A Working-Class Vegan Is Something to be: Challenging the Discourse on Dietary Dissidence.

In this discussion I challenge arguments that people who identify as working-class are resistant to engaging with veganism. Despite growing global consumption, animal-derived foods are increasingly seen as unsustainable, unhealthy, and unethical. It is thus argued that a societal shift to veganism has the potential to feed a growing global population, mitigate the impacts of climate change, contribute to sustainability, improve public health, and provide food security. Moreover, ethico-political veganism is a form of counter-conduct seeking to end the immiseration, exploitation, and oppression - of human and Nonhuman Animal alike - upon which the animal industrial complex is predicated. Widening knowledge in the UK of veganism’s potential benefits is evidenced in the growing number of people identifying as vegan, estimated to have increased ten-fold over the last 15 years. Studies suggest, however, that uptake is fractured along social class lines. Several assumptions indicate that people from working-class communities might be resistant to veganism. There is a consensus that veganism is an exclusionary lifestyle applicable and appealing only to the highly educated, politically liberal and financially solvent.

Drawing on analysis of semi-structured interviews with vegans in a working-class community in the Northeast of England, I contend that veganism is thriving among people arguably essentialised and/or ignored in discourses and research around it. I highlight working-class vegan (hi)stories, applying Rambo’s (1993) ideas on religious conversion and Joycean (1914) concepts of epiphany to provide an understanding of how people hitherto seen as resistant to veganism become vegan. I find a working-class veganism centred on solidarity and love, and which seeks to improve the health of people living in under-resourced communities, combat climate change, and end the oppression of those human and Nonhuman Animals entangled in the necrocapitalistic practices of the animal industrial complex.