Celebrity vegans and the lifestyling of ethical consumption

Abstract

ABSTRACTVeganism offers an important critique of unethical and unsustainable food production practices, yet vegans have been historically stigmatized in mainstream media. Given the recent prominence of celebrity vegans, this article asks, how might the cultural intermediary work of vegan celebrities make the ethical practice of veganism more accessible? And how do vegans’ ethical concerns about the exploitative production and consumption of animals as food and byproducts get reframed in the context of celebrity consumer culture? Bringing together philosophies of ethical veganism and eco-feminism with literature on ethical (food) consumption and celebrity culture, this article analyses the educational campaigning work on veganism by Hollywood actor, Alicia Silverstone and TV chat show host, Ellen DeGeneres. It finds that veganism is figured as a diet and lifestyle that foregrounds an ethics of care, compassion, kindness and emotion – about and for humans, animals and environment – consistent with ethical veganism. Yet these ethics are reworked through the commodity logic of celebrity culture to make it more marketable and thus consumable as a set of ideas and gendered lifestyle practices, where the individual choice is to be a healthy, happy and kind self. The tensions between ethical veganism as an intervention at the point of consumption within the production of exploitative and gendered human/animal/environmental relations, and the focus upon an individualized lifestyle politics through which celebrities maintain their commodity status, thus coalesce in the work of celebrity vegans.