The Great Vegan Rebrand

But in my complicated years of on-and-off plant-based life—now vegetarian, now vegan, now guiltily eating meat, and then back to the beginning of the cycle—I haven’t seen many vegan storylines onscreen that made that tiny bell of recognition chime.

Especially when I was a teenager, nuanced or intelligent perspectives of vegans or vegetarians were few and far between. A Phoebe Buffay from Friends or Lisa from The Simpsons type might have been vegetarian and proud—but they were also often hippies or young, a move which served to discredit or infantilize their ideological concerns around eating meat. Also, both occasionally break their own lifestyle to eat meat—most recently when Lisa ate a Scotch egg, shocking vegetarian viewers who had long admired The Simpsons' commitment to Paul and Linda McCartney that Lisa would stay a vegetarian not just after their guest episode, but always. (It’s possible Lisa—or the show’s writers—just didn’t know that the prototypical Scottish snack had meat in it, and she does pronounce the egg disgusting. Still a sad day for everyone’s favorite cartoon vegetarian.)

More troubling is the vegan or vegetarian “punching bag” type—characters who exist only as a punchline about how apparently ridiculous it is to be vegan. In How I Met Your Mother, Lilly describes one of Ted’s ex-girlfriends dismissively as a “militant hippie vegan”; in an episode of Gilmore Girls, Sookie and Lorelai debate not letting vegetarians into their restaurant anymore. When having to cook a plant-based meal, Sookie the chef protests: “You don’t dictate to an artist.”

But there are so many vegans out there. Between 2023 and 2024, the number of vegans in the UK increased by 1.1 million, while in the US 4% of the population identifies as vegetarian and 1% as vegan. And there’s great potential for vegan comedy out there, which I know all too well: What about when as an idealistic seventeen-year-old who’d been vegan for three years, I was deep in a study pit for my school exams and forgot to eat enough protein, leading to an extremely humiliating fainting scene in front of my whole class? Back in my own teenage days, I knew being vegan was fun, and funny, complicated and soothing, full of all the nuance that makes up any human character. But until recently, I haven’t seen much of that onscreen.

It’s dispiriting. But it’s also changing. Story by story, new vegans and vegetarians—or storylines about them—are appearing on our screens. They offer new insights into veganism, challenging or funny or endearingly mundane, and they challenge the archetype of the vegan as seen so far.

Dina in Superstore

In this workplace sitcom set in a big box store, assistant manager Dina Fox is a ruthless, gun-toting bully, played with stunning comic timing by Lauren Ash. She’s one of the funniest and meanest characters on the show, and mostly plays an antagonist role, locked in eternal combat with the store’s manager Glenn and making life difficult for her fellow characters (for reasons that have nothing to do with her diet). She’s also a vegan, in a sly subversion of the gentle, hippie, traditionally feminine vegetarians typically depicted onscreen.

Superstore announces Dina’s veganism in an interestingly underhanded manner; one of her colleagues offers her a milkshake, and Dina says, “No, thanks. Vegan.” There’s a moment of surprise, but no immediate follow-up and Dina’s veganism is never the brunt of the joke. (There is one episode where she breaks her veganism, in a valiant effort to help her best friend save face at a disastrous dinner party; the moment is shown as horrifying for her, and she immediately throws up.) A particularly charming element of Dina’s veganism is her fondness for birds; she has a collection of pet birds whom she adores and she cannot imagine wanting to eat one. In a world where the suffering of chickens and their feathery kin is so often overlooked, it’s a pleasure to see a character standing up for their rights.

The “Chickens” episode of Bojack Horseman

This episode is not technically about a vegan, but vegan values are present throughout, in its satirical and quietly tragic story about a chicken who escapes her transport to a slaughterhouse. Bojack Horseman is a show about anthropomorphic animals coexisting alongside humans; “Chickens” answers the question of what meat the humans and animals eat in this world, by presenting a dystopian and subversive vision of our own eating habits.

“Chickens” presents its viewers with two farming corporations, the evil Chicken 4 Dayz (essentially a factory farm), and the kinder but still eerie Gentle Farms—run by chickens (“No one knows chicken like chickens!” runs their horrific slogan.) By trying to prove the difference between ‘animals’ and ‘food’, and making its viewers extremely uncomfortable in the process, the show makes a sharp criticism of the doublethink required to feel okay about eating animals.

At one point, a newsreader interviews a spokesperson from Chicken 4 Dayz. “How do you respond to allegations that factory farming is torture or cruel, or like a terrifying movie about some strange dystopian society—but in this monster story, the horrifying monsters are us?”

“Relax, Tommy,” the spokesperson answers, cheerfully skewering every meat industry line about the apparent appropriateness of how they hurt animals. “Everything we do is completely legal and FDA-approved, so therefore it is fine!”

“I have no follow-up questions,” the newsreader announces.

Travelers

There’s a subtle emphasis on veganism in Netflix’s sci-fi series Travelers. The show is about time travel, with thousands of special operatives sent back in time from the future to prevent the collapse of our society. Across the board, each special operative is horrified by the fact that their new contemporaries consume animal products. One character is shocked that his coffee is made with cow’s milk; another says, “The fridge was filled with something called bacon. When I realized what it was I cried for hours.”

Travelers joins a legacy of sci-fi stories that imagine a future where no one eats animal products. In the 1987 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Lonely Among Us”, Commander William T. Riker explains gravely to an alien, “We no longer enslave animals for meat.” And in Simon Amstell’s BBC mockumentary Carnage, teenagers in 2067 are horrified at the idea that their grandparents once ate meat: “Why would anyone eat a baby? It’s just a little baby!”

The power of sci-fi has always been in its ability to share utopian visions for humanity’s future, as much as dystopian fears. Shows like Travelers unite the two: While the time-travelers no longer eat meat because of their own present day’s lack of resources and devastated planet, they are horrified by the idea that people in the past did. It’s a warning from the future, that we can learn from today.

Colin Kaepernick, civil rights activist and former NFL quarterback

To take a step out of fictional worlds, Colin Kaepernick has challenged all assumptions of what a vegan ‘looks’ like. Between his activism protesting racial injustice and work for the abolition movement, he also has made a stand against animal cruelty. In doing so, he fights back against stereotypical and harmful images of vegans as weak, unable to compete in professional sports, or as a choice that’s only for women, as veganism is still sometimes perceived.

In a 2016 locker room interview, Kaepernick announced that he had been vegan for nine months out of health and ethical concerns. In 2018, he shared a gym selfie with the hashtag #NotBadForAVegan, suggesting he’s kept up his commitment to a plant-based life. And since then he’s teamed up with Ben & Jerry’s to bring out a new flavor of vegan ice cream… helping out all his fellow vegans!

Emma’s empanadas in Selling Sunset

On the other spectrum of television personalities is Emma Hernan, known for her bubbly personality and enthusiastically diving into the intense fights and friendships that make up Netflix’s reality show Selling Sunset. Emma joins a long tradition of reality TV personalities using their camera time as an opportunity to hawk their goods—think Kathy Hilton bringing out her tequila at every opportunity on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—but in a very gentle twist on the formula, she’s promoting her vegan empanada brand.

Whether the empanadas are any good is another question. It’s unclear whether Emma herself is vegan in her day-to-day life (unlike her costar Heather Rae El Moussa!). And certainly there’s nothing massive to celebrate in this kind of marketing move.

But there’s something fun about rolling your eyes at a typical marketing storyline and noting that it is… vegan! True representation, after all, makes it clear that vegans are not villains or jokes, just flawed humans who have made an ethical choice about their lives. There are vegans out there who inspire me, like Colin Kaepernick; there are vegan storylines that make me think about the future or the doublethink required to eat meat. And then there are the vegan reality stars, who make me grin briefly in recognition, right before they get back to annoying me like every other reality star toting their brand on TV.