Social Media Made Veganism About White Wellness. How Are We Changing That?
On navigating veganism and the internet as a brown vegan
This week I am on vacation with my family, so today’s essay is a guest post from
, who writes the Substack newsletter . I really enjoy Anisha’s thoughtful writing about topics like her transition to veganism, navigating large Indian (and other) gatherings with non-vegan friends and family, and the gray areas of our personal dietary choices. I hope you will too.
I started posting food on the internet after a fanatic period of following Australian fitness bloggers. Dreaming of yoga and pink smoothie bowls on Bondi Beach, buzz words like pitaya and maca spilled out of my mouth. “Bali wellness retreat” was a non-negotiable item on my teen self’s bucket list.
Inevitably, my initial interactions with veganism were shaped by mainstream wellness media, particularly on Instagram. It’s no secret that the wellness scene exuded whiteness, punctuated by Goop cleanses, supplements, and an intensive self-care schedule attainable by a select few. On the internet, a quick search for vegan recipes led you to blogs run by predominantly white women. On Instagram, the same people tended to have the largest followings. A 2020 study by Virginia Braun and Sophie Carruthers1 analyzed popular vegan vlogs that would show up for a user with no prior search history:
“Our brief analysis captures the dominant ontologising practices: veganism in these vlogs was located within neoliberal healthist and contemporary privileged (white) wellness imperatives. Other constructions of veganism – as ethical eating from an animal rights perspective or as environmentally responsible eating – were sometimes present, but appeared only as minor characters in the story.”
Veganism’s ties to a neoliberal, healthist conception of wellness detracts from the movement’s central value of compassion for the earth and living beings. On social media, plant-based eating seemed like a Western health fad rather than something hundreds of cultures have been engaging with for centuries. As a result, many BIPOC individuals may feel deterred from plant-based eating because they do not see how they fit into it.2 Dominant stereotypes of veganism – “privileged hipster, the radical animal rights activist, and the free-spirited, nonconformist hippie” – assume whiteness, so the lack of diversity in food media becomes yet another barrier to eating more plant-based. Although veganism is rooted in BIPOC cultures and Black individuals are the fastest growing vegan demographic, we would not see this reflected on our phone screens.
After a few years of ogling over 5-ingredient energy bites and sunlit avocado toasts, I started my own Instagram with the naive intention of showing my community how good “healthy” food could be, as if exciting salads and smoothie bowls were a novelty. Even though I wasn’t vegan at the time, I ended up eating mostly plant-based because of my interest in the aspirational wellness lifestyle. Here is a look into the first year of my Instagram, when I was 19 and very into throw-things-in-a-bowl and call it #nourishing #plantbasedpower #wholefoodsplantbased #healthygirl.
Informed by the success of other bloggers, I posted the recipes I thought people wanted to see. The photos that received the most likes in the wellness space carried an air of familiarity. Creamy pastas. Nourish bowls with so many colors that it was obviously arranged just for Instagram, stripping away the photo’s guise of comfort and intimacy. Smoothie bowls as vibrant as fire hydrants with neat highways of bananas beside trails of hemp seeds. And don’t get me started on oatmeal.
In April 2020, we were stuck at home and I thought it would be fun to learn from my mother. Behold the first Indian dish I ever posted on my Instagram: coconut butter cauliflower and naan, inspired by a white food blogger with thousands of views and ratings… Honestly, it tasted great! But the recipe employed ingredients like curry powder, a spice blend that only exists because of colonialism. And it was titled “30 Minute Indian Coconut Butter Cauliflower,” even though the blogger’s Western recipes did not usually have a “30 Minute” specification. This implied that Indian food usually takes longer than 30 minutes, but with this recipe, feel free to chill out! Likewise, Bon Appétit has published recipes like “Weeknight Pad Thai” and “Weeknight Mapo Tofu,” yet hadn’t attached the term “weeknight” to any of its many bolognese recipes, even though bolognese is no simple feat. These examples are not explicitly related to veganism or plant-based eating, but the terminology distinction insinuates that it is easier to prepare plant-based meals that align with Western cuisines.
These nuances in food media’s representation of cultures were brought to light when the surge of the Black Lives Matter movement and flood of performative black squares coincided with the Bon Appetit scandal. Social media posts of ex-editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport sporting brownface were uncovered, right around the time he wrote a column about racial justice and food. Shortly after, assistant food editor Sohla El-Waylly revealed that she was used in the media platform’s videos as a token of diversity; unlike her white coworkers, she was not paid for these appearances. Other nonwhite employees at Bon Appétit also spoke up about pay inequities and the outcry led to a written apology. Part of the apology stated that they “treated non-white stories as ‘not newsworthy’...[and] appropriated, co-opted, and Columbused them.”
One of the most viral examples was “the stew,” when Alison Roman, star recipe developer of Bon Appétit, shared a “Spiced Chickpea Stew with Coconut and Turmeric.” The recipe acknowledges inspiration from South India and parts of the Caribbean, but it was framed to sound new and exciting for Bon Appétit’s target readership. In other recipes, Roman similarly used an “ethnic” ingredient and made it seem accessible to the American public. In contrast, Bon Appétit’s Priya Krishna was told that her Indian food wouldn’t get page views, while white chefs working beside her could create dishes rooted in Indian techniques, name it something different, and receive plenty of attention.
This isn’t to say that content creators shouldn’t be allowed to share dishes from outside of their culture, but it is problematic when the recipes promote a Eurocentric worldview or push forth a “better” or “easier” way to cook something people have been making for generations. How many times have you seen recipes for African peanut stew, Asian noodles, and Indian curry? Even today, a quick Google search will lead to pages of recipes by bloggers who either unknowingly or knowingly exoticize these cultures while overlooking the regionality of their cuisines.
Back in 2020, I conducted similar Google searches of my favorite Indian dishes and unsurprisingly found that the top hits were by white creators. This marked a pivot in my approach to creating, but still, with a desire to please the fickle Instagram algorithm.
I grew up eating dishes that you could not find at most US-based Indian restaurants, yet when I first started posting Indian food, it was merely “Indian-inspired” food. I made the recipes “accessible” by naming them in English, followed by the Indian name in parentheses as if the original name was an afterthought. I avoided ingredients that required traveling to an Indian grocery store, because who has the time to travel any further than 10 minutes to support a BIPOC-owned grocery store and obtain culturally significant ingredients!
During this time, some of my experiments became family favorites (like tofu tikka masala pizza), while others resulted from feeling obligated to showcase my culture while also stooping down to make my culture more approachable. When other creators posted their canned pumpkin recipes in the fall, I found ways to use canned pumpkin in a curry. (My family can attest to the fact that this was not a positive development.) I added avocado and cherry tomatoes to my rajma (an Indian kidney bean dish) just to add a pop of color and familiarity. I served peanut tofu with lemon rice because god forbid lemon rice would ever be able to withstand the forces of the internet on its own!
The history of plant-based eating on the internet is short, but from what we’ve seen so far, food media has historically maintained a monotonous vegan space. In the summer of 2020, Black and other non-Western vegan bloggers began to receive unprecedented attention, enough to evoke skepticism. People who steered clear of social justice issues in the past shared simplistic messages about how they usually don’t get political, but addressing racism was important. Infographics screamed “food is political.” More recently, the shift from photo to video allowed creators to add more personality to their content, which often included sharing about their cultures.
I’m no expert on the waves of social media, but I feel like the vegan and plant-based space is more diverse today – though I may feel that way because I now follow creators I resonate with. As consumers, we can diversify our social media feeds, call out content we find culturally insensitive, and uplift media platforms that are already doing the work to reverse the Eurocentric ideas propagated by food media. Beyond social media, a paradigm shift in nutrition (i.e. no longer screaming “Mediterranean diet!” from the mountaintops) could break down the barriers BIPOC individuals face when reconciling plant-based eating and their culinary traditions. This may look like training dietitians and physicians to make more culturally-informed recommendations and funding clinical research on non-Western diets. Changing the perspective shared by healthcare professionals may influence a similar shift in food media.
As for social media, people have been showing up and doing the work, day after day. I’ve seen and created videos directly addressing these issues, but I’ve also noticed more subtle shifts, like referring to a dish in a different language with no parenthetical written in English – if people don’t know what it means, Google is not that many taps and clicks away.
There is a lot of talk about how scrolling through Instagram and TikTok can be draining, and that is certainly valid—I feel that way any time I use the explore page. Yet every time I open these apps, I come across an exciting recipe I haven’t cooked before. I see people unapologetically eating with their hands on camera. I learn about other cultures and build community through sharing my own stories and recipes. I don’t know where social media with respect to veganism is headed, but I’m hopeful that it includes voices and ideas that have been excluded in the past.
Plant-Based Recipe Creators to Follow
A list of talented plant-based recipe creators to check out!
Want to Learn More? Some Further Reading and Listening
Food Media Must Work Harder to Fix Its Racism Problem (Grub Street)
The food world is imploding over structural racism. The problems are much bigger than Bon Appétit. (Vox)
Stewed Awakening (Eater)
Dear White Vegans, Stop Appropriating Food (Vice)
Eurocentrism in Food (Spice Club)
The Mediterranean Diet Is a Whitewashed Fantasy (Antiracist Dietitian)
What Is White Veganism? (Queer Brown Vegan)
Tokenism in Media (Studio ATAO)
A Case for a More Regional Understanding of Food (Vice)
When It Comes to a Recipe, What’s in a Name? (Vice)
The Color of My Skin Is Sometimes Confused With the Scope of My Talent (Epicurious)
Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble
The Importance of Non-White Led Food Media (Salt and Spine podcast)
More From Anisha!
To read more of Anisha’s work and support her, check out her Substack newsletter, Spice Club, follow her on TikTok and Instagram, and make some of the delicious plant-based recipes on her website.
Braun, V., & Carruthers, S. (2020). Working at self and wellness: A critical analysis of vegan vlogs. In Digital Food Cultures. Routledge.
Greenebaum, J. (2018). Vegans of color: Managing visible and invisible stigmas. Food, Culture & Society, 21(5), 680–697. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2018.1512285
 | A guest post by
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Thank you for having me Anjali! I admire your work so much and I'm thrilled to be a part of it.
Incredible essay! I am also someone who also got onto the vegan social media scene around age 19/20 in the era of banana mono-meals, raw till 4, and everything else you mentioned above. So grateful for you sharing your story, resources for further learning, and that incredible list of vegan food creators.