ABSTRACT
Meat-related vocabulary and narratives, traditionally coded as masculine, have been integrated into veganism. Specifically, while vegan narratives and food producers may claim to provide progressive counter-offerings to mainstream dietary choices, they also essentialize gender and prioritize masculinity. To illustrate this phenomenon and analyze its implications, this chapter addresses multiple contexts, including: vegan companies and experts’ uses of the term “meat” to describe plant-based foods and “butcher” to describe vegan food preparation; vegan testimonials by athletes, police officers, and other celebrated authority figures that perform manhood in order to temper concerns that veganism is emasculating; vegan cookbooks, such as Thug Kitchen, that yoke authority to racialized masculinity; and a recipe contest by a vegan food company that reinforces masculine stereotypes.
