better for building muscle than plant-based food is still common in the fitness world, and Jason has likely bought into that as well.
Jason’s environmental efforts
Jason actually studied marine biology and wildlife biology before he got into acting. And even though he didn’t graduate and never worked in this field, he has remained interested in it.
He has spoken up about the environment on various occasions, most notably at the United Nations’ Small Island Event in 2019. In his speech, he mentioned three main problems: “Entire marine ecosystems are vanishing with the warming of the seas,” “entire islands are drowning into the sea,” and “as the waste of the world empties into our waters, we face the devastating crisis of plastic pollution.”
According to Jason, the main culprits are “the enormous volume of emissions generated by the first world countries” and pollution of the seas. He said we need “global unity for a global crisis, to once again bring harmony between mankind and the natural balance of our world. … We can no longer afford the luxury of half-assing it as we willingly force ourselves beyond the threshold of no return.”
He thinks that, as consumers, we should focus on minimizing our use of single use plastic and switch to reusable water bottles and 100 percent recyclable aluminum cans. He even started a company to stimulate this transition.
What Jason is overlooking
Jason’s environmental efforts are commendable, but the fact that he still consumes animal products indicates a significant blind spot.
We have no nutritional need for animal products. And worldwide, plant-based food provides 83 percent of all our calories, while animal products only provide 17 percent. But the animal industries occupy almost a third of all land on earth. That’s more land than the area of Russia, the United States, and Canada combined for industries we don’t need.
By taking land from nature to produce animal products, we’ve ended up in a situation where 96 percent of all mammals are either humans or animals kept in captivity by us, only 4 percent are wild. The situation for birds isn’t much better, 70 percent of all birds live in captivity and only 30 percent are wild. The animal industries also drive deforestation, and production of animal products also requires significantly more water and fuel than producing plant-based products.
In terms of pollution, the animal industries are one of the major sources of the “enormous volume of emissions” Jason referenced, and they produce a lot of excrement. That excrement often finds its way into rivers and oceans and is a main factor in creating the 500 ocean dead zones that we currently have. And of course, that’s not the only way the animal industries impact the seas. They also kill over a billion fish and other aquatic animals every single day.
So, unfortunately, as long as Jason hasn’t given up animal products, he’s still “half-assing it” as an environmentalist.
Jason’s wife and companion animals
Jason is married to actress Lisa Bonet, who used to be married to Lenny Kravitz and is the mother of Zoë Kravitz. Lisa adopted a plant-based diet decades ago, after reading Diet for a New America, and she even appeared on national television in 1990 to inform people about the benefits. She told the audience that she was raising Zoë on a plant-based diet, and she also mentioned that the rainforest was being chopped down for hamburgers. But despite her passion at the time, she later, unfortunately, went back to eating animal products.
Jason and Lisa have multiple companion animals. They have goats, two wolfdogs, and a donkey. So, Jason clearly enjoys the company of animals.
Animal cruelty
Jason has also condemned animal cruelty on multiple occasions. For instance, he has said that he has an aversion to hunting for pure sport. And when a video went viral of two fishermen who had filmed themselves cutting a shark’s tail off before releasing the shark back into the water to suffer and die, Jason wrote them the following message:
“And there you are……it sucks to see that you are probably good men friends providers fathers but you fucking did this. Your life will forever change I have never in my life seen something so cruel. Your laugh makes me furious never have I wanted to hurt a human as much as I did when I heard your laugh and what u said. This will change you and hopefully you will save and protect I pray you find redemption. we all make mistakes but what u did was evil PURE EVIL. You will get what that shark got. FUCK YOU j”
So he takes a strong stand against animal cruelty. But, at the same time, he engages in it himself. Not just by paying the animal industries to kill animals on his behalf, but also personally.
He catches fish, kills them, and eats them. And even though he has no nutritional need for animal products and isn’t in any way in a survival situation, he doesn’t label the needless killing of these fish as “sport” or “evil.”
He has also been criticized for appearing on the show See with a real bear instead of a CGI bear, and subsequently using the bear for a promotional video. In the video, he lets the bear eat a cookie out of his mouth. Bears who are used to perform in the entertainment industry have usually suffered a lifetime of abuse, and the specific outfit that provided this bear has been cited numerous times by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act. Despite being criticized for it, Jason didn’t take the video down.
Jason’s inconsistencies
Unfortunately, there’s no way around the conclusion that Jason is inconsistent. On the one hand, he seems to care about animals and the environment, but on the other hand, he directly supports the industries that kill animals and contribute significantly to the environmental problems we face. And he kills animals himself.
Hopefully, he becomes aware of his inconsistencies and learns how easy it is to go vegan and still build muscle.
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