Culture

A diet can be adopted in an afternoon. A culture takes generations to grow, and longer to describe. The word vegan, coined in a Leicester meeting in 1944, has since attached itself to a loose federation of books, films, songs, restaurants, sangha, congregations, punk venues, cookbooks, slurs, jokes, and genealogies. This article surveys that federation — not to police its boundaries but to name the textures a newcomer actually encounters. The ethical and nutritional cases sit in their own pillars. What follows is the cultural surround.

The word itself

“Vegan” is a clipping, not a classical coinage. Donald Watson and Dorothy Morgan took the first three and last two letters of vegetarian because they wanted a word that announced its descent and its destination. The novelty of the term mattered: by 1944 vegetarian had come to mean, in British and American use, lacto-ovo abstention from flesh. A new word forced the dairy and egg questions into the open.

Eighty years later the word carries freight that Watson did not foresee. In consumer marketing, vegan now signals a product claim — suitable for those who avoid all animal ingredients — while plant-based has come into use as a softer descriptor, often favored by those who eat mostly but not strictly this way, and by food companies uneasy about the ideological connotations of vegan. The T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies popularized whole-food plant-based as a clinical-dietetic category distinct from ethical veganism. Jenny Greenebaum’s 2012 sociological study in Symbolic Interaction mapped the resulting fault line: health vegans and ethical vegans share a shopping list but narrate their lives differently, and each group accuses the other, at least privately, of missing the point.

Melanie Joy’s 2010 book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows contributed another durable piece of vocabulary. Joy proposed carnism for the invisible ideology that makes eating some species and protecting others seem natural. The word travels well in vegan cultural settings because it reframes the rhetorical default: the question shifts from why some people abstain to why the rest eat.

Film and moving image

No single cultural form has made more vegans than the documentary. Shaun Monson’s Earthlings (2005), narrated by Joaquin Phoenix with a score by Moby, stitched together undercover and industry footage from pet stores, slaughterhouses, leather tanneries, laboratories, and circuses. It was distributed free online, screened in classrooms and living rooms, and accumulated a reputation as the film that could not be unseen. The community coined “the Earthlings effect” for the reliable pattern of viewers ending the film in tears and breakfast the next morning without dairy.

Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn’s Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014) shifted the argument from the animal to the biosphere. The film’s central contention — that animal agriculture was the leading driver of deforestation, water use, and greenhouse emissions, and that major environmental organizations had been silent about it — was contested by climate scientists who disputed specific numbers (the “51 percent” figure from a 2009 Worldwatch report proved especially durable as a point of critique). The theatrical cut executive-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio for Netflix in 2015 corrected some figures and multiplied the audience. Andersen’s follow-up What the Health (2017) made the nutritional case in the same rhetorical register.

Chris Delforce’s Dominion (2018), funded by the Australian Farm Transparency Project and narrated by Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Sia, Kat Von D, and Sadie Sink, extended the Earthlings genre with drone and hidden-camera footage of Australian industrial agriculture. Delforce was at one point prosecuted under New South Wales surveillance-device legislation for the footage; the charges were eventually dropped. Dominion became the rallying film of a younger cohort of street activists and the backing material for the Cube of Truth outreach format developed by Anonymous for the Voiceless.

The popular-culture end of the spectrum is better represented by Louie Psihoyos’s The Game Changers (2018), produced with James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger, which profiled elite plant-based athletes, and by You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment (Netflix, 2024), which dramatized a Stanford identical-twin trial comparing omnivorous and vegan diets. These films talk past the ethical documentaries — they are health and performance pieces — but they occupy the same cultural slot: the inflection point after which a viewer tries something new.

Fictional cinema has been slower. Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (2017), a Netflix feature about a genetically engineered superpig, is the rare mainstream film whose plot turns on the ethics of industrial slaughter. Andrea Arnold’s documentary Cow (2021) followed a single British dairy cow through four years of her life and ended where such lives end.

Literature

The literary canon of veganism predates the word. Plutarch, Porphyry, Shelley, and Thoreau are the usual ancestors. The modern canon begins, by broad consensus, with Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), which used feminist theory to connect the symbolic and material violences done to women and to animals under patriarchy. Adams’s concept of the absent referent — the living animal whose disappearance into the word meat makes consumption easy — has had a long career in cultural studies, art criticism, and activist training.

J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), originally delivered as the Tanner Lectures at Princeton and published with responses by Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger, Marjorie Garber, and Barbara Smuts, is the most literarily ambitious statement of the vegan sensibility. Coetzee’s protagonist Elizabeth Costello compares industrial slaughter to the Holocaust and refuses to soften the comparison, and the novella stages the social cost of such speech as carefully as it stages the argument. Disgrace (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003) continued the thread.

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and its sequels imagined a post-human ecology in which the question of what to eat returns to first principles. Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972) and The Plague Dogs (1977), though not written as vegan manifestos, were received as such by a generation of British readers. Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998) did for the American meat industry what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle did for its great-grandparent. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (2009) translated the argument into confessional journalism for a mass audience.

Cookbooks are their own durable literature. Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971), Anna Thomas’s The Vegetarian Epicure (1972), Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Veganomicon (2007), and Bryant Terry’s Afro-Vegan (2014) each reshaped the kitchens of a cohort.

Music

Music has carried the ethic farthest into youth culture. The moment is best dated to the 1980s Washington, DC hardcore scene, where Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat coined straight edge as shorthand for a drug-, alcohol-, and casual-sex-free hardcore ethic. The New York band Youth of Today extended the same logic to animal products; their 1988 single No More — “kindness to animals will show what I truly feel” — is conventionally cited as the first explicitly vegan hardcore song. Earth Crisis, Vegan Reich, and the Hare Krishna-adjacent Shelter carried the idiom into the 1990s, and the broader tag hardline named a short-lived militant wing.

Moby, who recorded the Earthlings soundtrack and has been vegan since 1987, brought the ethic into mainstream pop and electronica. Prince, Bryan Adams, Paul and Linda McCartney, Morrissey, Billie Eilish, and Stevie Wonder have each given interviews or lyrics that shaped the music-industry adjacency. Hip-hop has its own lineage — dead prez’s Be Healthy (“I don’t eat no meat, no dairy, no sweets”), KRS-One’s long-standing vegetarianism, the Rastafari-inflected Ital eating of Protoje and Chronixx, Waka Flocka Flame’s 2015 vegan turn, and Billie Eilish’s outspokenness about factory farming.

The straight-edge and hardcore lineage matters culturally out of proportion to its record sales. It established that veganism could be read as discipline and rebellion rather than as self-denial; it built a circuit of venues, zines, and labels; and it provided a generation of later activists with their first political vocabulary.

Religion

Four living religious traditions are foundational to contemporary vegan culture, and several more are partial contributors.

Jainism is the tradition most fully aligned with vegan practice. Ahimsa, non-harm, is its first ethical principle; Jain monks and nuns follow it to the point of filtering water and sweeping paths; Jain laity have kept a strict vegetarian table for more than two millennia. Dairy has historically been permitted, but a growing Jain vegan movement, concentrated in Gujarat, Mumbai, London, and the Jain diaspora in North America, argues that modern industrial dairy no longer meets the tradition’s own standards for non-harm. Christopher Key Chapple’s Harvard collection on Jainism and ecology documents this internal turn.

Hindu dietary culture is varied. Vaishnava, Swaminarayan, and many yogic lineages maintain strict vegetarianism; the ISKCON movement brought this practice, through its restaurants and prasadam distribution, to Western cities beginning in the late 1960s. Dairy remains culturally central — panchagavya, the five cow products, is liturgically significant — and ethical vegan voices within Hindu communities, such as the Sri Krishna Kripa Dham network, frame cow-welfare critique as a continuation rather than a rejection of tradition.

Rastafari Ital is a Caribbean dietary law that grew out of the 1930s Jamaican movement. Ital — from vital — excludes meat, processed food, salt, alcohol, and, in its stricter readings, dairy and eggs. Ital cooking has carried Rastafari ethics into reggae venues, London takeaways, and the menus of Bob Marley tribute restaurants worldwide; Leonard Barrett’s The Rastafarians (Beacon Press, 1997) is the standard academic overview.

Seventh-day Adventism is the tradition most responsible for Western vegetarian and vegan foodways. Ellen G. White’s nineteenth-century health teachings led to the Battle Creek Sanitarium under John Harvey Kellogg, which in turn spawned the corn flake and the soy-protein meat analog. The contemporary Adventist denomination is officially pro-vegetarian; the Loma Linda, California, Blue Zone of long-lived Adventist vegetarians is one of the most-cited data points in plant-based nutrition discourse.

Partial contributors include Mahayana Buddhism, whose scriptures (the Lankavatara Sutra most pointedly) condemn meat-eating and whose East Asian monastic cuisines have given Taiwan, Vietnam, and parts of China a dense vegetarian restaurant infrastructure; Baháʼí, Sikh, and certain Quaker communities, which encourage but do not require abstention; and Ethiopian, Eritrean, Coptic, and Greek Orthodox Christianity, whose fasting calendars add up to roughly half the year of strictly vegan eating by rule.

Regional vegan cultures

The geography of veganism is less Western than press coverage suggests.

India has the largest population of lifelong vegetarians in the world — estimates range from 20 to 39 percent of the population depending on how the question is asked — and a fast-growing vegan movement building on that base. SHARAN (Sanctuary for Health and Reconnection to Animals and Nature), founded by the late Dr. Nandita Shah, and the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organisations have reframed dairy critique in terms familiar to Jain, Vaishnava, and Gandhian audiences. Veganuary’s India launch has made it one of the campaign’s fastest-growing national chapters.

Taiwan has, by several surveys, the world’s highest density of vegetarian restaurants per capita, rooted in Mahayana Buddhist lay practice and institutional support from temples, schools, and hospitals. Taipei’s su-shi (素食) infrastructure spans convenience stores, hot-pot chains, night-market stalls, and formal banquets; the transition from vegetarian to vegan within that ecosystem is largely a question of excluding egg-based sauces rather than building a new cuisine.

Ethiopia observes roughly 180 fasting days a year across the Tewahedo Orthodox calendar, and most traditional dishes exist in a ye-tsom (“of fasting”) version that excludes all animal products. The resulting cuisine — shiro, misir wot, atkilt, gomen, injera — is the most fully developed national vegan cookery in the world, and Ethiopian restaurants have become a hub of diasporic and cross-cultural vegan eating in London, Washington, Stockholm, and Tel Aviv.

Israel became, in the 2010s, the per-capita vegan capital of the West. The inflection point is usually dated to Gary Yourofsky’s 2010 “Best Speech You Will Ever Hear” lecture at Georgia Tech, which circulated on Israeli television and social media in translation and spawned a wave of conversions; Tel Aviv now hosts one of the world’s largest vegan festivals, the Israel Defense Forces offers a fully vegan soldier option, and chains such as Domino’s and Ben and Jerry’s piloted vegan products in Israel before rolling them elsewhere. Guardian and Haaretz coverage has examined the phenomenon at length.

Other significant regional cultures include German Veganz and Veggie-World retail networks, British high-street chain adoption driven by Veganuary, Brazilian veganismo rooted in feminist and animal-rights activism in São Paulo and Porto Alegre, and the Korean temple-food renaissance led by Jeong Kwan sunim.

Counterculture lineage

Contemporary Western veganism inherits its cultural texture from three overlapping mid-twentieth-century currents: the back-to-the-land movement and its macrobiotic, whole-food, and commune offshoots; the animal-rights second wave of Singer, Regan, and Adams; and the punk, hardcore, and hip-hop DIY ethic. Each taught a different lesson. The homesteaders taught that food systems are political. The philosophers taught that the ethical argument is defensible in a seminar. The hardcore scene taught that a minority practice can recruit through style and community rather than through persuasion alone. Mainstream vegan culture today draws from all three, and the internal arguments about whether veganism is a lifestyle, a movement, or a market category recapitulate the differences among its parents.

The vegan cliché, and its reality

Every minority practice attracts a stereotype. The standard vegan cliché — humorless, preachy, nutritionally precarious, performatively outraged — has been durable enough to shape the behavior of people who have never met a vegan. Julia Minson and Benoît Monin’s 2012 experiments named one of the mechanisms: do-gooder derogation, the tendency of people anticipating moral reproach from a minority to preemptively disparage that minority. Their subjects rated vegetarians as more “self-righteous” when they expected the vegetarians to judge them, and less so when they did not. The stereotype, in other words, is partly a defensive reaction to the anticipated judgment of any moral minority, and only secondarily a description of actual behavior.

Actual vegan behavior, on the survey evidence, is less uniform than either the stereotype or the movement’s self-presentation suggests. The Sentience Institute’s biennial US surveys find that self-identified vegans are younger, more female, and more politically progressive than the general population, but that a substantial fraction cite health or environmental rather than ethical motivations, and that rates of lapsing back to omnivorous eating are high — on the order of five in six former vegetarians and vegans. Ipsos’s multi-country Global Advisor surveys find the strongest vegan identification in India, Mexico, and Israel, and much lower rates in France, Japan, and Hungary. Greenebaum’s ethnographic work finds vegans regulating their own public speech to avoid the stereotype — sometimes to the point of not mentioning their practice at all.

The cliché is, in short, a useful cultural object for non-vegans and a problem for vegans, who argue internally about whether to embrace it, deflect it with humor, or dissolve it by expanding the tent. Chefs, athletes, documentarians, musicians, and comedians each reach for a different strategy. The culture is the sum of those strategies, tried against one another in public, over decades.

What this pillar covers

Supporting articles will open out the threads gestured at here. A profile of Carol J. Adams traces the feminist-vegetarian literary lineage. A focused article on Earthlings (2005) reconstructs the making and reception of the film. Dominion (2018) treats the Australian successor and its legal afterlife. Rastafari Ital documents the Caribbean dietary law and its global spread. Ethiopian fasting cuisine catalogs the world’s most fully developed national vegan cookery. Straight-edge and vegan hardcore traces the musical lineage from Minor Threat through Earth Crisis. Do-gooder derogation examines the social psychology of the vegan stereotype. The vegan boom in Israel follows the 2010s inflection point in Tel Aviv and its aftermath.