“Dining on Grass and Shrubs”: Making Vegan Food Sexy

Abstract

The media are filled with anti-vegan statements, grouping vegans together with other left-leaning activists who are portrayed as radical extremists, too unusual, too radical for anyone to accept.² One recent Toronto Star writer observed, “If you’re like me … vegans, yoga nuts, and people who eat only organic food might as well be from another planet” (“The Week” D16). When taken to a vegan restaurant, another commentator grumbled, “I hate hippie food” (Musgrave G6). If writers do not complain about “hippie food,” they sneer at the presumed superior attitude of vegans. In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004, Jon Carroll observed he felt contempt for “the concept of veganism and vegans themselves. Vegans … were people who were too snotty to be vegetarians” (D10). Writing for The National Review in 2003, Jonah Goldberg was similarly negative as he described his experiences when he tried veganism for one week: “From either ethical or health motives, vegans dont eat anything remotely associated with the meat-industrial complex. This means not just beef, fish, chicken, etc., but all forms of dairy, including butter, cream, and cheese. This qualifies vegans as an orthodox sect of the wider religion of vegetarianism and, hence, often a bit arrogant toward their lesser brethren… . Many of them are indistinguishable from the nuttier animal-rights crowd” (36). He described the vegan food industry as “large, booming, and strange” (36).

Barnard and Kramer 11.