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The geographies of veganism:
Exploring the complex
entanglements of places, plants,
peoples, and profits through
vegan food practices
Agatha Herman and Kirstie O’Neill
School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Abstract
The increasing visibility of veganism and plant-based eating makes it timely for environmental geographers
to critically engage with these unfolding debates. In this review, we unpack the complex socio-environmen-
tal entanglements of contemporary vegan food practices (VFPs), drawing on food geography literature to
reflect on the extent to which veganism can, and does, challenge and transform the hegemonic industrial
globalised food system. We consider the productive conversations to be had with sustainability, food sov-
ereignty, food justice and vegetal geographies in promoting the collective potential of VFPs beyond the indi-
vidualisation of mainstreamed, ‘plant-based’business-as-usual; re-centring production, hitherto relatively
invisible in the hegemonic consideration of veganism as just consumption praxis; and engaging with
‘multi-elemental’plant ethics. This offers a cross-pollination of ideas through a focus on the geographies
of veganism, which promotes the development of relational, placed and scaled analyses of vegan identities,
experiences and practices while also bridging the intradisciplinary silos within environmental geography.
Engaging with the geographies of veganism offers a timely and grounded lens to critically interrogate
key contemporary debates around diverse knowledges, sustainability and justice. As such, the alternative
ways of doing, being and relating offered by VFPs show real potential for hopeful, responsive and con-
structive research.
Keywords
vegan geographies, more-than-human, food system transformation, food justice, food sovereignty,
neoliberalism, plantationocene, sustainability
Introduction
Veganism has witnessed significant changes
historically, but over the last ten years, it has
been subject to considerable flux and fluidity.
While growth from 2014 onwards led some to
claim that vegan food practices (VFPs)
1
had
‘mainstreamed’(Oliver 2022, among others), the
rise of a depoliticised plant-based consumption
has threatened more radical understandings
of veganism, while the growth in vegan food
Corresponding author:
Agatha Herman, School of Geography and Planning,
Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII
Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3WA, UK.
Email: HermanA@cardiff.ac.uk
Original Research Article
Progress in Environmental Geography
1–21
© The Author(s) 2025
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/27539687241307954
journals.sagepub.com/home/peg
businesses and products through increasing cor-
poratisation (Giraud 2021) has recently stalled
(Ungoed-Thomas 2023). In 2024, 4.7% of the
UK population (approx. 2.5 million people)
identified as vegan, while in 2022 around 50%
of the UK population consumed some plant
milk and meat replacements (Chiarelli 2022).
The growth of people consuming plant-based
products but not becoming fully vegan is a
key area of contestation, generating challenges
to historically dominant animal- and activist-
interpretations of veganism. Nonetheless, veganism
has never been monolithic (Oliver 2022; Williams
2023) with varied motivations for becoming vegan,
although typically focusing on animal welfare/
rights, health and the environment (Green,
Costello and Dare 2010; Giraud 2021; Oliver
2022). For some, this is through ‘flexitarian’
practices to reduce meat consumption; for
others, being ‘social omnivores’(eating animal
products in social circumstances); or embarking
on a full ‘vegan transition’. Contemporary
veganism therefore comprises multiple move-
ments, motivations, practices and discourses
(Wright 2015; Dutkiewicz and Dickstein 2021).
Although more apparent in high income
countries, these production and consumption
trends are increasingly reflected globally
(Radnitz, Beezhold and Dimatteo 2015; The
Vegan Society 2022). Such consumption prac-
tices are finding greater traction with consumers
and policymakers in response to climate change
and the increasingly widely recognised violence
of animal agriculture. Institutions, events, cam-
paigns and reports, including Veganuary (2014
onwards), the EAT-Lancet Commission Report
on Healthy Diets (2019), the IPCC Special
Report on Climate Change and Land (2019),
and the Vegan Society’s (2024) Vegan Manifesto
call for dietary and food system transformation
(Janssen et al. 2016; Edwards, Sonnino and
Cifuentes 2024). However, climate arguments by
both policymakers and scholars frequently encour-
age a reduction but not removal of animal pro-
ducts from diets (Scarborough et al. 2023).
Therefore, although once dismissed by aca-
demia as a serious topic of enquiry (Yilmaz
2019), veganism is undergoing a surge of inter-
est from multiple disciplines. Geographers have
come relatively late to researching veganism,
but as Oliver (2023a) argued, it is a timely
empirical subject, opening up contemporary
food system debates around scale, place,
power and relationality. Historically, veganism
has been explored by scholars through diverse
cross-cutting approaches such as vegan studies
and critical animal studies, philosophy and
ethics, and much recent research in these
arenas continues to focus on the social practices
associated with vegan food consumption,
exploring how eating more plant-based foods
changes and repurposes practices, knowledges,
materials and local spaces (Fuentes and
Fuentes 2022; Godin 2023; Wendler 2023).
Less attention is paid to how such vegan con-
sumption practices are changing the wider
food system, to explore their impacts on the
individuals, communities, spaces and political
economies of production, and the metabolic
interactions of these with consumers and con-
sumption spaces (Cusworth 2023). New studies
by Hodge et al. (2022) and Oliver (2022)
brought vegan geographies to the fore. In
this critical review, we centre the geographies
of veganism to examine the multiple entangle-
ments that constitute contemporary VFPs by
bringing these into conversation with food
geographies research to unpack the distant-
and-local relational impacts in the wider
food system.
Through long-standing practices of mixed
methods research, sensitivities to interactions
between people and landscapes, recognition of
ways in which simultaneous processes shape mul-
tiple spatial scales from the body to the state to the
long reach of commodity chains, geographers
have a diverse, analytical tool kit for making
meaningful investigations into slow violence.
(O’Lear 2021, 1)
2Progress in Environmental Geography 0(0)
Following O’Lear (2021), we argue that geo-
graphers are both well-suited to critically explor-
ing the slow (and fast) violence that veganism
aims to combat (yet can also reproduce), and the
entanglements of diverse veganisms with the key
debates on capitalism; neoliberalism; identity;
coloniality and the decolonial; the more-than-
human; ethnicity and race; gender; and sustain-
ability, which have long engaged critical environ-
mental geographers. This is imperative given that
the growing popularisation of veganism risks a
homogenising narrative that elides significant ten-
sions; amidst calls for food system transformation
(Edwards, Sonnino and Cifuentes 2024) research
must attend to the unfolding and dynamic politics
and injustices that are occurring in places and
among peoples where plants are being commodi-
fied for neoliberal Western markets.
We began work on this paper in 2020 and this
longitudinal engagement has allowed us to
follow the debates in this changing and
dynamic arena. The earliest iterations of our
ideas have been superseded by new research,
and it is beyond the scope of any paper to
fully trace all the lines of these evolving
debates. We have therefore chosen to focus on
three facets of contemporary research around
VFPs that we find particularly compelling in
terms of their connections to our own research
interests, and the opportunities they present for
cross-pollination with food geographies. What
has particularly intrigued us is the seeming dis-
connect between the emancipatory potential
presented by activist veganism’s discourses
and how veganism has become co-opted by cor-
porate and industrial values as it has ‘main-
streamed’. Our aim in this review is therefore
to respond to a guiding question: to what
extent can and does veganism challenge and
transform the hegemonic practices of the con-
temporary industrialised and globalised food
system? We do this through drawing on long-
standing discussions within food geography lit-
erature, with a focus on food justice and food
sovereignty.
In what follows, we offer a synthesis of
research pertaining to three specific and inter-
related aspects of VFPs, followed by reflections
on how and where environmental geographers
might further engage. Our contribution seeks
to generate productive research conversations
about the fuller food geographies of which
vegan and plant-based eating form a part. In
Section 2, we push beyond the individualisation
of mainstream, corporatised, ‘plant-based’busi-
ness-as-usual to explore how veganism might
engage with the alternative and collective endea-
vours of food sovereignty. Section 3 proposes
shifting the dietary focus of contemporary vegan-
ism as consumption practice to recentre the hith-
erto invisible production spaces drawing on the
food justice movement. In section 4, we reflect
on veganism’s challenge to structural anthropo-
centrism to promote a genuinely multi-species
and decolonial ethical praxis. These debates not
only highlight the opportunities for geographers
to develop relational, (em)placed and scaled ana-
lyses of vegan identities, experiences and prac-
tices, but the potential disruptions veganism
presents to environmental geography. Engaging
critically with the geographies of veganism neces-
sitates a move beyond the intradisciplinary silos
of, but not limited to, agri-food, animals, health,
ecosystems, consumption, activism, decolonisa-
tion, feminism and posthumanism, demanding a
contextual, practise-based and ‘multi’perspective
on who we should care for, where, how and
why, to better engage with the key socio-
environmental challenges of our times.
Challenging globalised,
corporatised mainstreaming: the
placeless foodscapes of
depoliticised plant-based diets
Contemporary veganism is commonly posi-
tioned as a consumption practice (Hirth 2020)
typically focused on food, although many
vegan organisations extend this to ‘a way of
Herman and O’Neill 3
living which seeks to exclude …all forms of
exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food,
clothing or any other purpose’(The Vegan
Society 2020a, emphasis added). As White
(2018) stated, such an activist conceptualisation
of veganism offers a radical praxis grounded in
trans-species justice and demands wider (food)
systems change (Giraud 2021; White 2021). The
increasingly popularised and corporatised ‘plant-
based’diet, in contrast, obscures such radical
politics and can reverse vegan activists’success
in drawing attention to the animal condition in
neoliberal, capitalist and patriarchal systems of
exploitation (White 2018; Giraud 2021; Sexton,
Garnett and Lorimer 2022). The mainstreaming
of ‘Big Veganism’(Sexton, Garnett and Lorimer
2022) as an individualised consumption practice
therefore acts to dilute activist veganism’s critical
and emancipatory energy.
It is widely argued that ethical consumption
can connect across scales and remediate socio-
ecological challenges (Johnston, Szabo and
Rodney 2011). Gills and Morgan (2020; see
also Kortetmäki and Oksanen 2021) encouraged
us to reduce or eliminate meat and dairy, and
buy local and/or organic as much as possible;
while the controversial EAT-Lancet diet advises
substantial, population-level dietary changes
focused on plant-based eating (Lawrence
et al. 2019). Nevertheless, veganism as a
form of ethical consumption continues to treat
the consumer as a rational economic actor disem-
bedded from context, using their purchasing
decisions to facilitate socio-environmental
justice without needing to do anything differ-
ently (Stanescu 2019). Despite more radical
vegan ideologies standing in opposition to
capitalism’s consumption mandate (Wright
2017), mainstreamed plant-based eating as
dietary praxis remains dependent on corporatised
consumption (Garnett 2019). Indeed, the rising
popularity of plant-based foods can be seen as
veganism without the ideological baggage
(Pendergrast 2016), and is actively constructed
by mainstream actors as ‘just’a diet (White
2018; Giraud 2021). Within this, plant-based
foods have become depoliticised and, while nat-
uralised as solutions to ‘climate change, animal
welfare, and human health challenges’(Clay
et al. 2020, 946), in many incarnations are pro-
moted for health and aesthetics rather than
animal liberation and environmental issues.
This ‘project of the self’represents a perform-
ance of a neoliberal ‘will-to-health’through
individualised responsibility and accountability
through consumption (Pirani and Fegitz 2019).
Reflecting on the ‘Meatless Mondays’cam-
paign, critiqued by Morris (2018) for being an
unthreatening and apolitical lifestyle choice,
the potentially problematic mobilisation of meat-
free eating is highlighted since it ‘perpetuates an
exploitative industrial food system to maximise
profits’(Singer 2017, 352). ‘Meatless Monday’
brand partners use vegan/vegetarian products to
expand their markets rather than replace conven-
tional meat products, not challenging the fetishised
position of meat in our diets (Dilworth and
McGregor 2015) and leaving the ‘meatifica-
tion’(Morris 2018) of the food industry
untouched. As Twine (2018) suggested, the
expanding market for meat substitutes con-
tinues to normalise the eating of animal pro-
ductsinattemptingtoimitatea‘cooked dead
animal’s body: its taste, texture, physical
appearance, smell, and, sometimes, name’
(Chauvet 2018, 401) and, therefore, the politics
that underlie these practices (Singer 2017). As
such, plant-based diets have been co-opted by
the corporate agribusiness complex, which
conceals its activities of exploitation, dispos-
session and cultural abuse in a new round of
capital accumulation (Singer 2017; Clay et al.
2020), where plant-based consumption neither
challenges omnivorism nor neoliberal capitalist
approaches to food commodification. For
example, Clay et al. (2020), in their work on
‘mylks’, argued that such plant-based substi-
tutes effectively hide agri-industrial production
systems through mobilising discourses of sus-
tainability, alterity and disruption. However,
4Progress in Environmental Geography 0(0)
mylks (and other plant-based ‘substitutes’)
represent ‘palatable disruptions’that ‘encour-
age people to rebel just enough to switch from
dairy milk to plant mylk while entreating them
to remain devoted consumers of commodity
mylk (and dairy milk)’(Clay et al. 2020,
948). This, like ‘Meatless Mondays’, enables
the reproduction of globalised, capitalist systems
of provision through green-washed consumerism,
which responsibilises the citizen-consumer
without challenging the politico-economic
status quo, facilitating the systems which per-
petuate violence to diverse peoples, animals,
ecosystems, and lands.
In contrast, VFPs offer a ‘widely enacted
form of trans-species direct action’(White
2021, 190) that intentionally seeks to destabilise
the hegemonic food system, which has contrib-
uted to our existing climate, biodiversity and
geopolitical perma-crisis. Feminist, indigenous,
and degrowth scholars have argued that radical
action is required to change world views and
enact a ‘cultural transformation that re-establishes
livelihoods, relationships and politics around a
new suite of values and goals’(Paulson 2017,
430). This position is also advocated by food sov-
ereignty movements, which depart from a critique
of capitalism’s impact on the environment and
inequality, and develop a vision that stresses the
‘right to act’(Patel 2009); working towards ‘the
right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropri-
ate food produced through sustainable methods
and their right to define their own food and agri-
culture systems’(Nyéléni 2007). While food sov-
ereignty and VFPs share certain framings, ‘…as a
comprehensive attack on corporate industrialised
agriculture for its devastations, both environmen-
tal and social…as a programme for the constitu-
tion of a new, sustainable and socially just world
food order…’ (Bernstein 2014, 1032), they
differ in their central figures of the (peasant) pro-
ducer and (activist) consumer. Nonetheless, both
advocate for marginalised food actants (either/
both themselves or non-human others) and thus
challenge the associated power imbalances of the
current neoliberal food regime. As such, VFPs
could offer an alternative valuation of the natural
world, drawing on food sovereignty to resist
appropriation by the political economy of indus-
trial agri-business and replace food systems.
Harper (2013, 5–6) maintained that vegan-
ism represents a potent political challenge
since ‘it is about the ongoing struggle to
produce socio-spatial epistemologies of con-
sumption that lead to cultural and spatial
change’. Although all eating impacts the land
and resource use (Dal Gobbo 2018), and ultim-
ately ‘involves death’(Heldke 2012, 68),
through practising a vegan diet, people can
become ‘aware of the gravity of the planetary
ecological situation’(Dal Gobbo 2018, 241).
Nevertheless, within the dominant noncon-
frontational ‘veganism’(Cole and Morgan
2011; Overend 2019), politics has been
reduced to individual consumption and pur-
chasing decisions, and power remains with
corporations (Clay et al. 2020), doing little to
allow alternative, collaborative food systems
to grow. Beacham and Jackson (2022) argued
more widely that citizens need to engage in
food politics, as with activist veganism (this
is not homogenous, see Véron 2016; Sanford
and Lorimer 2022), yet this is an underex-
plored area in relation to understanding the
impacts of ‘plant-based eating’. We need to
be attuned to how vegan-industrial food com-
plexes can reinforce the power of globalised
corporate food actors in shaping food
futures, presenting themselves as ‘ethical’
while conducting business-as-usual. Indeed:
If ethical eating is judged solely on an animal/
nonanimal food divide, we obscure and relegate
other forms of food politics, including but not
limited to the conditions of migrant workers
who produce vegan food; how vegan food pro-
duction affects local people, environments, and
ecosystems; and how some vegan food move-
ments overwhelmingly feed an affluent white
middle class. (Overend 2019, 82–83)
Herman and O’Neill 5
While food sovereignty has been critiqued
for its essentialising rhetoric of ‘we are all the
same’(Park and White 2015) and the difficulties
its local, producer focus makes in up-scaling
this political project (Bernstein 2014; Grey and
Patel 2015), its emphasis on relationality,
context and multi-scalar networks offers valu-
able opportunities for veganism as a movement
to contextualise and attend with care to the
metabolic flows and political economies of its
global commodity networks (GCN) (Cusworth
2023). Mares and Peña (2011) argued that a
food sovereignty approach to veganism shifts
the focus from White, middle-class urban con-
sumers to embrace diverse, rural producers,
and addresses justice concerns around working
conditions, hunger and food poverty. Others
have argued that veganism can enhance urban
food sovereignty, and that by linking veganism
to food justice and food sovereignty as well as
Black cultural movements like hip-hop, it
offers a means for food system transformation
(Nocella et al. 2017). Such moves promote
resistance and activism, to overcome the domin-
ation of the industrial food system (Cadieux and
Slocum 2015) and relocalise food systems in
ways that are more ethical and ecological,
through building resilient and collective food
movements. We suggest that Cusworth’s (2023)
concept of ‘metabolic agricultural ethics’offers
one avenue for veganism to draw from food
sovereignty to ‘disrupt the hegemony of the
globalised food regime and do so in a way
that is not just about privileging the “local”
but instead reconfigure scale’(Wald and Hill
2016, 209). Focusing on the in- and out-flows
from any site along a GCN enforces the con-
ceptualisation of ‘both the distant and local out-
comes being produced through the activities’of
that site (Cusworth 2023, 67).
Engaging with these debates acknowledges
the potential of veganism’s more expansive,
activist relations of care and justice, offering
routes beyond the individual consumer embed-
ded in globalised, commodified food regimes.
Veganism can build on the systemic, scaled
and collective challenge to neoliberal and indus-
trial ideologies presented by food sovereignty to
extend this into a more inclusive resistance in
which the human is de-centred and the non-
human right to define their systems is founda-
tional. Although recent trends in veganism
may be ‘little characterised by ethical and polit-
ical concerns but …strongly related to a neo-
liberal focus on the self’(Pirani and Fegitz
2019, 60), the struggle against the destructive
forces of capitalism is both global and personal,
across multiple geographical scales and embody-
ing differential politics (Klein, 2014 in Pilgrim
2019). Food has always offered a platform allow-
ing everyday interdependencies to be felt and
practised but, whatever the underlying ideology,
these always need to be critically and reflexively
interrogated to maintain their connective, pro-
gressive, and expansive potential. Despite
veganism frequently being presented as a more
ethical option (Wright 2017), it remains entangled
in the injustices, violences and inequalities that
structure neoliberal market relations (Mares and
Peña 2011; Featherstone 2013; Trauger 2022).
Thus, we need to question how the politics of
VFPs manifest in production spaces; the extent
to which the realities of such production practices
are visible to consumers; how consumers interpret
and remake vegan food identities in multiple
spatial contexts; and the implications for contested
power relations throughout.
Knowing and caring for ‘invisible’
places: constructing and
connecting spaces of vegan
practices
All ideologies require bodily interactions to
perform their foundational discourses and prac-
tices; indeed, ‘it is the doings and sayings of
vegans themselves which have been responsible
for the successful reproduction and growth of
the practice’(Twine 2018, 167). Yet, recent
6Progress in Environmental Geography 0(0)
market growth does not reflect the ideals and
politics of long-term vegans (Giraud 2021);
with veganism increasingly positioned as an
eating practice, the relations within broader com-
modity networks are masked, which prevents an
acknowledgement of the relationalities of food
provisioning (Hirth 2020). Hirth (2020) therefore
proposed a move from ‘veganism’to ‘VFPs’to
highlight the non-exclusive relationship between
vegan identities and practices (Niederle and
Schubert 2020) and recognise the role that pro-
ducers (and processors, policymakers and busi-
nesses) also play in defining and materialising
food relations (O’Neill 2014). Here, we can
see opportunities for engaging with food justice
debates, which offer insights into ‘the historical
inequalities and marginalities across the whole of
the food chain…making visible the persistent
inequalities that have been hidden by the changing
discourses and motivations of alternative food
systems’(Herman and Goodman 2018, 1042).
Following Herman and Goodman (ibid), we
argue that the more holistic framing of food net-
works through food justice’s explicit attention
to (in)justice more broadly demands action
across the scales and places of contemporary
agri-food systems.
After all, everyone in a GCN makes political
and ethical choices; acknowledging this moves
VFPs—like other ethical consumption move-
ments—beyond questions of the practices and
responsibilities of the citizen-consumer and
of activists combatting the violent injustices
of explicitly animal agri-food systems to take
a more expansive view of the potential for
‘vegan justice’to shape the praxis of GCNs.
Adopting a deontological perspective that posi-
tions ‘vegan’as a diverse and fluid practice
(Herman 2018) rather than an attribute estab-
lishes it as something that must be constantly
performed by the diverse actants that constitute
its networks. As such a carrot becomes vegan
through its (animal-free) production rather than
being an inherent quality or due to the identity
of its consumer (Hirth 2020). Seymour and Utter
(2021) suggested that further research is needed
to explore these emergent ‘veganic’agricultural
practices and how they relate to environmental
indicators such as soil health. Veganic farming
presents changes in human-environment relation-
ships, affecting and challenging local cultures
and food practices, and need to be examined in
different parts of the world, paying close attention
to how geopolitical and climatic shifts are playing
out in tandem.
Vegan activism commonly focuses on con-
sumers’care for animals, through challenging
the use of animals as food, pets (and pet food),
entertainers and clothing as well as in the
pharmaceutical industry (see, for example,
PETA UK 2020; The Vegan Society 2020b;
Baker 2023). While this connects the ‘meatifi-
cation’(Weis 2007) of global diets to broader,
environmental issues around ‘global warming
(sic), widespread pollution, deforestation,
land degradation, water scarcity and species
extinction’(The Vegan Society 2020b), ‘care’
for the injustices and violence perpetuated
against humans and non-humans in both cor-
porate and alternative GCNs producing vegan
foodstuffs is only slowly being recognised.
The focus on being a consumer ‘forecloses
many possible avenues of change that would be
opened to us if we also saw ourselves as citizens,
neighbours, or just humans’(Werkheiser and
Noll 2014, 204) and ‘the opacity of the supply
chain obscures the condition of production such
that consumers have little to go on in terms of
making ethical choices of any kind’(Trauger
2022, 640). Like with consumer movements
more broadly, to enhance its ethical capability to
enact change within GCNs, veganism arguably
needs to better connect into its networked and
performative practices, resisting its corporate
reduction to a consumer-facing attribute.
Food justice’s focus on ‘access to sufficient,
affordable, healthy, culturally appropriate food,
and—very importantly—respect and self-
determination’(Bradley and Galt 2014, 173)
demands attention to the racialised and class-based
Herman and O’Neill 7
relations, practices and inequities throughout agri-
food systems (Agyeman and McEntree 2014).
Food justice scholarship has continued to evolve,
moving beyond the race emphasis engendered by
US-centric research (Glennie and Alkon 2018),
and has become united by a focus on ‘just sustain-
ability’(Agyeman 2013), which promotes a recog-
nition of the intersectional justice issues within food
systems. There are clear parallels here with activist
veganism’s foregrounding and championing of
trans-species justice, which offers:
…a statement of intent that rejects the intentional
suffering of other animals and acknowledges the
intrinsic violence, brutality and exploitation that
humans endure when caught up in key spaces of
animal violence…(White 2021, 191)
However, we argue that this needs to be
extended beyond the admittedly critical arenas
structuring the animal condition to acknowledge
that trans-species violence also happens else-
where. For example, environmental arguments
for veganism tend to focus on the greenhouse
gas emissions associated with animal agricul-
ture (Scarborough et al. 2014; Aleksandrowicz
et al. 2016), with little recognition of the land
use changes and consequent justice issues that
accompany the growth of ‘new’commodities
that support plant-based eating and VFPs. The
ecological impacts of replacement industries
for animal products are rarely considered in
detail (McGregor and Houston 2018);
Australia’s emerging soy plantations are
highly water intensive, creating challenges for
sustainable socio-agro-ecologies in biomes that
already suffer significant water stress, which is
further exacerbated by a changing climate.
Such shifts in production systems require
in-depth analysis to expose the potential for
transformation or reproduction of monocultural
industrial agriculture, and its biodiversity and
climate-related damages (Figueroa-Hellend,
Thomas and Aguilera 2018), as well as social
justice issues (see Oxfam report into labour
violations in chicken processing plants (cited
in Roeder 2021), which Trauger (2022) sug-
gested may be replicated in the production of
industrialised animal protein substitutes). The
environmental and animal-welfare impacts of
‘modern’industrialised forms of agriculture
are long-documented (see Steinfeld et al.
2006; Kemmerer 2015). However, compara-
tively little is known about the wider impacts
of the burgeoning globalised corporate vegan
food system, which relies on similarly conten-
tious socio-economic, environmental and political
relations and practices to conventional industrial
agricultural complexes.
2
The expansion of plant-
based markets therefore has the potential to per-
petuate socio-environmental destruction (Vijay
et al. 2016) through displacing biocultural diver-
sity in distanciated places. The large-scale produc-
tion of many commodities iconic within VFPs
(such as almonds, avocados, coconuts and soy
3
)
are tied into neocolonial industrial supply chains
(Garnett 2019) with deeply problematic human-
environment relations, such as monocultural plan-
tations, use of agro-chemicals, exploitative labour
practices, and contentious breeding systems. An
emphasis on trans-species justice must not mask
the global concerns, raised by food justice and
food sovereignty activists, around labour rights,
representation, trade relations and sustainable
market access that persist for many small produ-
cers and hired labour (Glennie and Alkon 2018;
Apostolidis 2020; Dickstein et al. 2020).
GCN scholars have directed their attention to
the continuing legacies of colonialism as well as
forms of neocolonialism in relation to both
carnist and VFPs (Overend 2019).
Nevertheless, for Harper (2013, 133), veganism
can ‘decolonize the negative effects of colonial-
ism on our bodies and minds’and offers a potent
political tool to dismantle dominant, racialized,
and systemic health structures and injustices.
While Dean (2014, 138–144) acknowledged
that the practices of veganism cannot fully
step outside of all systems of oppression, she
maintains that veganism is ‘less governed by
8Progress in Environmental Geography 0(0)
normalizing, patriarchal power’than omnivor-
ism and that, when adopted as an ethical practice
of freedom, veganism ‘allows us to eat with the
least amount of domination possible’. However,
persistent monocultures (Figueroa-Hellend,
Thomas and Aguilera 2018) and industrialised
and globalised supply chains (Clay et al. 2020;
Sexton, Garnett and Lorimer 2022) reproduce dis-
tanced, placeless foodscapes and systems of
oppression. A geography of veganism approach
could critically excavate the extent to which con-
temporary food systems are reproducing or chal-
lenging these aspects of the industrialised food
system through vegan GCNs.
With a global population predicted to reach
nine billion by 2050, there are frequent claims
that shifting to a plant-based diet is a structural
necessity—especially for affluent countries
(Cole, 2008, Vinnari and Vinnari, 2014 cited in
Dal Gobbo 2018, 236). Although disputed, the
‘Anthropocene’(Steffen, Crutzen and Mcneill
2007) is leading to an increased emphasis on the
role of globalised food production and consump-
tion systems in causing unprecedented ecosystem
destruction and greenhouse gas emissions (Gills
and Morgan 2020). These socio-ecological con-
cerns are regularly used to promote veganism as
sustainable dietary praxis (Ripple et al. 2021),
representing a significant shift from its original
ethical motivations around animal liberation
(Watson 1944) and challenging speciesism
(Greenebaum 2017). Adopting a socio-ecological
lens can, therefore, elide critical questions asso-
ciated with VFPs; shifting attention to counting
carbon and developing new, ‘efficient’production
systems and associated certification schemes
(Freidberg 2014) results in an epistemologically
different understanding of what it means to
be vegan (Dutkiewicz and Dickstein 2021;
Sexton, Garnett and Lorimer 2022). Focusing
on the socio-ecological effects of VFPs may
obscure broader concerns around labour and
trade justice; power and informational inequalities;
biocultural connectivities; food quality and safety;
and even animal rights as the discourse of ‘plant-
based’or ‘meatless’absents animals (Pendergrast
2016). It is therefore critical that research exam-
ines the discursive shifts that occur as different
vegan-isms are espoused in diverse fora
(Dutkiewicz and Dickstein 2021; Kortetmäki
and Oksanen 2021). Such research will be
key in developing detailed accounts of vegan-
ism’s evolving and relational nature, and the
challenges presented by ‘plant-based’diets.
Writing from an indigenous perspective in
Australia, Yandarra et al. (2022) noted how
industrial agriculture perpetuates colonisation,
of land, bodies and animals, especially on lands
stolen from indigenous communities (see also
Dal Gobbo 2023). They argued for a more cultur-
ally embedded and relational approach to
veganism, one that reflects indigenous cosmol-
ogies to living with kin. Future research on
vegan food networks should pay close attention
to the potential for challenging and dismantling
industrial systems of oppression, and the extent
to which the growing adoption of plant-based
diets offers an opportunity to substantively
transform food systems, while not universalis-
ing the sovereignty of different communities to
practice culturally significant ways of eating.
As such, and despite challenging discourses of
speciesism and imperialism, lived VFPs must
be analysed to understand the role plant, as well
as animal, bodies and materials play in the neoco-
lonial vegan project. In what ways are plants
instrumentalised for nationalistic ends? How are
plants re-made and commodified into (neo)colo-
nial subjects, continuing to normalise settler
modes of colonial life and further displacing alter-
native epistemologies?
(Re)centring the Other:
deconstructing human–
multispecies hierarchies
A key question underpinning veganism is ‘what
and for whom are animals for?’As Davis (2011,
in Pilgrim 2019, 89) argued ‘our use becomes
Herman and O’Neill 9
their ontology…and their teleology’and -
under dominant, meat-centric discourses (i.e.,
carnism) - ‘…animal bodies that are inserted
into capitalist spaces of commodity production
are always already scheduled for death…’
(Belcourt 2015, 9). Scholars have argued that
anthropocentrism is ‘the anchor of speciesism,
capitalism and settler colonialism’(Belcourt
2015, 4) and myriad forms of violence and
oppression: in order to challenge unsustainable
global practices, we, therefore, need to confront
structural anthropocentrism (Dal Gobbo 2018).
How we relate to, and care for, animals in par-
ticular becomes an indicator of our relations
with non-humans, women and the environment
(Pilgrim 2019), as well as indigenous and ethnic
communities, since the animal-centric dis-
courses, which dominate both conventional
and alternative food systems, are colonial,
violent, anthropocentric and hetero-patriarchal
(Cudworth 2008; Collard, Dempsey and
Sundberg 2015; Gillespie 2021).
While Cole and Morgan (2011) argued that
animal rights are the primary rationale for
veganism, evidence suggests that personal,
health-centred lifestyle drivers (White 2018)
have been foregrounded as veganism has main-
streamed (Pendergrast 2016; Overend 2019;
Pirani and Fegitz 2019). Indeed, MacInnis and
Hodson (2015) suggested that non-vegans are
more likely to accept health than animal rights
as a motivation for veganism (O’Neill et al.
2019). While changing diet can destabilise ‘the
mindless repetition of taken for granted ways
of thinking, doing and sensing’(Dal Gobbo
2018, 242), engaging in VFPs for health
reasons does not automatically translate into
an interest in, or activism around, animal
rights and liberation or other justice-related con-
cerns. Historically veganism has sought to
re-centre animals by abstaining from systems
that oppress them (Giraud 2021), supporting
the work of critical animal geographies in
advancing our understandings of the agency of
the more-than-human within social relations,
structures, practices and environments (Philo
and Wilbert 2000; Collard, Dempsey and
Sundberg 2015). Although changing motiva-
tions mean that veganism’s capability to chal-
lenge conventional relations with non-humans
cannot be assumed, its longstanding aim of
decentring humans offers a clear route to
rethinking and contesting these relations
(Giraud 2021), although analysing the geog-
raphies of these remains underdeveloped.
Considering veganism as ‘a radical departure
from oppressive colonial and patriarchal power
relations’(Overend 2019, 85) offers the poten-
tial for wider food system transformation,
through challenging globalised, industrial food
systems. Nonetheless, such alternatives need to
be rooted ‘beyond anthropocentric, modern,
colonial, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal civili-
sational frames’(Figueroa-Hellend, Thomas
and Aguilera (2018, 175). Tracing the roots of
the contemporary food system, vegan or other-
wise, presents Eurocentric masculinised epis-
temologies and ontologies as shaping hegemonic
industrialised production methods, exploitative
and violent relations through human supremacy
and racialised categories of sub-humans (Nocella
et al. 2017; Roeder 2021).
The cultural politics of food have always
been ‘deeply entangled with discourses of race,
nationalism, and colonialism’, with animals and
animality long playing a central role in boundary
work (Joy 2010; Hirth 2020) and ‘nation-making
projects of inclusion/exclusion’(Gillespie and
Narayanan 2020, 2–3). Vegan discourses are not
immune to place-specific, politicised and racia-
lised interpretations that sculpt particular national
narratives, as evidenced in Israel’s self-positioning
as an ‘animal-friendly’nation (Alloun 2020).
Here, veganism provides moral legitimation to
Israeli nationhood while sedimenting Palestinian
‘unbelonging and exclusion’and obscuring
settler-colonial violence and occupation (ibid:
25). Discussions of animal welfare enable the
construction of a progressive Israel against a
backwards Palestine and, thus, silences the
10 Progress in Environmental Geography 0(0)
voices and narratives of Palestinian animal
activists. Alloun (2020) reflected that this is
an ‘ambivalent, complex, lived, uneven
terrain of power’that overlooks and depoliti-
cises ‘the injustices of the [Israeli] State’s
expansionist policies’:such‘depoliticised
framing obscures intersections of colonial
and racial oppression’(ibid:30–36). Such
debates highlight the important role attitudes
towards animals play within national imagin-
aries, and how they can be mobilised to
shape intra- and inter-national geopolitical
relations. It is critical to further explore the
spatial and racial politics of all food networks,
especially those that are plant-based or vegan,
to expose the potential offered by an expan-
sive trans-species justice.
Decolonial theory presents a radical chal-
lenge to the colonialist thinking that shapes the
ongoing experiences of exclusion, exploitation
and extraction of communities and individuals
in “developing spaces”(Noxolo 2017). There
are, then, productive connections with vegan
practices, and critical engagement with the more-
than-human by decolonial geographers, offering
a route to engaging with collective agency and
co-becoming; challenging the value of knowledge
and relations; and exploring how to care through
complex, politicised and historic entanglements
(Bell 2019; Krzywoszynska 2019; Puig de la
Bellacasa 2019). Drawing from other disciplines,
this work acknowledges how settler colonialism,
and therefore contemporary international relations,
are grounded in the placed and politicised inclu-
sions and exclusions of particular plant, animal
and human bodies, with the indigenous often
being erased in favour of imports (Belcourt
2015; Gillespie and Narayanan 2020) via indus-
trialised and globalised systems of provision.
Scholars such as Dunford (2017) argued that plur-
iversality is critical for engaging with other cos-
mologies that can represent equal and different
ways of knowing and being in the world, which
offer potential to transform relations in place,
across and within species. Further, those who
have been dehumanized through centuries of colo-
nialism and coloniality, have important perspec-
tives that need to be heard in debates relating to
veganism and the food system more broadly
(Maldonaldo-Torres 2008; Yandarra et al. 2022).
Haraway’s (2015) concept of the
‘Plantationocene’seeks to reflect this Eurocentric
genealogy of racism, homogeneity, efficiency,
control and accumulation, which underpins
modern industrialised agriculture (Jackson
2020a) and foregrounds the violent human–
plant entanglements that are central to racia-
lised capitalism (Lawrence 2022):
…the alienation of people, plants, and land, the
domination of powerful and predatory institutions
over workers and nature, the violent compartmen-
talization, hierarchization, and economization of
human and other-than-human life in plantation
societies past and present…Thinking-with the
Plantationocene thus opens fertile avenues for
engaging with the necrobiopolitics of the planta-
tion as an assemblage of human and non-human
life, whose fates and futures are thoroughly, if
often unevenly and violently, enmeshed…the
concept invites a critical interrogation of the pos-
sibilities for social, environmental, and multispe-
cies justice in plantations as ‘landscapes of
empire’(Besky 2013)…(Chao et al. 2023, 546)
As Mares and Peña (2011) observed, it is
important to attend to the historical and contem-
porary projects of settler colonialism that con-
tinue to extract and disperse peoples, animals
and plants. Such injustices, discrimination and
appropriation endure in contemporary foodscapes,
including corporate vegan food systems.
When indigenous foodstuffs are ‘(re)discov-
ered’through VFPs, this can have significant
socio-cultural, environmental, economic and
political impacts on their origin communities
(Mares and Peña 2011). This can be seen in
discussions around the impacts of the chan-
ging demand for so-called “vegan superfoods”
such as maca and spirulina among international
consumers. However, few foods are vegan
Herman and O’Neill 11
specific and those perceived as ‘vegan’can be
subject to uncritical purity politics by those
wishing to delegitimise and discredit vegan
praxis, as has been the case with quinoa
(Ofstehage 2012; Walsh-Dilley 2020; Giraud
2021). These socio-economic, environmental
and cultural impacts demand attention to the
power-laden politics of such food choices,
leading to consideration of when appreciation
becomes appropriation (Julier 2019). How
then are, for example, key proteins in VFPs,
such as soy, coconuts, almonds and chickpeas
understood, valued and consumed in their
native production spaces? Sportel and Veron
(2016) highlighted that coconut and copra
are one of the most globalised commodity
markets, yet we know little about the implications
of this within producer communities. Where
are the plants themselves, their unique
and ‘Other’temporalities, agency and ethics
(Lawrence 2022)?
Vegan geographies, and philosophies more
broadly, continue the wider consensus that con-
siders even staple, well-distributed or economic-
ally important plants as invisible, overlooking
them as passive objects or a collective backdrop
to human/animal activities (Atchison and Phillips
2020). Yet, ‘interrogations of ‘life’which
refer only to animal bodies—while valuable—
can only take us so far’(Lawrence 2022, 630).
As Trauger (2022) stated, a hierarchy of care is
shaped by ‘types of closeness’and ‘degrees of
harm’, which privilege some humans, animals
and places over others. Proponents of a new
‘vegetal geography’argued that attending to
plants challenges hegemonic ethical imaginaries
grounded in reciprocal relations and the avoid-
ance of death, enforcing a broader consideration
of how care is enacted and for whom (Atchison
and Phillips 2020; Lawrence 2022); ‘for people
to live, something must die’(Trauger 2022,
651). Engaging with a multispecies necropoli-
tics of the plantation allows us to explore ‘who
is disposable and who is not’(Mbembe 2003,
27), with arguably the native species (plant
and animal) removed to make space for the
plantation, and the commodity crops there to
be extracted both experiencing ‘the status of
living dead’(ibid: 40). In these spaces, death
is always imminent and in a system of total
human control. Within this framing, Lawrence’s
(2022, 638) provocation—‘how should a vegan
ethics respond to the acknowledgement that all
consumption involves some form of violence
and death?’—does not seek to denigrate the suf-
fering of animals. Likewise, we are not arguing
for a diminishing importance of critical animal
geographies but seek to push veganism to cham-
pion a more diverse justice through the inherently
multispecies, multi-scalar and ‘multi-elemental’
nature of ‘plant ethics’(ibid). This would make
space for us to acknowledge the plant but also
human and ‘animal lives lost to a plant-based
label [which] are unaccounted for and obscured
from view with deceptive marketing’(Trauger
2022, 650). Plant instrumentalism underpins all
industrial agricultural systems (ibid); to truly chal-
lenge structural anthropocentrism, geographies of
veganism need to subject the place of plants in
the GCNs of vegan and ‘plant-based’foods to crit-
ical and reflective enquiry.
As an activist ideology, veganism challenges
the hegemonic patriarchal, racialised, colonial
and anthropocentric discourses, which ground
relations from the personal to geopolitical
(Overend 2019; Pilgrim 2019). Indeed, ‘a core
feature of veganism is the recognition that food
connects us to systems and structures beyond our-
selves…’ (Overend 2019, 89) and yet contempor-
ary veganism is typically portrayed as a white,
middle-class identity (Harper 2013; Wright
2017; Pirani and Fegitz 2019; Oliver 2023a).
That blackness and veganism are popularly per-
ceived as mutually exclusive (Pirani and Fegitz
2019) is promulgated by mainstream ‘plant-based’
literatures writing for a specific audience, which
fail to address the relationship between black-
ness and veganism, and so generalise what is
actually highly specific (Harper 2012). Yet,
for Greenebaum (2017, 359) the issue around
12 Progress in Environmental Geography 0(0)
‘privilege’arises ‘when the idea of veganism as
a privileged diet or lifestyle is couched as a fun-
damental or essential characteristic of veganism
itself’. The capability to choose any kind of
‘speciality diet’entails some degree of con-
sumer privilege but the targeted attention on
‘vegan privilege’in particular, ‘deflects the
moral and ethical ideology of ethical veganism
and reinforces the legitimacy of carnism’(ibid:
362; see also White et al. 2022), limiting the
scope for more fundamental critiques of
human–non-human relations (Giraud 2021).
Nevertheless, the increasing connection of
veganism to healthist ideologies ignores the
systemic barriers ‘to accessing and maintain-
ing health’(Overend 2019, 93) and a ‘repulsively
post-racial’green and healthy eating agenda
ignores its foundational grounding in particular
experiences of white, socio-economic privilege
(Harper 2013).
Nevertheless, Overend (2019, 85) argued that
veganism can offer ‘a radical departure from
oppressive colonial and patriarchal power rela-
tions’; as Harper (2013, 133) suggested, vegan-
ism challenges the industrialised, ‘colonised’
diet and bodies that have established nutrition-
ally grounded health disparities, particularly
among non-White US communities. It is import-
ant to recognise that veganism in and of itself is
not an immediate solution for overlapping oppres-
sions (Breuck 2017) or removing more-than-
human inequalities. To do so, veganism needs to
engage in more active connections with other
socio-environmental justice movements, such as
food justice and food sovereignty, to promote
deeper and wider change, particularly in relation
to the roles of neoliberalism and neocolonialism
in reproducing oppression and violence in the
food system and beyond. Research that focuses
solely on White, Western, female and privileged
‘consumers’can neither reveal the experiences
of the colonised and marginalised ‘Other’nor
offer insights into food system transformation.
It is critical to investigate where power lies in food
production, distribution and consumption systems
and who has the authority to define ‘universal’
truths and ‘core’values in nutrition and healthy
eating (Hayes-Conroy 2013). Decolonising VFPs
is therefore critical in learning, unlearning and
relearning inclusive and diverse genealogies and
practices of activism, labour, health and values.
Conclusions: the geographies of
veganism
Eating is a political act (Mackendrick 2014):
engaging with the geographies of veganism
encourages foodscape analysis—including
food justice and food sovereignty—to move
beyond the dominant anthropocentric ‘meats-
cape’. This illuminates food’s relations across
environments, places and communities along-
side the multiple practices of (in)equality, (in)
justice, exclusion, exploitation, and domination
that exist. Exploring the emerging, alternative
ways that foodscapes can be ‘Other’solidifies
the idea of the economy as a site of ethical
action and citizenship instead of solely capital
accumulation and consumption (Gibson-Graham
and Roelvink 2011; Raj, Feola and Runhaar
2024). Being open to multiple food practices
uncovers new ways of living with nature (Buck
2015), new forms of economy (Paulson 2017)
and new ways of caring and co-becoming (Puig
de la Bellacasa 2010) to transform socio-economic
structures and norms in the Anthropocene
(Roelvink and Gibson-Graham 2009) or
Plantationocene (Haraway 2015). Thus, as Ko
(2019, 10) argued, veganism is about more than
food and lifestyles, with the potential to trigger
‘powerful conversations for change’not only
within but also beyond the food system.
As an embodied practice, veganism seeks
to destabilise ‘mindless eating’(Greenebaum
2017) retraining tastebuds (McGregor et al.
2023) to unlearn and relearn food practices
(Hayes-Conroy 2013; Godin 2023; McGregor
et al. 2023). However, the increasingly depoliti-
cised, placeless and individualised corporate
incarnation of ‘plant-based’eating presents
Herman and O’Neill 13
challenges for ethico-political veganism to
retain its radical, emancipatory and activist
ideals, and develop a more critical and inclu-
sive interrogation of all the places, scales,
relations and agents that co-constitute its
food practices. Fundamentally, the networked
practices of inclusive trans-species justice
should destabilise and challenge the status quo
of contemporary food systems. Fetishised, corpor-
ate, industrialised vegan GCNs are accelerating
the permacrises in climate, social justice and
geopolitical terms: a dramatic social shift is
needed to challenge them, not ‘business as
usual’as encapsulated in a ‘chicken-less nugget’,
which continues to fetishise the corpses of
animals, even amongst those choosing to go
‘meat free’. As such, we consider that while
veganism as a food practice has the potential
to challenge the hegemonic globalised food
system, further critical interrogation is needed.
Through engaging with food sovereignty to
resist corporate appropriation, food justice to
acknowledge connections throughout its GCNs,
and plant geographies to develop a more expan-
sive and decolonised trans-species justice, VFPs
could offer an Othering that offers an inclusive,
sustainable and care-full transformation.
In conclusion, we are advocating for more
attention to be paid to the geographies of vegan-
ism. We are not attempting to ‘first’or suggest
that this represents a new research agenda
(Oliver, Turnbull and Richardson 2024); however,
engaging specifically with spatially centred
questions that can both build on geographic
research focused on the food system more
widely, and veganism specifically, is critical.
We suggest a number of productive routes
for research into the geographies of veganism
through engaging with key contemporary
debates in environmental geography:
the more-than-human; vegetal geographies;
the decolonial; Indigeneity; sustainability;
climate change; GCNs; and food justice and
sovereignty. Veganism represents a micro-
cosm of the food system and embodies a
space for critical environmental geographic work
to explore issues of justice, power and politics
as being changed by, and changing, veganism.
Thus, veganism presents an effective assem-
blage for what remain often siloed concerns
within environmental geography, offering a
lens to understand and analyse relations with
animals, plants and nature more broadly
through a trans-species and multi-scalar
praxis of care-full justice. We conclude by
advancing four provocations connecting
VFPs to the broader food system and environ-
mental debates through:
•Multi-scalar food systems change.
Veganism’s ideological opposition to
hetero-patriarchal, colonial, capitalist
and anthropocentric frameworks presents
an opportunity to challenge, and critically
and reflexively investigate, the alternative
ways of connecting across scales such an
epistemology offers. However, there is
also a need to acknowledge and analyse
the environmental, socio-cultural and eco-
nomic impacts of plant-based and vegan
GCNs and cultures to problematise VFP’s
ethical relations, exploring its politics
across scales, knowledge systems, dis-
tance and context. To critically explore
veganism’s intra- and inter-national
labour and trade relations, racial and
spatial politics, and role in global envir-
onmental change, there is a need to
move beyond the existing focus on con-
sumer identities and behaviours, and
connect explicitly into these critical,
contemporary debates.
•Assembling inclusive connections.
Veganism’s inherent foregrounding of
non-humans presents opportunities to
develop conceptual frameworks to critique
and reflect on the relations and practices
of the Anthropocene/Plantationocene,
offering opportunities for rethinking
future food systems within planetary
14 Progress in Environmental Geography 0(0)
boundaries. Decentring humans also
offers critical opportunities for reflect-
ing on the collective and performative
discourses and practices of a care-full
agency within decolonial scholarship.
This focus on the ‘more-than-human’
must involve a critical examination of
the effects of rising demand for vegan
products on the myriad animals, plants
and people (framed by some as non-
humans, see Jackson 2020b)enrolled
in these systems. Building on longstand-
ing research on GCNs to explore the
connective opportunities posed by
ideas of journeying (George and Wiebe
2020) and metabolism (Cusworth
2023) offers a means to promote an
inclusive, care-full and holistic
approach to analysing network relations
(Sexton, Garnett and Lorimer 2022).
Working through assemblage theory
would add further nuance to understand-
ing the heterogenous and placed con-
nections and conflicts that define
contemporary veganism across its mul-
tiple places and scales of operation
(Herman 2019), folding in the materials
and (digital) technologies that mediate
VFPs (Clear et al. 2016; O’Neilletal.
2019).
•Foregrounding invisible others. VFPs
have roots in, and routes to, the diverse
places and practices that sustain and
reproduce veganism. Engaging with pro-
ducer spaces and communities is critical
to consider how commodities become
‘vegan’and the impacts of vegan con-
sumer ideologies in shaping agricultural
practices and experiences, often at a dis-
tance. After all, environmental as well as
socio-cultural issues arise from the mono-
cultures, ecological harm and cultural
appropriation, which are part of conven-
tional as well as vegan GCNs. Again, an
assemblage approach would enhance
investigations of relationships between
local variations and contested meanings
of veganism in diverse places: it is import-
ant to connect with places that are not
scripted as ‘vegan’under hegemonic
urban White, middle-class, female dis-
courses. How are ‘invisible’vegan spaces,
places, plants, and peoples, as well as the
non-vegan Other, affected by their enrol-
ment in globalised, corporatised plant-based
‘markets’? Responding critically to this
would offer important insights into prac-
tices of ‘alternative’and ‘ethical’move-
ments more broadly.
•A challenge to the conventional.
Veganism’s‘mainstreaming’has estab-
lished a corporate, industrialised ‘market-
place’centred on a health-and-beauty-
focused, depoliticised and neoliberal pol-
itics of dietary choice. Exploring existing,
or potential, connections to food sover-
eignty, as well as food, social and envir-
onmental justice movements would
enable analyses of veganism’s capability
to offer a constructive challenge or resist-
ance to neoliberal diets and ideologies, the
political economy of industrial agricul-
ture, and global environmental change.
For researchers, understanding the extent
to which such ‘ethical’networks already,
or could, offer an alternative to their con-
ventional counterparts is critical. As such,
investigating the geographies of veganism
through the lens of justice and/or care is
essential to better understanding the chal-
lenges and opportunities for attending to
gender, race, class, the more-than-human
and place in alternative foodscapes and
cultures.
Today, there are many challenges across envir-
onmental, socio-cultural, economic and political
arenas, affecting humans and non-humans at all
scales. It is therefore easy to fall into apathetic
despair through contemplating Earth’s
Herman and O’Neill 15
ruination. However, food is something we all
‘do’(Allen 2008; Herman and Goodman
2018) and engaging with VFPs creates hopeful
potential; alternative ways of doing, being and
relating through such a connective praxis
offers the real capability for responsive and
care-full research, and an active opportunity
for constructive food system change.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest
with respect to the research, authorship, and/or pub-
lication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Agatha Herman https://orcid.org/0000-0003-
0646-9726
Notes
1. Following Hirth (2020), we move away from
veganism as an identity and towards the broader,
performative vegan food practices, which encom-
pass all the discourses, relations, materialities and
skills (Herman 2018) which constitute vegan
praxis across its global commodity networks.
2. See, for example, Alpro (owned by Danone),
Quorn and Cauldron (owned by Monde Nissin),
Pure Free From (owned by The Kerry Group)
and Vitalite (owned by Saputo Dairy UK) as
instances of brands certified by The Vegan
Society, which form part of predominantly
animal-based corporate portfolios.
3. Foods such as these, which are frequently labelled
as ‘vegan’, are also eaten by non-vegans. As such,
it is misleading to conflate these items solely with
VFP, yet many processed vegan commodities do
rely on plants such as coconut and nuts for their
raw materials.
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