Selling veganism in the age of COVID: Vegan representation in British newspapers in 2020

It ain’t easy being green as Kermit so famously said. Sociological research has uncovered a general derogation of vegans in all levels of society including the personal (MacInnis and Hodson 2017), the institutional (Greenebaum 2016), and the cultural (Cole and Morgan 2011). This negativity has been identified as a key barrier to vegan transition (Markowski and Roxburgh 2019), which is a particular nuisance given the litany of inequalities associated with nonvegan consumption (“natural” disasters and zoonotic outbreaks like COVID-19 included). Given that vegan claimsmaking directly challenges established power structures and capitalist interests, vegan stigmatization and derision is perhaps predictable. Nonetheless, veganism has managed to gain a foothold on the popular imagination: vegan options continually increase in availability across stores and restaurants, while, each year, growing numbers of participants register for vegan challenges (such as the UK’s Veganuary and the Afro Vegan Society’s Veguary). The public seems to be considerably more educated about the treatment of other animals in speciesist industries and the relationship between speciesism and climate change (Sanchez-Sabate and Sabaté 2019). COVID-19, for that matter, could offer an additional window of opportunity by lending weight to the seriousness of veganism’s claims and underscoring its potential as a sustainable solution to social injustices related to public health and environmental integrity.

This increased attention is remarkable given that traditional news spaces have historically been antagonistic. Critical Animal Studies scholars have observed that the media frequently protects the interests of the powerful, particularly as media conglomeration has concentrated ownership among a small number of elites. For this reason, social movements that counter power inequities are often misrepresented or outright ignored in mainstream media (Earl et al. 2004, Hocke 1999). This power is not absolute, however, and media producers must negotiate, to some extent, with their consumers. Having persisted for over a century, veganism has become a cultural mainstay of interest to audiences regardless of the historical misrepresentation or invisibilization of veganism. How have mainstream news channels adapted? To address this, I offer an exploratory analysis of mainstream UK newspapers to survey the new normal of vegan ideology in a post-COVID society. I expected that the time transpired since previous analyses in tandem with the mobilizing moment that the pandemic offered would result in a substantially different media discourse. I conducted a content analysis of articles mentioning veganism published in 2020, the first full year of COVID-19. In contrast to the more pessimistic findings uncovered by research conducted in the 2010s, the results of this study find a mediascape that is vegan curious and generally supportive of plant-based living.