This book explores themes in the rhetoric of vegetarian discourse. A vegan practice may help mitigate crises such as climate change, global health challenges, and sharpening socioeconomic disparities, by ensuring both fairness in the treatment of animals and food justice for marginalized populations. How the message is spread is crucial for these aims. Vegan practices thus uncover tensions between individual dietary choices and social justice activism, between ego and eco, between human and animal, between capitalism and environmentalism, and within the larger universe of theoretical and practical ethics. The chapters apply rhetorical methodologies to understand vegan/vegetarian discourse, emphasizing, for example, vegan/vegetarian rhetoric through the lens of polyphony, the role of intersectional rhetoric in becoming vegan, as well as ecofeminist, semiotic, and discourse theory approaches to veganism. The book aims to show that a rhetorical understanding of vegetarian and vegan discourse is crucial for the goals of movements promoting veganism. The book is intended for a wide interdisciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, and individuals interested in veganism, food and media studies, rhetorical studies, human-animal studies, cultural studies and related disciplines. It urges readers to examine vegan discourses seriously, not just as a matter of personal choice or taste but as one vital for intersectional justice and our planetary survival.

This wide-ranging volume explores the tension between the dietary practice of veganism and the manifestation, construction, and representation of a vegan identity in today’s society. Emerging in the early 21st century, vegan studies is distinct from more familiar conceptions of "animal studies," an umbrella term for a three-pronged field that gained prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, consisting of critical animal studies, human animal studies, and posthumanism. While veganism is a consideration of these modes of inquiry, it is a decidedly different entity, an ethical delineator that for many scholars marks a complicated boundary between theoretical pursuit and lived experience. The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies is the must-have reference for the important topics, problems, and key debates in the subject area and is the first of its kind. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, this handbook is divided into five parts: History of vegan studies Vegan studies in the disciplines Theoretical intersections Contemporary media entanglements Veganism around the world These sections contextualize veganism beyond its status as a dietary choice, situating veganism within broader social, ethical, legal, theoretical, and artistic discourses. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of vegan studies, animal studies, and environmental ethics.

Homeless assistance has frequently adhered to the “three hots and a cot” model, which prioritizes immediate material needs but may fail to address the political and social exclusion of people experiencing homelessness. In this study, Loehwing reconsiders typical characterizations of homelessness, citizenship, and democratic community through unconventional approaches to homeless advocacy and assistance. While conventional homeless advocacy rhetoric establishes the urgency of homeless suffering, it also implicitly invites housed publics to understand homelessness as a state of abnormality that destines the individuals suffering it to life outside the civic body. In contrast, Loehwing focuses on atypical models of homeless advocacy: the meal-sharing initiatives of Food Not Bombs, the international competition of the Homeless World Cup, and the annual Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day campaign. She argues that these modes of unconventional homeless advocacy provide rhetorical exemplars of a type of inclusive and empowering civic discourse that is missing from conventional homeless advocacy and may be indispensable for overcoming homeless marginalization and exclusion in contemporary democratic culture. Loehwing’s interrogation of homeless advocacy rhetorics demonstrates how discursive practices shape democratic culture and how they may provide a potential civic remedy to the harms of disenfranchisement, discrimination, and displacement. This book will be welcomed by scholars whose work focuses on the intersections of democratic theory and rhetorical and civic studies, as well as by homelessness advocacy groups.

This book sets out to historicise our understanding of contemporary trends by studying the long relationship between science, food and drink marketing and the promotion of healthy lifestyles. It aims to bring together contemporary and historical research from a multimodal perspective, considering how scientific discourse and ideas about health and nutrition are channelled through visual and material culture. Using examples of advertisements, commercials and posters, the 16 chapters in this book will foster a cross-disciplinary and cross-temporal dialogue, uncovering links between past and present ways that manufacturers have capitalised upon scientific innovations to create new products or rebrand existing products and employed science to make claims about health and nutrition. They will, thus, demonstrate the continuity of science in food and drink marketing—even if fundamental ideas of nutrition have evolved over time. The book provides crucial new insights into the significance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a period of innovation in food and drink marketing and showcasing how many of the marketing strategies employed today, in fact, have a far broader historical trajectory. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Critical Food Studies, Media and Communication Studies, History of Science and Medicine and Cultural Studies, as well as nutritionists, dieticians, sportspeople, in addition to policymakers and practitioners working in the area of food and drink marketing.

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century re-assesses both canonical and less well-known literary texts to illuminate how vegetarianism and veganism can be understood as literary phenomena, as well as dietary and cultural practices. It offers a broad historical span ranging from ancient thinkers and writers, such as Pythagoras and Ovid, to contemporary novelists, including Ruth L. Ozeki and Jonathan Franzen. The expansive historical scope is complemented by a cross-cultural focus which emphasises that the philosophy behind these diets has developed through a dialogic relationship between east and west. The book demonstrates, also, the way in which carnivorism has functioned as an ideology, one which has underpinned actions harmful to both human and non-human animals.

Artists and the Practice of Agriculture maps out examples of artistic practices that engage with the aesthetics and politics of gathering food, growing edible and medicinal plants, and interacting with non-human collaborators. In the hands of contemporary artists, farming and foraging become forms of visual and material language that convey personal and political meanings. This book provides a critical analysis of artistic practices that model alternative food systems. It presents rich academic insights as well as 16 conversations with practicing artists. The volume addresses pressing issues, such as the interconnectedness of human and other-than-human beings, the weight of industrial agriculture, the legacy of colonialism, and the promise of place-based and embodied pedagogies. Through participatory projects, the artists discussed here reflect on the links between past histories, present challenges, and future solutions for the food sovereignty of local and networked communities. The book is an easy-to-navigate resource for readers interested in food studies, visual and material cultures, contemporary art, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities.

This book highlights the value and skill of horticultural work through stories of food cultivation. It examines the difficulties that arise from the perception that this type of activity is unskilled and the importance of acknowledging the expertise involved in growing food. The book provides a rare focus on horticulture as a vital part of agri-food systems, offering a social science perspective on the sector’s current and past characteristics. It presents new primary research into horticultural work and workers across UK food growing, using close attention to their abilities to highlight the depth of their knowledge and learning. This is set in the context of global agri-food regimes which press producers to seek ever more precarious labour, undermining food justice. By examining these in the context of internationally connected supply chains, it characterises injustices which recur globally and across food system labour. The conceptual argument starts from an ecological definition of skill as a social practice embedded within its socio-economic landscape, developing this perspective beyond its association with artisanal contexts. Together the empirical and conceptual materials highlight the fallacy of discourse which tends to individualise skill and the challenges around recruitment into food production. To counter this, the book proposes a more collective approach to fostering healthy skills ecosystems, reaching towards commoning through examples of horticultural communities seeking this in the meantime. It will appeal to postgraduates, researchers and professionals interested in food systems, their workers and related topics of horticultural education, training and human resources, labour, migration and politics of injustice. It draws on perspectives from rural studies, human geography and sociology and connects with international debates in these fields. Food focused scholars and activists will find data and insights to support calls for better work in food systems.