The Good Eater

November 1, 2023

Cofounder of Plant Futures, with a PhD from Harvard and attention from The Atlantic, The Telegraph, and Refinery29, vegan and sociologist Guilbeault offers an expansive social history of veganism, the science behind it, and its implications for food culture and the environment. Prepub Alert.

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March 11, 2024
Sociologist Guilbeault (Habits of Inequality), who cut animal products out of her diet following her grandfather’s death from cancer, considers whether there’s “truly an ethical way to eat” in her ho-hum account of veganism’s past and future. She examines several facets of the vegan movement in hopes of discovering what a “just, nourishing, and equitable food system could look like.” Surveying the burgeoning vegan food tech industry, Guilbeault visits the headquarters of Wildtype, which produces fish “grown from animal cells in a laboratory,” and Beyond Meat, which makes fake meat products out of plants. These companies pose ethical conundrums, the author contends: they often still rely on “our current commodity crop system, in which crops are grown with chemical fertilizers, sprayed with herbicides, and then heavily processed.” On the other hand, Guilbeault champions regenerative agriculture, a new philosophy of pesticide-free and carbon-sequestering soil-health management, which she argues is compatible with veganism since both philosophies take factory farming as an enemy. While Guilbeault offers some entertaining historical context for the vegan movement and plenty of personal insight, her conclusions are often underwhelming (“If there’s one takeaway from this book, it’s that no matter which food system we choose, trade-offs are inevitable”). Despite the author’s best intentions, this fails to make a splash.