Why does the word vegan put people off?

The objection

“I’m interested in eating less meat, but I’d never call myself vegan. The word’s just… off-putting.”

The answer

You’re not imagining it, and you can eat this way without ever taking on the word. The reaction is common enough that psychologists have measured it, and part of it is about the kind of person the word brings to mind. MacInnis and Hodson (2017) found that meat eaters rated vegetarians and vegans as negatively as, or more negatively than, several groups that commonly face prejudice, and rated vegans more harshly than vegetarians [1]. The bias was stronger among people with more right-wing views, and the authors traced it to how much of a threat those people felt vegetarians and vegans posed [1].

Why do people react badly to vegans?

Research points to resentment at feeling judged, because a vegan’s choice can feel like a verdict on everyone else’s dinner whether or not anything is said. In a study of how meat eaters see vegetarians, Minson and Monin (2012) found that 47% of participants freely associated negative words with vegetarians, and the words grew more negative the more participants expected vegetarians to see themselves as morally superior [2]. Asking people to imagine that judgement before they rated vegetarians made the ratings less positive, a backlash the authors call do-gooder derogation [2]. MacInnis and Hodson found a similar pattern by motive, with vegetarians and vegans who cited animal rights or the environment judged especially harshly compared with those who gave health as their reason [1].

Newspapers have helped draw the picture. Studying UK national papers from 2007, Cole and Morgan (2011) found they tended to discredit veganism through ridicule or as too hard to keep up, casting vegans as ascetics, faddists, sentimentalists or, in some cases, hostile extremists, a portrait the authors argue misrepresents what being vegan is like [3]. Being mistaken for that preachy, extreme figure is something people work to avoid. In focus groups, college students who weren’t vegan said they expected to be stigmatised if they ate like vegans, and distanced themselves from vegans, and from eating like them, to avoid it; Markowski and Roxburgh (2019) suggest this fear holds people back from moving to a more plant-based diet [4].

Does the word vegan on a menu put people off?

It does, at least in the US, where randomised experiments found that dishes were chosen less often when they carried the label. Berke and Larson (2023) showed people two menu items, and a randomly chosen group saw a “vegan” or “vegetarian” label on one of them; labelled items were significantly less likely to be picked, and the effect was much larger in two field studies at a US university, where people were choosing real food for events, than in an online study where the choice was hypothetical [5]. The study found no sign that removing the labels pushed vegetarians and vegans towards the meat dishes [5]. Between the words themselves the gap is small. In two pre-registered experiments with 1,148 people in the US and 491 in Germany, a “plant-based” label was slightly more appealing than “vegetarian” or “vegan”, and how good people expected the food to taste was a strong and consistent predictor of whether they said they would buy it, whatever the label (Ruby, Graça and Olli, 2024) [6].