Sociological research has uncovered a general derogation of vegans in all levels of society including the personal (MacInnis and Hodson 2017), the institutional (Greenebaum 2016), and the cultural (Cole and Morgan 2011). This negativity has been identified as a key barrier to vegan transition (Markowski and Roxburgh 2019). It is a particular nuisance given the litany of inequalities associated with nonvegan consumption (“natural” disasters and zoonotic outbreaks like COVID-19 included).
Given that vegan claimsmaking directly challenges established power structures and capitalist interests, vegan stigmatization and derision is perhaps predictable. Nonetheless, veganism has managed to gain a foothold on the popular imagination: vegan options continually increase in availability across stores and restaurants, while, each year, growing numbers of participants register for vegan challenges (such as the UK’s Veganuary and the Afro Vegan Society’s Veguary). The public seems to be considerably more educated about the treatment of other animals in speciesist industries and the relationship between speciesism and climate change (Sanchez-Sabate and Sabaté 2019).
This increased attention is remarkable given that traditional news spaces have historically been antagonistic. Critical Animal Studies scholars have observed that the media frequently protects the interests of the powerful, particularly as media conglomeration has concentrated ownership among a small number of elites. For this reason, social movements that counter power inequities are often misrepresented or outright ignored in mainstream media (Earl et al. 2004, Hocke 1999). This power is not absolute, however, and media producers must negotiate, to some extent, with their consumers.
Having persisted for over a century, veganism has become a cultural mainstay of interest to audiences regardless of the historical misrepresentation or invisibilization of veganism. How have mainstream news channels adapted? To address this, I conducted an exploratory analysis of mainstream UK newspapers to survey the new normal of vegan ideology in a post-COVID society. Results were published in Human-Animal Relationships in Times of Pandemic and Climate Crisis (Browne & Sutton 2024). I expected that the time transpired since previous analyses in tandem with the mobilizing moment that the pandemic offered would result in a substantially different media discourse. I conducted a content analysis of articles mentioning veganism published in 2020, the first full year of COVID-19.
In contrast to the more pessimistic findings uncovered by research conducted in the 2010s, the results of this study find a mediascape that is vegan curious and generally supportive of plant-based living. Veganism is predominantly presented in a positive light, especially with regard to goods to buy, restaurants to visit and festivals to patronize. Today’s veganism is a more or less normal contender in the marketplace, at least as presented by British newspapers.
This monetized lifestyle veganism was predominantly detached from the pandemic. Although the sample used in this study encapsulated the COVID-19 crisis, much of the vegan coverage appears to have been following the momentum of the pre-existing normalization of veganism and the substantial upward trend in vegan product development and availability. Some articles did mention COVID-19, but these largely related to the space the pandemic created for testing new products or launching new services.
A few articles mentioned COVID-19 as a motivator for trying veganism or at least consuming more vegan food, and this is consistent with the heightened public attention to health, homesteading and hobbying associated with the pandemic. However, the importance of veganism for preventing pandemics (and strengthening resistance to disease) could have been emphasized, but was not.
Veganism as a solution to climate change actually surfaced more than veganism as a solution to pandemics. The somewhat ambiguous concept of climate change offers a considerably more generic frame than the pandemic and, notably, climate change is also consistent with ‘green’ capitalism’s sustainable growth (consumption-centric) model. Perhaps COVID-19 represents a missed opportunity for campaigners, but it is more likely that veganism understood as a site of resistance to zoonotic disease is considerably more political and thus harder to monetize – at least for the time being.
Ultimately, the focus on vegan products and dietary practices has created a depoliticized image of veganism. Critical discussions of non-human animal rights and speciesism were noticeably absent in the sample, while the capitalist encroachment on veganism was omnipresent. Approximately half of the articles in the sample related to vegan products or services.
More on this study can be found here.
References
Browne, J. and Z. Sutton. Eds. (2024). Human-Animal Relationships in Times of Pandemic and Climate Crisis. London: Routledge.
Cole, M. and Morgan, K. (2011). Veganphobia: Derogatory discourses of veganism and the reproduction of speciesism in UK national newspapers. The British Journal of Sociology, 62(1), 134–53.
Earl, J., Martin, A., McCarthy, J. and Soule, S. (2004). The use of newspaper data in the study of collective action. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 65–80.
Greenebaum, J. (2016). Questioning the concept of vegan privilege: A commentary. Humanity & Society, 4(1), 355–72.
Hocke, P. (1999). Determining the selection bias in local and national newspaper reports on protest. In D. Rucht, R. Koopmans and F. Niedhardt (eds), Acts of Dissent: New Developments in the Study of Protest, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
MacInnis, C. and Hodson, G. (2017). It ain’t easy eating greens: Evidence of bias toward vegetarians and vegans from both source and target. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 20(6), 721–44.
Markowski, K. and Roxburgh, S. (2019). ‘If I became a vegan, my family and friends would hate me’: Anticipating vegan stigma as a barrier to plant-based diets. Appetite, 135, 1–9.
Sanchez-Sabate, R. and Sabaté, J. (2019). Consumer attitudes towards environmental concerns of meat consumption: A systemic review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(7), 1220.
Readers can learn more about the politics of veganism in my 2016 publication, A Rational Approach to Animal Rights.
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