New Books In Food

Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present (Oxford UP, 2021) focuses on the iteration of the trope of ‘the monstrous vegan’ across 200 years of Anglophone literature. Explicating, through such monsters, veganism’s relation to utopian longing and challenge to the conceptual category of the ‘human’, the book explores ways in which ethical identities can be written, represented, and transmitted. Reading Veganism proposes that we can recognize and identify the monstrous vegan in relation to four key traits. First, monstrous vegans do not eat animals, an abstinence that generates a seemingly inexplicable anxiety in those who encounter them. Second, they are hybrid assemblages of human and nonhuman animal parts, destabilizing existing taxonomical classifications. Third, monstrous vegans are sired outside of heterosexual reproduction, the product of male acts of creation. And, finally, monstrous vegans are intimately connected to acts of writing and literary creation. The principal contention of the book