Materially Constituting a Sustainable Food Transition: The Case of Vegan Eating Practice

Abstract

Informed by several intellectual turns and sub-areas of sociology this article explores veganism as a practice and argues that its nascent social normalisation can be partly explained by specific modes of material work with food performed by vegan practitioners. Based primarily on interview data with UK-based vegans the research identifies four modes of material constitution – material substitution, new food exploration, food creativity and taste transition – which are of particular importance in strengthening links between the elements of the practice. The article argues that these are significant for offering an explanation for the recent growth of vegan practitioners in UK society and that they are also of value to the broader endeavour of understanding sustainable food transitions and intervening for more sustainable food policies.

Keywords

food materiality practice sustainable transition veganism

Introduction

This article emerges from three intellectual turns (practice, material and animal) to explore veganism as a practice, and to argue that its increasing social visibility and acceptability can be partly explained by specific modes of material work performed by vegan practitioners. Within the context of the Sociology of Climate Change, theories of social practice afford novel framings and suggestions for intervention in the challenging task of mitigating and changing high carbon practices. They have enhanced both the sociological role and the importance of interdisciplinarity in the attempt to render research relevant to the question of radical greenhouse gas mitigation. Recent theories of social practice that specifically orient themselves to the concerns of environmental sociology (e.g. Shove et al., 2012) have also been an important part of the material turn in the social sciences (Rinkinen et al., 2015). Here the interdependence of human actors with material objects and infrastructures is crucial to understanding the reproduction of practice. The broader material and animal turns in the social sciences and humanities (which have occasionally overlapped in actor-network theory and science and technology studies) have both asked questions of a narrowly constituted ‘social’ at play within sociology. Research in material culture and in animal studies is diverse and yet can both be situated within recent posthumanist and post-dualistic deliberations on sociological ontology which partly decentre the sovereign human subject.

Sociology’s own slice of the animal studies cake, usually termed the sociology of human–animal relations, has questioned the anthropocentric presumptions of the discipline and focused sociological attention upon human/animal entanglements in a wide range of contexts (for examples published in this journal, see Charles, 2014; Peggs, 2009; Wilkie, 2015; and see also Cudworth, 2016). One theme of this sociological focus has looked at alternative ways of doing human/animal relations in the form of vegetarian and vegan eating practices which, most clearly in the latter, contest the everyday commodity status of nonhuman animals. Furthermore, they have the potential to incur the least carbon impact (Berners-Lee et al., 2012; Scarborough et al., 2014), with animal agriculture responsible for more than 1 in 7 (14.5%) of all greenhouse gas emissions (Gerber et al., 2013).

Less directly concerning human–animal relations, though emerging from this animal turn, such work is increasingly referred to as vegan studies (Wright, 2015), which is inclusive of specific sociological studies of veganism (e.g. Cole and Morgan, 2011; Marta Andreatta, 2015). Now followed by over 1 per cent of the UK aged 15+ population,¹ and potentially offering part solutions to a range of contemporary sustainability problems (including climate change but also of relevance to addressing biodiversity loss, water conservation, antibiotics resistance and certain types of human morbidity), a concerted sociological focus on veganism is timely. While the practice is understood as a transition away from a whole series of animal uses (clothing and cosmetics, for example) the focus here is on vegan food practices.

The aim of this article specifically is to explore the material culture of vegans and to examine its role in what could be claimed as the early normalisation of the practice. This is of particular interest because the recent growth in vegan eating has had no structured policy steer but has emanated from the vegan community of practitioners itself. It is the doings and sayings of vegans themselves which has been largely responsible for the successful reproduction and growth of the practice. This article emerges also from contemporary work on practice theory approaches to sustainable transitions which simultaneously constitute developments in social theory around (but not reducible to) the material and practice turns and are also part of the endeavour of environmental sociology. The long called-for greening of the social sciences and the humanities (e.g. Catton and Dunlap, 1980; Jagtenberg and McKie, 1997) still arguably requires disciplinary centring and struggles to be heard among the natural science dominance of environmental and climate change research.

This article proceeds by exploring discussion in recent practice theory literature around the role of materiality in sustainability transitions and then draws mainly upon interview data involving UK-based vegans to explore various modes of how the transition to veganism is materially constituted and maintained. Taking what vegans do with food as the most significant form of material constitution in vegan practice, this research discerns four such modes – substitution, new food exploration, food creativity and taste transition – as important to the materially constituted experience of vegan transition and the social diffusion of the practice. Finally, the article argues that these modes can have a broader import for contemporary policy on sustainable food transitions.

Materiality and Practice

Warde (2016) provides a useful recent genealogy of the concept of practice outlining its emergence as a focus of social theory in the 1970s and 1980s most notably in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. However, Warde identifies the arrival of a second phase of practice theory associated with the work in particular of Reckwitz (2002a) and Schatzki (e.g. 1996, 2002). It is this phase that is of most interest to this article especially for the way in which it has been taken up and refined by social scientists specifically interested to understand transitions towards more sustainable practices (e.g. McMeekin and Southerton, 2012; Shove et al., 2012). It frames practices in two senses, as socially recognisable entities and as embodied performances (Reckwitz, 2002a; Schatzki, 1996), arguing that changes to the everyday performance of a practice can eventually engender change in the overall practice entity.

The work of Shove (notably Shove et al., 2012) has been important for furthering a usable conception of practice entities as comprised of the following three elements – competences, materials and meaning. While this work might remain limited in its understanding of the political-economic dimension of transition (e.g. Malm, 2016), its grasp of scale (although see Hui et al., 2017 for attempts to address this dimension) and questions of whether the elemental structure is too simplifying, it has been influential across social science transition research. The general argument is that ‘practices emerge, persist, shift and disappear when connections between elements of these three types are made, sustained or broken’ (Shove et al., 2012: 14–15, emphasis in original). This is important because this article contends that the modes of material constitution identified below strengthen such connections between elements and thus contribute to the consolidation and diffusion of vegan eating practice. They further argue that connections form between practices themselves, forming what they term ‘bundles’, an example might be shopping and driving. When such bundles become part of routine social infrastructure we encounter deeply embedded practice ‘complexes’. To underline, elements are framed as ‘qualities of a practice in which the single individual participates, not qualities of the individual’ (Reckwitz, 2002a: 250) which has an implication for how the framework imagines both change and intervention. This emphasis has been part of the attempt by practice theorists to stress the socially embedded, routinised and affective dimensions of practice contra overly rational and individualistic frames of some psychological research (see Shove, 2010).

Noting the prominence given to materiality in the elemental definition of practice above it is worth exploring further just what Shove and other practice theorists have said in relation to the significance of the material dimension. From this perspective material objects are important for the way in which practices become stabilised and diffused, and new designs in technology can suddenly quite radically change the direction of a practice which in turn can shape the structuring of everyday routines and habits. For example, a host of practice research is underway into how material designs can technologically mediate energy demand and other resource use issues (e.g. Shove et al., 2014). In my own everyday routines incorporating panniers into my practice of cycling enables me to bring back a heavy load of food shopping without resorting to a car or bus and, as I demonstrate below, the process of vegan transition involves changes to the material engagement of one’s eating-related practices.

Schatzki makes clear that he sees objects as important for the order and maintenance of practice and for new innovations. On the one hand ‘the presence of objects both stabilizes and regularizes doings and sayings’ (Schatzki, 2002: 107; see also Reckwitz, 2002b: 206) but also the introduction of new objects may partly co-ordinate new practices. They can be both enabling and constraining for the dynamics of social life. Reckwitz (2002b: 213) takes a rather similar view of artefacts as a necessary feature of both social orderliness and social change.

A further contribution to exploring the material constitution of practice was a focus on everyday design specifically in practices related to forms of household consumption (Shove et al., 2007). This work contributed theoretical groundwork for understanding the active material constitution of practice in the sense of both hybrids between objects and human bodies and also the complexity of interactions between objects themselves. It is critical of the way in which designers have delimited their understandings of users largely ignoring how ‘rather than simply meeting needs, artefacts are actively implicated in creating new practices and with them new patterns of demand’ (Shove et al., 2007: 10), a point which is later underlined in relation to the experience of new food practices. It is the later text, The Dynamics of Social Practice (Shove et al., 2012) which sets out a theoretical framework of practice theory. As mentioned, this constructs materials as one of three key elements of a practice alongside competences and meanings. They define materials as ‘including things, technologies, tangible physical entities, and the stuff of which objects are made’ (2012: 14). Alongside their integration with meanings and competences materials are cast as important for the recruitment to, defection from and reproduction of practices. Materials may be shared between different practices and they may become obsolete or co-opted into new practices. Material substitution (2012: 58–59) is an important process whereby practices change over time, and subsequent work by the Sustainable Practices Research Group (Spurling et al., 2013), placed significant emphasis on material substitution to overall practice substitution in terms of potentially achieving low carbon transitions via new or adapted practices – a theme I return to below in the context of vegan transition.

In a recent article in this journal Shove and others (Rinkinen et al., 2015) exactly explore the importance of material relationalities within everyday social practices. They draw upon empirical diary data to explore the implication of material objects in accounts of keeping warm in everyday life. Such material accounts enrich understanding of a social ontology inclusive of the nonhuman and are important if social science is to contribute to the broader agenda of pro-environmental transition. This endeavour includes the recognition that food practices, in common with energy demand practices, are multi-layered and scaled phenomena including broad infrastructures as part of the material constitution of practice-complexes.

A broader consideration of the material stuff of eating practices would include infrastructures and such objects as dedicated vegan cookbooks and nutrition wall charts as aids to competence. However, the focus for the remainder of this article is upon food itself. We can note this in previous practice theory such as Schatzki’s (2002: 112) interest in the (albeit medicinal) herb industry, analyses of the sustainable re-crafting of food practice by experiments in a New Nordic diet (Spurling et al., 2013) and a recent study examining the potential for expanding bean consumption in a meat-eating culture (Jallinoja et al., 2016). A focus on food needs to be mindful that it is intimately incorporated into the human body, and partly for this reason, but also because of strong relationships between food and identity, is a materiality with varied and complex linkages with the further practice element of meanings.

Researching Vegan Eating Practices

The posthumanist sympathies of practice theory, which posit practices rather than people per se as the primary unit of social analyses, have also prompted methodological reflection. In particular there have been useful critical examinations of whether interview research methods are adequate or reliable for capturing how people actively accomplish practices in everyday life (Hargreaves, 2011; Hitchings, 2012; Martens, 2012). Practice theory, Hargreaves (2011: 84) argues,

implies the use of methodological techniques capable of observing what actually happens in the performance of practice such as ethnography, rather than relying solely on the results of either questionnaire surveys or interviews as is typically the case within conventional approaches.

Furthermore, because practices are often routine, mundane and performed unconsciously it could be problematic to assume that people will always report useful or accurate accounts of their own actions. Yet in exploring whether people can talk about their practices, Hitchings (2012: 65) cautions against the rejection of interview methods arguing that their usefulness may depend on the practice/s under examination and the social positionality of interviewees. They remain valuable for understanding performances and especially for novel innovations in a practice because although the posthumanist leanings of practice theory to an extent decentre the human, what people do as a nexus of intersecting practices remains important.

In examining veganism, we confront a practice that diverges from the habitual norm of animal consumption. It is consciously practised, and unlike many modes of eating practice which are weakly regulated or co-ordinated (Warde, 2013: 25), it is rule-bound and defined as a way of eating with its own forms of social events in the UK (e.g. vegan potlucks or food fairs) and organisations (e.g. The Vegan Society, Vegfest, Viva). It is thus a type of socially identifiable practice which is arguably open to a broad range of methodological approaches.

A combination of participant observation and interview methods were used in this study. I transitioned to vegan in 2005 and during the last five years have participated, volunteered and given seven talks at the burgeoning network of vegan fairs in the UK (specifically in London, Manchester, Brighton, Lancaster and Glasgow). The main focus of this empirical research involved interviews with 40 vegans in three UK cities – Manchester (14), Glasgow (14) and Lancaster (12) – during the second half of 2013. Participants were recruited initially through an advert in the Vegan Society magazine, through local vegan organisations and word of mouth. Once momentum was reached the sample was simple to obtain via the snowball technique. The interviews were semi-structured and open. First participants were asked to narrate their own story of transition. Second, participants were asked about their everyday doing of veganism. Finally, participants were asked a set of questions about transition and relationships (see also Twine, 2014).

Interviews lasted between 40 and 75 minutes and took place either at the participant’s home, my home, in my office or in a vegan friendly cafe. Participants were aged between 18 and 72 years, with the average age 36.8 years. Twenty-nine participants (72.5%) were female. Thirty-nine participants (97.5%) were self-defined white British/European, one was self-defined mixed race British. Thirty-one participants (77.5%) either had a first degree or were studying for one. Data were thematically coded in terms of practice elements but with extra codes emerging for infrastructure and social relationship dimensions. Further data can also be gleaned from the activity of vegan food companies and the particular ways they are materially experimenting with food. A simple question transcends all these areas: what are vegans, the vegan curious and vegan manufacturers doing with food as part of the practice beyond the obvious exclusion of animal products? I draw mostly upon the interview data in this article to explore emergent themes which can be argued as being crucial to the ability of the practice of vegan eating to reproduce itself and attract growing numbers of practitioners.

Food Materialities and Vegan Social Change

The findings of this study are organised around four partly overlapping modes of material constitution which emerged as significant to the transition to, and reproduction of, vegan eating practices: material substitution; food creativity; new food exploration; and taste transition. These are shown to make links with the other elements of the practice, that is, meanings and competences, and in doing so have a role in practice consolidation and reproduction. Before exploring each of these it is worth briefly outlining recent quantitative data from a 2016 Ipsos Mori poll (see note 1) which provides some initial analysis of the UK vegan community. The poll which surveyed close to 10,000 people in England, Scotland and Wales found that 542,000 or 1.05 per cent of the 15 and over population identified as vegan. Demographically the community of vegans are disproportionately young (42% in the 15–34 age category), urban (88% in urban or suburban areas) and female (63% identified as female compared with 73% in my small sample). The total number is thought to represent a significant increase over the last 10 years, with the Vegan Society quoting an estimated total of 150,000 in 2006 (see note 1). This seems to be borne out via the increased social visibility of the practice and its practitioners in, for example, the proliferation of vegan food fairs and media coverage of veganism. It would appear that unlike many practices a significant number of vegan practitioners are regularly engaged in forms of activity which are intended to explicitly garner interest, contest dominant omnivorous practice and attract new practitioners.

Material Substitution

An example of the greater visibility of veganism is specific vegan substitute foods in mainstream supermarket spaces. These include a wide range of plant milks, vegan cheese, margarine and yoghurt brands and meat substitutes. Substitutes can be seen as aids to transition because they allow for a high degree of continuity moving between omnivorous, vegetarian and vegan diets. They afford less disruption to pre-established eating routines and consequently can potentially attract new practitioners. Like all processed foods vegan substitutes are examples of skilling the material² whereby competences can be built into the materiality of practice affording a temporal saving. This is arguably enhanced in vegan transition as it shortcuts the expectation that a large degree of new competency in cooking might be inherently required. Although in many cases the use of these new materials is continuous with their animal-based predecessor, others such as egg substitutes or plant milks can involve a degree of learning, adaptation and new competence. Learning to avoid the curdling of plant milks in coffee is one example. Indeed, some manufacturers have developed specific products to address this problem pointing to the ubiquity of coffee consumption and the importance, for many, of maintaining its routine. Substitute materials generally contest the meaning of veganism as wholly ‘other’, offering familiar types of replacement and again potentially aiding continuity.

Importantly they also point to a plurality in the doing of veganism. Those interviewed expressed a diversity of orientation towards the use of substitute foods. One can be vegan without drawing upon any substitutes, and while their use and appreciation was common in the sample, also present was a degree of suspicion or negative affect towards certain substitutes:

I definitely use almond milk because I like the convenience of having a breakfast cereal in the morning. (Mary, 20)

I use fake meats and fake cheeses and soya milk and everything like that. I have a theory where if you can make your diet as close to what it was before, the transition is so much easier. You don’t need to completely change your diet. (Tanya, 30)

These two participants expressed the benefits of substitutes for continuity with prior food routine and for minimising disruption in the experience of vegan transition. This was the majority view throughout the sample, however, also present was a more ambivalent orientation to food substitutes:

I suppose there’s an underlying feeling that slightly makes me uncomfortable because I think well, are we saying that we miss these products so much that we’ve got to really strive so hard to recreate them and does that mean that there’s something drastically missing from our lives if we don’t have them, and then the other part of me thinks, well if you can make it and you enjoy it, just do it, so I’m sort of slightly conflicted really. (Laura, 43)

It makes me a little bit queasy, especially the fake meats and I don’t like, yeah even the cheese, yeah it makes me, it’s not anything I could be bothered with buying. (Judy, 25)

Overall these extracts capture well a diversity of orientations towards vegan substitute foods. Most of the sample, and I would suggest most vegans, use some form of substitutes especially to ease themselves through transition and to negate the disruption of food routines. However, ambivalence emanates from at least two sources. Substitutes can be perceived as highly processed foods (there is much variation between them on this) and this can clash with often highly valued health meanings associated with vegan practice. Cost of substitutes was also sometimes expressed as a prohibiting factor. Second, substitutes might be seen as conforming to an omnivorous meal structure and may position veganism as reliant upon this. A related ‘queasiness’ may emerge out of a continued symbolic presence of meat or other animal products. Sinclair (2016), for example, writing in critique of mock meats argues that they symbolically keep the animal present and thus do not contest the edibility of other animals. Yet most vegan practitioners remain untroubled by such considerations and take pleasure in the mocking aspects of substitution. Moreover, they are not only consumed by vegans and overall contribute to reductions in animal consumption.

Substitution, I argue, takes both corporate and community forms for the vegan community. Both forms exhibit material creativity that re-constitute the practice of vegan eating in various ways. Over the past five years food companies and specific vegan start-up companies have added choice for vegans. Perhaps the most ambitious company (non-vegan in-vitro meat development notwithstanding), based in the USA, Impossible Foods® have drawn upon laboratory science to produce substituted materiality (a vegan burger using extracted heme from plants to mimic the taste of meat) and eventually, they hope, a substituted plant-based material infrastructure. Already substantial UK companies such as Frys and Vbites sell a broad range of meat substitute products. In recent years vegan cheeses have been developed by UK supermarkets and a diverse range including new companies such as ‘Tyne Chease’ are sold in more specialist health food shops.

A US company Follow Your Heart® (a pun on the compassionate and health meanings of veganism), now distributing within the UK, sells VeganEgg, an egg replacer materially constituted from algal protein that can be used to make omelettes and scrambled ‘egg’. The packaging includes eggbox cardboard and pictures of chickens. Substitution here includes not only the simulation but also the parodying sense of the verb to mock. The approximation and in some cases indistinguishability of substitutes has begun to have repercussions in the political economy. In 2014 Unilever (owners of Hellman’s mayonnaise) attempted to sue Hampton Creek, makers of a vegan mayonnaise called Just Mayo, on the grounds that a product must contain egg in order for it to be called mayonnaise. Although dropped a subsequent freedom of information request revealed that the US government backed American Egg Board had attempted to sabotage Hampton Creek and Just Mayo due to its perceived threat to the egg industry.³ Similarly, in the USA, the dairy industry is currently lobbying the Food and Drug Administration to make it illegal for plant milk producers to call their product ‘milk’. Such developments capture well the competition between different practices, reminding us of the political and economic contexts of practice dynamics (Sayer, 2013) and the potential of material re-constitution to engender social, economic and cultural change.

Food Creativity

Forms of substitution by vegans overlap with the second mode of material constitution of practice identified in this research. While established food corporations and newer start-ups are engaged in experimental, creative material reconstructions of food there exists a further domain of shared creativity among the vegan community of practice. Social media is a further important dimension of vegan material infrastructure affording opportunities for the global sharing of food creativity and ‘open source’ experimentality. Several participants were regularly engaged in sharing images of their food creations, especially on instagram, with the practice of vegans photographing their food something of a community stereotype and joke.

A significant example of vegan community food creativity over the last two years has been the discovery of ‘aquafaba’ – a versatile ingredient used especially as an egg replacer. Prior to this discovery vegans already used such foods as flax seeds to replace eggs in cooking but aquafaba (the left-over brine found within cans of chickpeas) has proved decisively more versatile, capable of binding, emulsifying, foaming and thickening. In early 2015 Aquafaba was proven to be the first reliable egg substitute to be used to make vegan meringues, and an international online community centred on the Facebook group ‘Vegan Meringues – hits and misses’ emerged as a site to share a broad diversity of recipes. As of February 2017, this group had over 64,000 members and showcases the use of aquafaba to make not only meringues but also cakes, biscuits, cheeses, ice cream, mayonnaise, butter, mousse, macarons and pavlovas. This vibrant free community creativity has enabled vegan cooking to expand into areas that were previously seen as out of bounds or impossible. Creative material recuperation here plays an affective role of sensual reassurance that previously enjoyed foods remain on the menu.

Vegan cheese represents a further example of homemade creativity with several participants making their own cheese using unexpected ingredients such as cashew nuts. Vegan baking is another significant area of food creativity that replaces traditionally used ingredients of eggs and butter. Such creativity contests a widespread understanding of veganism as involving loss and thus challenges negative meanings. Vegan substitution refers not to just ingredients but to whole meals and vegans use their own verb, to ‘veganise’, to refer to the cooking of traditional dishes in vegan form. Once more this provides the possibility to retain food continuity in this sense with prior food identities:

I enjoy cooking traditional stuff that I would have eaten before and there’s just no reason why you shouldn’t be able to eat things like that. Like even St Andrew’s day coming in, the haggis, the neeps and the tatties but you can do that so easily. All vegetarian haggis is vegan so things like that. (Tanya, 30)

This participant captures well the ability of food creativity and substitution to allow vegans to retain participation in national and cultural celebrations. In a similar vein the creativity of vegans may be orientated towards the retention of traditional and personally satisfying meals:

I’ve got a really nice winter dish which is ale, mushroom and lentil pie with puff pastry on top. It’s just really sort of satisfying and feels a very traditional kind of meal with potatoes and broccoli and that’s always gone down really well. (Rebecca, 41)

These are significant because they suggest the material amelioration of potential alienation from prior food identities that could arise after vegan transition, and again assuage perceptions of the otherness of veganism. In comparison to mainstream omnivorous eating, despite the relative recent proliferation of processed vegan foods, vegans have less processed foods to choose from. This does have a consequence for the modes of cooking vegans participate in with many in this sample reporting a renewed engagement with food and an increased likelihood to ‘cook from scratch’ post-transition. Transition itself may consequently engender forms of creative experimentation. Vegan cheesecake is a good example of the versatility of silken tofu which as Leslie pointed out can also be used to make vegan mousse:

There’s a really nice recipe for a chocolate mousse that’s just really tofu and chocolate blended together. You give that to people and they say, that’s too nice to be tofu, but it’s the easiest mousse. (Leslie, 47)

Another unexpected ingredient in vegan cakes is vinegar which stems from Second World War recipes produced under conditions of rationing and austerity. As Rosemary recounts:

I used a Rose Elliot recipe for a sponge cake that used baking soda, baking powder and vinegar and everyone was horrified that you would put vinegar in a cake but of course it’s a chemical reaction and it works. (Rosemary, 64)

Vinegar is also commonly used in vegan recipes for cupcakes. The vegan cupcake is part of a group of foods that have become iconic within the vegan community due to the artistry and creativity put into their creation. Others in this category include the vegan pizza (as vegan cheese manufacture has improved) and the vegan fry up, or vegan breakfast. The community fetishisation of these foods can be read in the context of a less resource intensive mode of hedonism (Soper, 2008) and as working to secure meanings of pleasure in the face of stereotypes of veganism as bland. This suggests work on the material constitution of vegan practice as intimately involved in contesting the meanings of veganism.

New Food Exploration

Although we can now point to evidence suggesting that it is a practice gradually entering the mainstream of society, practitioners still certainly encounter problems with intelligibility. Ritualised responses from omnivores become shared jokes within the vegan community. One of these is the question ‘what do you eat?’, which suggests some degree of material ignorance over the vegan diet (even though everyone eats food that is vegan). On social media a very popular hashtag used by vegans to tag photos of meals (#whatveganseat) is itself a retort to this question. Yet a subtext to the question is: what else could there possibly be left to eat once one omits animal products and it reinforces the perception of veganism as restrictive.

In light of this, an interesting finding from this research is the tendency of vegans to explore new foods that they had not consumed prior to transition. This subverts the negative meaning of restriction and suggests veganism for at least a significant number of practitioners to be an expansive, abundant diet and transition a time of exploring new foods and incorporating them into daily or weekly food routines:

I’ve eaten foods that I wouldn’t normally have eaten, I’ve become a lot more experimental and open to different types of food that I would normally have screwed my nose up at. (Bob, 20)

People say well ‘what do you eat?’ and basically I eat many hundreds of plant stuffs whereas non-vegans, they survive on half a dozen dead things. I suppose my diet has expanded in that I’ve experimented much more with loads of different vegetables, nuts, pulses, seaweeds, I do quite a lot of foraging for mushrooms and seaweeds and stuff like that. (Paul, 48)

Both of these participants point to experimenting with new foods with Paul inverting the usual assumption of vegan restriction, instead making an argument for the narrowness of omnivorous eating:

There’s so many things that I’ve tried since being vegan I’d never have known about or tried before, you know, coconut oil spread on toast instead of butter, which is absolutely gorgeous, nutritional yeast which I use, and you know, just all the different sort of vegetables, like kohlrabi, I’d never had a kohlrabi before. (Fiona, 43)

For these vegans transition ushered in a period of food exploration and reinforces previous findings that a vegan diet is often associated with increased and more diverse levels of fruit and vegetable consumption (Haddad and Tanzman, 2003). Accordingly, transition cannot be reduced to a process of material substitution but can involve an expanding and diversified material re-constitution of eating and a re-design of eating routines.

Taste Transition

Such a process of exploration and reconstitution could not take place without simultaneous changes in the social and physical experiences of taste as part of the physicality of food practice. This is an important dimension that needs consideration in the broader literature on sustainable food transitions. Attending to the embodied and sensual experience of food transition illuminates how practitioners understand the concept of taste. In trying to understand food practices notions of taste are pertinent to all elements of the practice – meanings, materialities and competences. Aesthetic discourses around vegan eating are arguably heightened due to its part contextualisation by mainstream portrayals of loss and blandness of taste. The aesthetic devaluation of vegan eating may constitute a barrier to practice diffusion and it is thus not surprising to see vegans engaged in broad strategies of vegan food aestheticisation. The three aforementioned modes of material constitution of vegan eating – substitution, food creativity and exploring new foods – involve active experiments with taste.

Alongside a celebratory taste aesthetics including practices of social display via, for example, social media, participants spoke of taste in ways which underlined its fluid dynamic social construction. A recurrent theme was the way in which people spoke of transition being easier than expected. This was bound up for many in the exploration of new flavours mitigating a possible sense of loss. Several participants spoke of trying out new tastes and being aware that it took time to get used to new flavours, such as some substitutes:

I tasted vegan cheese and thought it was the most disgusting food I had ever tasted so didn’t actually try that again for some years. But then I tried it again and it didn’t taste nearly as bad, so I think it was about the comparison. Again, I tried vegan yoghurt not long after I turned vegan and didn’t like it. I tried it a couple of years later and thought it was lovely stuff. So I think your tastes do actually change over time. (Leslie, 47)

I’ve found it much easier than I thought. I think I almost feel like I eat better stuff now that tastes better because there’s less convenience food that’s vegan. You sort of have to cook more from scratch but then that’s a good thing because you end up getting more variety. (Claire, 35)

The first extract may also allude to the material work on taste performed by an increasing number of plant-based start-ups interested in reproducing the taste of animal products (see Sexton, 2016). The readjustment of daily food routines within transition is also arguably bound up within the learning of a new competency of taste in which not only new flavours become valued but ethics and aesthetics come to overlap. Participants were asked to reflect on their prior meat eating and often this was expressed via taste or olfactory disgust again highlighting the dynamics of taste:

It disturbs me when I think of the taste now. I think if we were meant to eat meat we’d eat it like every single other animal on the planet, we would eat it raw. (Sophie, 21)

Arsel and Bean’s practice theory informed concept of a ‘taste regime’ is useful here. They define this as a ‘discursive system that links aesthetics to practice […] a normative system that orchestrates the aesthetics of practice in a culture of consumption’ (2013: 899–900). They outline various activities that practitioners engage in which bring together material objects and meanings. For example, a ‘taste regime problematizes objects by continually questioning how they align with the regime’s core meanings’ (2013: 907). Understood in this way vegans are engaged in the construction of their own taste regime, one which interweaves aesthetic and ethical meaning in the ongoing dynamic of what constitutes vegan practice. This may also extend to the problematisation of plant-based material objects such as palm oil which may be perceived as questionably vegan due to their implication in habitat loss for the orangutan.

Taste is further mobilised as a means to socially extend the practice but also to practise family and friendship. Participants revealed a theme which I term ‘demonstrative veganism’ (Twine, 2014) whereby they used food to communicate with non-vegan friends and family about veganism, to draw omnivores into the material, sensual experience of vegan food. Here cooking for others and the agential taste of the food serves to positively change the meanings of veganism, to again domesticate its sense of otherness. Social events such as vegan potlucks and fairs are also designed to be demonstrative of the taste regime to both practitioners and the curious, providing opportunities, literally, for tasting foods and the linked circulation of meanings, materials and competences. The network of vegan fairs in the UK has grown considerably during the past five years extending now to also include smaller cities such as Lancaster, Bournemouth and Lincoln. Discussing the importance of events to practice theory Birtchnell (2012: 500) argues that they provide a celebratory context for a practice which is ‘given visibility, merit and institutional blessing’. Vegan fairs comprise numerous stalls that visitors explore which act to project meanings, introduce materials and demonstrate competences in the practice, with cooking demonstrations an example of the latter. Vegan practice contests both a fixed view of taste and the dominant taste regime that celebrates the tastes of animal products divorced from the ethical treatment of animals.

Materialising Vegan Practice: Intimations for Sustainable Food Transition

Focusing on vegan materialities in producing an account of the practice and processes of transition affords insights into the rich material dimensions of veganism, and especially how food is actively worked with as part of the practice. Importantly, it provides evidence for some of the significant interweavings between materials and the other elements of competences and meanings. From being an active participant in the UK vegan community, and through the rich narratives of the interview data, I have argued that four overlapping modes of material constitution can be discerned – substitution, new food exploration, food creativity and taste transition – which are important to the experience of doing veganism. These modes of material constitution have contributed to the diffusion of the practice and could be important for broader policies on sustainable food transition. Specifically, they could help dispel the assumption that vegan transition constitutes an overly demanding policy ambition.

The doing of vegan eating, as I have highlighted, is not a homogenous practice. There are variations for example, in terms of consuming processed vs non-processed foods, and between those more or less enrolled into the health meanings of the practice. This research suggests that most vegans eat some degree of processed substitute foods for their convenience value and the maintenance of prior routine.

Modes of material constitution here are found to play a role in strengthening the links between different elements of a practice. This takes place within the broader context of the dominant practice of omnivorous eating whose practitioners perpetuate omnivorous normativity and may also be engaged in the devaluation of veganism. Thus, working with and consuming substitutes presents a form of veganism partly within the normative structure of omnivorous eating (i.e. a meal organised around a protein object) but has the distinct advantage of remaining intelligible and within prior routine. Ecologically this constitutes an example of what Spurling et al. (2013) refer to as using substitution to reduce the resource intensity of a practice by changing its elements. Vegans are often aware of the parasitic nature of substitution, subverting it with humour if sometimes also exhibiting ambivalence towards such materiality. As well as promoting a more normalised, domesticated doing of veganism substitution also builds competency into the object itself, in common with processed foods generally. Substitution represents one of the quickest ways in which a society might achieve a sustainable food transition and should arguably receive a greater policy steer.

However, ‘skilling the material’ is more indicative of mass produced substitutes and this study highlighted a realm of DIY vegan cooking where practitioners not only took joy in ‘cooking from scratch’ and the learning of new food competences but also experimented with modes of substitution as underlined with the case of aquafaba. The varying time resources of practitioners shape the mode of engagement with materials and competences. New food exploration and food creativity actively contested mainstream meanings of vegan practice, promoting instead a veganism of choice, not loss or restriction; pleasure not blandness; as accessible not onerous. The fetishisation of vegan iconic foods by the broader community of practice online and at vegan events aestheticises vegan food in order to disseminate such meanings and create new patterns of demand. This new taste regime is open to experimentalism and novelty. Such reflexivity to the dynamics of taste is itself an important competency for imagining sustainable food transition and generally greater policy knowledge of vegan practice could inform policies to promote practice interventions to facilitate more plant-based eating.

This study may be of wider import to sociological interest in the relation between materiality and practice. First, by adding to understandings of the active implication of materials in the diffusion of practice. Second, by further revealing ways in which materiality adheres with other elements of practice and, third, by suggesting avenues for accelerating adoption via new taste regimes which actively enrol practitioners into their everyday reproduction.

There are also obvious limitations to a focus on the material constitution of vegan practice. It potentially backgrounds cherished ethical meanings – especially those related to animal ethics – important to practitioners and which were revealed by the narratives of my participants. Interestingly, vegan advocacy has traditionally proceeded first by trying to convince people of ethical arguments around animal sentience and so on. This has arguably over-rationalised the human, assumed an autonomous actor and not taken on board practice theory insights around the habitual and systemic nature of practice. What vegans do with food to materially constitute the practice arguably illustrates a better awareness of the aesthetic and commensal dimensions of food experience, as well as a recognition of how people accomplish vegan practice in everyday life. While there are dangers in fetishising vegan food which might naively assume that plant-based foods are immune from ethico-political scrutiny, the material constitution of vegan practice has been shown to be a generator of cohesion between the elements of vegan practice and offers, in lieu of any governmental steer on sustainable diets, a part explanation for the growing adoption of vegan eating in the UK.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Richard Twine is a senior lecturer in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the Centre for Human–Animal Studies (CfHAS) at Edge Hill University. His main research interests are in critical animal studies, the relationship between food practices and sustainability and the sociology of climate change. He is the author of Animals as Biotechnology: Ethics, Sustainability and Critical Animal Studies (2010, Routledge) and co-editor of The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (2014, Routledge).

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