The Rhetorical Construction of Vegetarianism

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.

Cristina Hanganu-Bresch is Associate Professor of English at St. Joseph’s University. Her research so far has focused on the rhetoric of health and medicine, with a focus on psychiatry, and scientific writing; she also has a strong interest in animal studies and vegetarianism. She has co-authored and edited several books, among which Diagnosing Madness (with Carol Berkenkotter, 2018), and Veg(etari)an Arguments in Culture, History, and Practice: The V word (with Kristin Kondrlik, 2021).