Buyer’s

Steak out…
In step with its conviction environmentalism more than Morrissey’s
‘meat is murder’ mandate, boutique Northamptonshire festival
Shambala has announced its 2016 edition will be vegetarian.
Event Industry News talks to festival co-founder Chris Johnson.
From line-up to makeup, festivals reflect the wants of their target ticketbuyers, the broader
the stretch, arguably, the greater the potential return. Shambala, however, has three other,
equally core, ingredients: education, education, education. Once you stop learning, you
start dying, after all, and a lesson in the broad arc of environmental best practice is a
laudable legacy from music festivals’ alternative roots.
According to the Shambala website http://www.shambalafestival.org/meat-and-fishfree-for-2016/
the meat industry is responsible for more greenhouse emissions than the
combined exhaust fumes from all global transportation. ‘It’s also becoming more widely
accepted that it is unhealthy to consume meat in the way that we are’.
Launched in 1999, the now 10,000-capacity Shambala has been described as ‘hippyish’
by the Guardian, thanks to its green commitment rather than any propensity for flares
and slippers. In step with that lazy stereotype, this year the festival has been productively
stealing the headlines by taking meat and fish off the menu, entirely. Its audience, typically
20/30-somethings, are used to the leftfield and reaction has
been broadly positive, so far at least.
“There was a bit of chat on Facebook and we had to refund
three people, but it’s four days of your life and you can
choose to come or not,” Chris Johnson tells Event Industry
News. “Shambala has always been about exploring ethics
and this is a principled look at how we’re living and the
impact of the industrial food system.
“It’s too easy to say we’re taking our audience with us, or
anything glib like that. It’s a real challenge to persuade them,
even about something like recycling. They’re at the festival
to have a good time, pure and simple. So it’s up to us as
the organisers to make it as easy as possible to take the
right decision in terms of our festival’s principles.”
Green fingers
The vegetarian step comes on the back of
a run of successes with slightly less radical
initiatives. Johnson and company have worked
their way through the event’s impact and now
use 100 per cent renewables for energy, by
way of example. As a result, Shambala costs
significantly less to run than when it started.
“Our generators are on for a fraction of the
time of most festivals this size because we’ve
reached out to the end user and found out
exactly what power they need,” Johnson says.
“We’ve always been determined to keep on
moving forwards with our ideals, and that has
provoked a lot of debate. We had the highest
reach in terms of social media when we
announced the vegetarian step, which shows
these risks can be worth taking.”
Johnson, to his credit, is acutely aware that removing Shambala-goers’ right to choose what they eat could
be the ultimate political faux pas, but there’s no compromise, just a quality commitment.
“The pressure now is on us,” he says. “Can we provide a delicious, affordable vegetarian menu? That’s what
we have to do to make this idea pay real dividend.
“We have always had stringent standards about food sold on site, using specific wholesalers with an onus
on organic procurement,” Johnson adds. “It’s difficult to monitor the complete supply chain, to be 100 per
cent confident about the food on a festival site, but I’m quite open, in the future, to reintroducing meat to the
Shambala equation, if it’s of the very highest order. A standard, which will be reflected in the price. That, I
think, is the way to open people’s eyes to the real impact of the meat process and the cost of making it fit a
sustainable model.”
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