Living food diet and veganism: Individual vs collective boundaries of the forbidden

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2011 50: 275Social Science InformationTiina Arppe, Johanna Mäkelä and Virpi Väänänen

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396618 SSI50210.1177/0539018410396618Arppe et al.Social Science Information

Corresponding author:Tiina Arppe, Department of Sociology, PO Box 16 (Snellmaninkatu 12), 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland. Email: [email protected]

Living food diet and veganism: Individual vs collective boundaries of the forbidden

Tiina ArppeUniversity of Helsinki, Finland

Johanna Mäkelä & Virpi VäänänenNational Consumer Research Centre, Helsinki, Finland

AbstractThe article compares two distinctly modern dietary movements of the 20th century: the living food diet and veganism. It shows that, although food is one of the principal areas where nature and culture converge, in modern society eating is no longer a mere problem of classification (edible/non-edible); it has also become the object of strong emotional and moral investments. Both living foodism and veganism emphasize the importance of ‘natural’ foods, yet both are very much products of modern individualistic culture. Moreover, both diets involve rather extreme forms of denial that can make everyday life difficult (rejecting cooked produce, rejecting all animal products), even though the two stem from rather different motives. The data on living foodism is based on face-to-face interviews and a postal questionnaire, both conducted in Finland in 2006, whereas the data on veganism is based on existing Finnish theses, interviews from which are used selectively in this paper. The differences and the similarities between the two diets are analysed in light of the motives for following the diet, the assumptions concerning the purity and the impurity of the food, and the attitudes towards prohibitions and rules. The article shows that the stronger the role of community in the dietary movement, the more pronounced is the moral aspect of the diet and the stricter the rules defining the boundaries of the forbidden.

Keywordsaffectivity, culture, food, impurity, individualism, nature, prohibition, purity

Anthropology of food/Anthropologie de l’alimentation

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RésuméL’article compare deux régimes alimentaires modernes du 20e siècle: le régime de l’alimentation vivante (‘living food’) et le véganisme. Bien que la nourriture soit l’un des principaux domaines où nature et culture convergent, manger, dans nos sociétés modernes va bien au-delà de la simple classification ‘comestible/non-comestible’; c’est aussi devenu l’objet d’un fort investissement émotionnel et moral. Le régime de l’alimentation vivante comme le véganisme insistent sur l’importance de ‘l’alimentation naturelle’, et pourtant tous deux sont au plus haut degré des produits de la culture individualiste moderne. De plus, tous deux impliquent des formes de renoncement plutôt extrêmes, qui peuvent rendre la vie quotidienne difficile (refus des produits cuits, renoncement à tous les produits d’origine animale) quoique leurs motivations soient assez différentes. Les données sur l’alimentation vivante ont été obtenues par des interviews en présence et un questionnaire postal, réalisés en Finlande en 2006, tandis que les données sur le véganisme proviennent de travaux finlandais existants, dont les interviews ont été utilisées de manière sélective. Les différences et les ressemblances entre les deux régimes alimentaires sont analysées en fonction des motivations pour suivre le régime, des conceptions concernant la pureté et l’impureté de la nourriture et des attitudes envers les prohibitions et les règles. L’article montre que plus le rôle de la communauté est important dans le mouvement diététique, plus l’aspect moral du régime est accentué et plus les règles définissant les limites de l’interdit sont strictes.

Mots-clefs affectivité, culture, impureté, individualisme, nature, nourriture, prohibition, pureté

Food is one of the principal areas where nature and culture converge. As Claude Lévi-Strauss (1989) remarked, there is no culture without a language and cooking. Although food is vital to us, we do not eat things chosen at random, at random times or prepared in random ways. Nature offers us a wide selection of nutritionally adequate raw materi-als, yet we do not accept everything that is edible for our food. The selection of food is a process wherein nutrition offered by nature is transformed by preparation (cooking) into food, a cultural product (see MacClancy, 1992; Mäkelä, 2002).

The more technological our culture, the greater a problem eating seems to become. This is quite logical if we regard food-related distinctions and the transformation of edibles into ‘food’ as cultural products. The more complex cultural reality becomes, the subtler are the distinctions made within it and the more numerous the subcultures spawned by them. In the case of eating, this is reflected especially in the 20th century by the growth in the number of different diets and dietary movements, but also by a number of more general processes, such as the increasing moralization, medicalization, aestheticization, ecologization and economization of food (see e.g. Massa, Lillunen & Karisto, 2006, 178–179).

From a sociological perspective, the interesting question is whether this is due only to the proliferation of classifiable material and thereby of opportunities for making more refined classificatory distinctions: alternatives such as vegetarianism become possible only in a situation where there is enough food to eat. Another possibility is to see the phenomenon as being a characteristic of (post)modern culture and therefore primarily a result of the historical distinctiveness of that culture. Why, in modern societies, has




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eating developed from a problem of classification into something that can carry an extremely powerful affective and moral charge?

This article compares two distinctly modern dietary movements of the 20th century: the living food diet (living foodism, or LF for short) and veganism. These diets are par-ticularly interesting from the perspective of the nature/culture dichotomy, since both emphasize the importance of ‘natural’ foods, yet both are very much products of modern individualistic culture.

Briefly, both diets are plant based. A vegan diet strictly excludes any products of ani-mal origin, be it food or clothes (see www.americanvegan.org; www.vegansociety.com; www.vegaaniliitto.fi). The living food diet allows the use of honey, but the food should be prepared without actually cooking it. LF emphasizes that food should be uncooked, unprocessed and preferably organic. Typical methods of preparation are sprouting and fermentation (Väänänen & Mäkelä, 2007). While LF and sometimes mainstream vege-tarianism accentuate the diet as a healthy choice, veganism is connected to the animal rights movement in its avoidance of animal products (Suddath, 2008). At first glance both diets involve rather extreme forms of denial that can make everyday life difficult (rejecting cooked produce, rejecting all animal products), even though the two stem from rather different motives.

The data on LF is based on face-to-face interviews and a postal questionnaire, both conducted in 2006, while the data on veganism is based on existing Finnish theses, inter-views contained in which are used selectively in this study. The present study is therefore not a strictly empirical comparison between commensurate datasets; instead, it is a loose juxtaposition that seeks above all else to highlight the main differences between these two modern dietary regimes and to interpret them in the context of modern culture.

The analysis of the LF interviews is loosely founded on the idea of the ‘culinary tri-angle’ developed in the 1960s by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss’s triangle is based on oppositions between culture and nature, and between the elaborated and the unelabo-rated, dichotomies that occupy a central place in the LF diet as well. Unlike the myths studied in the culinary triangle, both the LF diet and veganism seem to challenge the idea of culture seen as progression, but not in the same manner. In order to bring out the strong ethical aspect of the diets, especially salient in veganism, and the attendant affec-tive charge (pertaining to what is considered as forbidden), we have employed the theory of cultural dynamic between clean and unclean presented in the 1960s by Mary Douglas, as well as the Freudian idea of emotional ambivalence associated with the prohibited, emphasizing the ‘regressive’ aspect of human culture. These models have been used to analyse the attitude of living foodists and vegans towards the boundaries of their own dietary regime and towards what is forbidden. Finally, we discuss LF and veganism spe-cifically as modern cultural phenomena and their relationship to community and individuality.

Living foodism and veganism as products of modern culture

Although vegetarian diets have a long history (on the history of vegetarianism, see Spencer, 1993; Twigg, 1984), living foodism and veganism are distinctly movements of modern 20th-century Western culture. The UK Vegan Society was founded in 1944 and





is acknowledged to be the first vegan association in the world (www.vegansociety.com/about/history.aspx). Its American counterpart, The American Vegan Society, was estab-lished in 1960 (www.americanvegan.org/history.htm). Despite the fact that a comprehen-sive international study on the history of veganism has yet to be written, it is safe to say that the common denominator for vegans all over the world is their close connection to the animal rights movement and their refusal of all animal products (although the bound-aries of ‘veganism’ can also be culturally more fluid, as the interview data gathered by Anna Willetts in Southeast London clearly shows – see Willets, 1997: 117–118; by com-parison, for a Finnish vegan a concept like a ‘fish-eating vegan’ would be utterly incon-ceivable). By contrast, the living food diet was developed during the 1960s by one individual, the American Ann Wigmore. She promoted the diet in her books (see e.g. Wigmore, 1984) and travelled around the world lecturing on living food. Wigmore also visited Finland several times in the early 1980s (Väänänen & Mäkelä, 2007).

One of the defining characteristics of 20th-century culture often cited is the emer-gence of individualism, the effects of which have been analysed by social theorists from a variety of perspectives (Lasch and the ‘postmodern culture of narcissism’, Colin Campbell and the ‘hedonism of modern consumption’, Giddens and the ‘decontextual-ized individual’, Beck and the ‘risk society’). This same process of individualization is also reflected in eating, yet in most food research it is presented rather unproblematically as an event that a priori strengthens the community (see e.g. DeVault, 1991). This desired communality of eating is nevertheless undermined in modern culture by many factors, starting from the wide dissemination of fast and convenience foods and ranging as far as snacks and specialized diets.

Considered strictly from the viewpoint of the eating event, LF and veganism can both be seen as being part of this development: both tend to isolate the eater from the commu-nity rather than unite him/her with it. The act of eating is often a solitary event, and even if the person eats the meal in company, the specialized character of his/her food and the attention lavished on it tend to set the eater apart from others around the table, who eat ‘ordinary’ food. However, if we consider the situation from the perspective of the motives that dictate the choice of diet, it is transformed utterly: where the primary motive of living foodists is their own personal health, that of vegans is the wellbeing of the other (animals, the planet Earth). It is interesting that modernity can give rise to two movements with such different attitudes towards the alleged ‘individualism’ of the culture: one in which indi-vidualism seems to have been taken to the extreme, as the obligations and responsibilities of the individual are seen exclusively in terms of his/her own body, health and quality of life; another in which the individual is prepared to sacrifice a considerable part of the comforts of modern life on behalf of the other, since the obligations and responsibilities of the individual are seen primarily in terms of the other and the other’s life.

This difference manifests itself clearly in the attitudes of vegans and living foodists towards the permitted and the forbidden, towards the ‘pure’ and the ‘impure’. Whereas for living foodists the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden is largely tech-nical in nature, a norm that pertains to the preparation of food and the processing of raw materials, for vegans it is an ethical law that pertains to the act of eating. The latter relationship to the forbidden makes the boundary an absolute one and any transgression a sin, rather than a mere ‘lapse’. Vegans consequently harbour a much stronger affective attitude towards the boundary and that which lies beyond (the forbidden) than living




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foodists, whose attitude towards the rules that restrict their eating are much more relaxed. Sociologically, it is interesting to note that the attitude towards prohibition seems to vary as a function of group pressure. Vegans, among whom the perception of group pressure is quite strong, take a sharper view also of prohibitions, whereas living foodists, who do not constitute any kind of a community, have a considerably more easygoing attitude towards the prohibited.

Research data

This article makes use of empirical data on both living foodists and vegans. The data on living foodists consists of interviews with 12 Finnish living foodists, and a questionnaire mailed to the members of the Finnish Association of Living Food (N = 239, response rate 51%). The nature of the material and its analysis are discussed in detail elsewhere (Väänänen & Mäkelä, 2007). Briefly, the interviewees were between 24 and 85 years of age. Two were men, five had a higher university degree. At the time of the interviews, half of the interviewees were pensioners, all others bar one had a job. Nearly all were living in the Helsinki metropolitan area or its vicinity. Not all interviewees regarded themselves as living foodists when they were interviewed, although some had followed the diet more scrupulously at some earlier time.

In September 2006, all members of the Finnish Association of Living Food were mailed a questionnaire designed to elicit a general idea of the diets followed among the membership, their reasons for choosing living food and also the effects of the diet. The respondents were between 18 and 86 years of age, with an average age of 56. About one in ten were male, nearly one-half held a university degree, and nearly one-half were employed. About half lived in the Helsinki metropolitan area. Respondents were asked to estimate how much of their food was living. Exclusively living food was reported by five respondents, or 2%. Almost exclusively was reported by 13%, and about half by 35% of the respondents. The largest group were those who reported that they apply some principles of living foodism in their diet (43%). Very little or none at all was reported by 7% of the respondents.

In respect of veganism, the data was not gathered by the present writers. Instead, the comparison is based on existing studies, of which there are not very many. The article makes use of most Finnish thesis studies on the subject (Karatmaa, 2001; Luukka, 1998; Peltokoski, 1999), membership data from the Vegan Society of Finland (sex, domicile), as well as some more general sources (Konttinen & Peltokoski, 2004). The data in the theses consists of rather narrow, in-depth interviews, autobiographical essays and partici-patory observation. The interviewees (total 19 interviews: 10 men, 9 women) were for the most part between the ages of 20 and 30, relatively highly educated (university or polytechnic students), city dwellers who had taken up veganism for ethical reasons (ani-mal rights, environmental issues).

Living foodism in Finland

Living foodism is a lifestyle programme that centres on the principle that a diet of uncooked vegetarian food will help one to gain health and maintain it. Although the food is not cooked, it is prepared and processed in various ways. The raw materials should





ideally be organic and contain a lot of leaf green, and no industrially produced foodstuffs should be used. Living foods are also thought to cleanse the body of accumulated poi-sons and waste products. The diet is based on the idea that the enzymes in food are important for human digestion and health (for more on the subject, see Väänänen & Mäkelä, 2007).

The living food diet first emerged in Finland in the 1980s. The Finnish Association of Living Food was established in 1983, and in 2006 its membership was about 500.

Living food diet: Content, reasons and effects

The living food diet has seven basic food groups: raw fruits; vegetables; fruit and chlo-rophyll juice; sprouted seeds, grains and beans; seeds and nuts; fermented foods; and unprocessed honey (Wigmore, 1984: 41).

The living food diet of the interviewees was based on the ideas of Ann Wigmore (1984). They ate a lot of vegetables, fruits, berries, nuts and seeds. Dried fruits were also used in abundance, raisins and figs in particular. The most-often-mentioned seeds were sunflower, sesame, linseeds and almonds. Other foods often mentioned by the interview-ees were vegetable and fruit juice, seed milks, shoots, sprouts, sprouted grain, dried ‘bread’, fermented vegetables, seaweed, regenerative juice, wheatgrass juice, honey and cold-pressed oil.

However, all interviewees except one said that they also ate foods that are not part of the LF diet. These included cooked or animal products such as cooked vegetables, bread, coffee, fish, butter and cheese. However, meat or convenience foods were used very seldom. According to the interviewees, the benefits gained from non-living foods were health-related, such as vital oleic acids from fish, although variety and pleasure were also emphasized. The consumption of non-living foods among questionnaire respondents was also high. It appears that the main concern for living foodists is not to avoid cooked food or meat, but industrial foods.

The main reasons for the choice of diet both among the interviewees and the question-naire respondents had to do with the promotion of health and vitality, while ethical or ecological considerations had very little prominence. More than half of the questionnaire respondents said the diet was a way to find help for some illness or other health-related problems. The three most important reasons for the LF diet were health promotion and physical and mental vitality.

The interviewees and questionnaire respondents reported many positive effects of the diet. The most-often-cited effects in the questionnaire responses were increased vitality, continuing health and fewer incidences of flu. More than one in three reported ameliora-tion of the symptoms of illnesses; this was also mentioned by many interviewees. Illnesses mentioned by both groups included gastro-intestinal problems, arthritis, asthma and multiple sclerosis.

Preparation of living foods: Sprouting and fermentation

All interviewees had learned to prepare living foods by experimenting and taking instruction from books and courses. Their opinions varied as to how laborious it is to




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prepare living foods, but all agreed that it takes time to learn. Most interviewees had simplified their food preparation so that they ate very similar meals on a daily basis. ‘It’s kind of straightforward and the same from day to day, but you don’t get bored with it’ (Marketta). Many interviewees described food preparation in minute detail. Living food is not just raw food, but prepared food made from raw materials. Preparation methods affect rawstuffs in different ways, and, according to the LF ideology, cooking is tanta-mount to ‘killing’ food. Soaking, sprouting and growing shoots are, by contrast, means of bringing the raw materials ‘to life’. ‘All the vitamins and enzymes come awake that have dried in there, but when you soak, sprout them, it all becomes activated, so that’s just where the power is …’ (Senni). All seeds, beans and grains contain substances that inhibit the functioning of enzymes, and soaking is specifically designed to activate the enzymes and to ‘bring [the seeds] back to life’. The method allows the human body to metabolize all the nutrients in the food.

Nearly all interviewees also used sprouting. For many the method had become part of their everyday routine to the extent that they felt it ‘in [their] bones’. However, inter-viewees also emphasized the need for precision and hygiene, because sprouts can carry salmonella. Growing shoots is slightly more infrequent than sprouting, possibly because the method requires soil and other types of seed compared to sprouting.

Blending is an important method of preparing living foods, and all interviewees were familiar with it. A blender makes food preparation easy and fast, and the food easily digestible. ‘When you blend it in a blender, it’s in a more digestible form, and all the nutrients are absorbed better’ (Anette). Many interviewees used a blender to make raw soups, seed milks and smoothies.

Most interviewees drank wheatgrass juice, considered an ‘elixir of life’ with healing properties. Made from shoots of wheat berries juiced in a specialized juicer, the drink is considered to lose its power soon after juicing and must therefore be prepared at home and used fresh. In principle, the juice is therefore completely fresh, or particularly ‘alive’, a kind of quintessential living food. According to interviewees, this chlorophyll-filled drink prevents flu, improves the level of haemoglobin in the blood, cures asthma and purifies the body of various poisons. Many said that wheatgrass juice tastes unpleasant and can cause intestinal symptoms when used in excessive quantities or too frequently.

Only two interviewees said they fermented vegetables on a regular basis, as fermented produce can also be bought in the shops in Finland. Because fermented vegetables keep for a long time, they do not need to be prepared very often. Fermented vegetables were part of the diet of most interviewees. The benefit of fermentation is that fermented foods contain lactobacilli that make vegetables more easily digestible. ‘Then all the fermented products are fermented when, if you eat cabbage raw, it’s not easy to digest, and that’s what cabbage really is, so when it’s fermented with lacto-fermentation, you have all those lactobacilli in it ...’ (Senni). Fermentation with lactobacillus cultures is a method of bringing food ‘alive’ by increasing the amount of live lactobacilli in the food that are beneficial to digestion. In addition to sauerkraut, fermentation is used to prepare other living foods such as rejuvelac and grain yoghurts.

Many interviewees had also tried dehydrating their foods, but relatively few used the method regularly. Dehydration can be done either in an oven or more properly in a dehy-drator. It must take place at low temperatures, because the ‘life’ in food is destroyed in temperatures that exceed 40 degrees Celsius. Dehydrated food adds variety to the diet





and allows food that resembles conventional dishes to be created. The group that most actively uses dehydration are those who were strictest followers of the LF diet. Dishes prepared using dehydrated foods bear a certain resemblance to cooked food and are rela-tively highly processed. Spices are also used to some extent in such dishes, but seasoning in the LF diet is generally very simple. Dehydrating is used to create ‘culturally familiar’ savoury combinations, i.e. food that is considered ‘normal’. On the other hand, living foods are supposed to taste of pure raw materials, yet not necessarily too raw, too unrefined.

From nature to culture, or vice versa?

One of the frames of interpretation often used in sociological research on food is the culinary triangle presented in the 1960s by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss originally developed his model for the purpose of analysing the dichotomy between nature and culture in the myths he had collected in South America. In addition, the triangle has since been employed frequently to analyse Western food cultures in a non-mythic context.

According to Lévi-Strauss, food is perceived by humans primarily in three different forms: it can be raw, cooked or rotted (Lévi-Strauss, 1968: 405–406). This gives us the triangle reproduced in Figure 1.

‘Raw’ represents the neutral starting point of food preparation; it is the unmarked, unelaborated apex of the triangle. ‘Cooked’ and ‘Rotted’ both represent elaboration as opposed to raw, although in opposite directions: cooked is the result of cultural elabora-tion, rotted is ‘natural’ elaboration. In the myths studied by Lévi-Strauss, the movement from nature to culture generally appears as progress, whereas return to nature is often a form of regression that involves the violation of cultural rules, such as the prohibition on incest or killing. Looking at ‘modern’ dietary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries from this perspective, it is interesting to note that so many of them specifically arise from the denial of the ‘civilizing’ effects of culture. This applies to a wide range of dietary regimes classifiable as ‘vegetarianism’, from living and raw foodism to vegetarianism and veganism. However, they do not question culture or the current relationship between nature and culture in the same way or based on the same tenets. With slight exaggeration,

Culture Nature

Raw

Cooked Rotted

Figure 1. The triangle of food perception (Lévi-Strauss, 1968: 405–406)




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however, we might say that all ‘modern’ vegetarian diet regimes involve, in one way or another, an attempt to reappropriate culture in a ‘natural’ way.

If we look at the principles sustaining LF from this angle, the trend is clearly visible. To begin with, the paramount values in the LF diet are that the food is natural and unelaborated. ‘Natural’ is seen as an ideal of healthy eating. On closer examination, however, nature in this case is not ‘pure’ or ‘untouched’, but culturally quite elaborate. Elaboration consists not only of various methods of preparation (e.g. sprouting, soaking, dehydrating, fermenting), but it also has an epistemological and discursive level. Nature in LF is saturated by scientific discourse. Particularly prominent seem to be vitamins and enzymes, which, prior to the 20th century, were completely unknown. Certain types of cultural elaboration are regarded as harmful precisely because they destroy the vital nat-ural energy in food: enzymes and vitamins. By contrast, this inherent energy of food-stuffs is preserved by specific methods of preparation: soaking, sprouting, dehydrating and fermenting. Sprouting is particularly important because it demonstrates life in its very process of growth, new and fresh. Dehydrating is a gentle and slow method whereby natural power is ‘concentrated’ for later use. Fermenting is a type of ‘rotting’ process in which the food is allowed to ‘stew’ in its own liquids. These are all slow methods of preparation, however, whereas blending and juicing are fast and violent, ‘technological’ cultural interventions on the slow workings of nature.

All in all, it is important to see that living food is not about romantic nostalgia for untouched nature, but an elaboration of nature in the ‘right’ way. In this sense it is an undeniably modern regime that increases not only the opportunities for cultural interven-tion but also their complexity. On the other hand, the LF diet represents a merging of natural ideal and cultural elaboration. The idea is to reach a maximally ‘natural’ result, and in the process all cultural interventions are allowed insofar as they remain within certain limits. In this situation, the manner and object of cultural intervention become central considerations because they also define the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden.

At first sight it may seem paradoxical that, even though living food is culturally elabo-rated in many ways, the ideal of ‘pure’ nature continues to thrive among those who eat it. This paradox is dispelled, however, when we remember that ‘pure’ in this context is not the same as ‘unelaborated’. The sharpest line is drawn against ‘industrially produced’ and ‘additives’. On the other hand, cooking too is considered a damaging method of elaboration. Cooked food is ‘dead’ because its enzymes and vitamins have been destroyed.

Some structure in the protein breaks down when it’s cooked, you don’t get it like it’s in there, the structure of the fats change, it’s like the whole structure of the food changes and the body is forced to deal with a foreign substance it’s not programmed to handle. It can do it [though], and the third one is that some of these substances vanish, like enzymes, for example .... (Kevin, 52, educator)

Additives are ‘impure’ substances added to food by a technological culture that has gone amiss. The ideal of most raw food diets has always been to ‘add’ as little as possible to the foodstuffs gotten from nature, whether it be spices, salt or anything not contained in the fresh produce itself. The concept of ‘purity’ associated with all types of vegetarian-ism has changed significantly since the emergence of these new types of diets from the





19th century to this day. Whereas a ‘pure’ vegetarian diet in the 19th century went hand in hand with the avoidance of fermented foods and ‘stimulants’ (alcohol, spices, tea, coffee, salt, herbs), ‘purity’ in the last decades of the 20th century has increasingly begun to denote food that is free from all additives and chemicals; the word is now ‘organic’ (see Spencer, 2000: 308).

Apart from additives, one thing that seems to be central in LF is the object of cultural intervention: when intervention involves the methods and tools of preparation, it is accepted more readily than when it involves the substance (the ‘internal’ structure of food, its vitamin content, nutritional value, perishability, etc.). The greatest danger comes from the artificial modification of foodstuffs enabled by industrial culture: additives and the extremes of artificial ‘intervention’ (genetically modified food, BSE). The interven-tion is more readily acceptable if the responsible agent is either the eater him/herself or some other individual. By contrast, intervention in the process of food preparation by large collective agents, ‘industry’ in particular, must be prevented.

Purity and impurity, boundaries and ‘sin’

The dichotomy of purity/impurity and the suppression of impurity have been discussed in a few Finnish graduate theses on vegetarian diets and veganism (Karatmaa, 2001; Peltokoski, 1999). The theses have relied especially on Mary Douglas’s theory of impu-rity (Douglas, 1966). Douglas starts from the Lévi-Straussian idea that as humans we structure reality through symbolic categories. The area that lies between or beyond the categories is a realm of chaos and impurity. This realm is dealt with by human communi-ties through symbolic strategies (explanation, physical control, avoidance, labelling as dangerous, etc.). Impurity or deviation are not just a residue of classification; they are a necessary consequence of any classificatory system. In this sense, impurity is an unavoid-able side-effect of any effort to create order. Moreover, disorder is a necessary condition for all creativity and change because the desire to maintain order is always a conservative impulse.

Pure and impure

Comparing the LF diet and ideology with veganism – another ‘extremist’ version of vegetarianism – nothing illustrates their difference better than their attitudes towards the dichotomy between the pure and the impure, the permitted and the forbidden. Although the preparation of food in the LF diet involves numerous rules and restrictions, when it comes to eating, the boundaries seem surprisingly flexible. For example, coffee, bread and fish can be included in the diet without making too much of a fuss, even though they are in principle ‘forbidden’ foods. The boundaries between the permitted and the prohibited in LF are not absolute moral injunctions, but rather normative rules or recommendations that allow some discretionary flexibility on the eater’s part. In vegan-ism, by contrast, the ‘demand for purity’ is absolute, at least in principle: transgressing the boundary by eating or using products derived from the animal kingdom endangers




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the individual’s entire identity. Whereas living foodists can ‘lapse’ by eating forbidden substances, a vegan will immediately vomit any meat eaten by accident:

… it was an older woman who hadn’t checked the dish [for meat], and so I put it in my mouth and I noticed that it was ham, so I went to the toilet and stuck two fingers down my throat. Although I didn’t put much in my mouth, it didn’t matter in that way, but for me it just felt, for my own wellbeing, that I somehow had to do it. (Karatmaa, 2001: 36)

The website of the Vegan Society of Finland (established in 1993, with approximately 700 members in 2006) has a detailed list of all products that are ‘forbidden’ from the vegan perspective, and the ingestion of which threatens the vegan identity of the person.

In similar situations, living foodists prefer a strategy of concealment or lying: one of the interviewees reported having swallowed the first bite and left the rest uneaten. She had not declared that she was a living foodist, however, so she said she did not have an appetite and blamed this on having a headache. Another interviewee had actually com-plained about having been served chicken soup, but the crucial difference compared to vegans is again in the explanation or justification: living foodists do not appeal to their inability to eat meat, but to their unwillingness.

I was thinking that sometime in the past I had liked liver casserole … so it must be good, and I took the casserole and warmed it up, but I didn’t like the taste anymore, and I kept eating it the whole day through and the taste of the casserole kept coming back in my mouth, so I’m not a fanatic, I wouldn’t say no, but I don’t want it. (Gunilla, 75, retired)

Vegans have also been studied as a group whose primary objective is the Douglasian idea of ‘purity’, and which has an affinity with the Lutheran religious ideology (see Karatmaa, 2001). The ‘fundamentalist’ zeal with which vegans guard their ideological boundaries and the religious rhetoric even the vegans use themselves (e.g. talk about being ‘con-verted’), as well as the more general notion of the ‘sanctity’ or inviolate nature of bound-aries, all undeniably recall sectarian religions.

The LF diet too includes features that are reminiscent of religious asceticism: the body is being trained for a more ‘spiritual’ future, although in this case the aims are purely subjective (personal wellbeing). The danger (contamination) comes from the out-side world, yet the subject guarding the boundary seems to take a relaxed view of the task. The rules in LF are recommendations rather than laws, they are porous and allow exceptions. Transgression is not a catastrophe: after the transgression, the boundary can be sealed again, until the next time.

We decided to have one bratwurst between the two of us, and I ate my half of it and I thought it tasted terribly good, but I didn’t want any more, I didn’t at all have the feeling that I would like more of it, unlike with chocolate when you have to eat it all, it’s just like I was totally satisfied after eating the one half of a bratwurst and I felt nice and wonderful, because it’s so fat and I like fatty things.... (Anette, 51, educator)





In short, the eating restrictions in LF seem to lack the aspect of sin, whereas sin is an essential aspect of the vegan dietary regime: ‘The desire for pleasure and ease leads to sinful action’ (Kupsala, 2000: 3). The vegans’ relationship to forbidden foods has an interesting ambiguity to it. On the one hand, they feel repelled by meat; on the other, some other ‘prohibited’ animal products are for them ‘temptations’, in the classical sense that they feel drawn to them yet struggle against them as well in the name of universal ethical principles. An opportunity to ‘commit a sin’ would seem to have at least two requirements: first, moral principles that the sinner violates and, second, a community that pressures its members to comply with those principles. From this perspective, the transgression is not merely a confusion of categories that might threaten collective boundaries, as assumed in Douglas’s theory; it calls into question the entire moral integ-rity and identity of the experiencing subject insofar as the identity of the individual always derives from the other (the community). It is difficult to sin exclusively against oneself because sin always requires the existence of a community both in a positive (attribution of identity) and a negative (limit-setting) sense.

The difference between vegans’ and living foodists’ attitudes towards boundaries could be summed up as follows (in somewhat simplified terms): whereas rules and restrictions in the LF regime are basically technical instructions pertaining to the prepa-ration of food and the handling of foodstuffs, in the vegan regime they apply to the very act of eating, the assimilation of foreign matter into oneself. It might even be claimed that the ethical dimension as it relates to otherness is continually present in the life of vegans in the act of eating. The status of the injunction is therefore much more absolute among vegans than among living foodists, for whom the ‘other’ (object of the prohibi-tion) is a foreign ‘substance’ (poisons, additives, fertilizers, GMO, prions).

Prohibition, transgression and sin

The attitude of vegans towards the prohibitions that limit their diet does not seem to be merely an issue of classification; it also contains a powerful affective component con-cerning the injunction and its objective. This aspect of the regime is difficult to reveal with the purely classificatory structuralist models of Lévi-Strauss and Douglas, since they do not concern themselves with why something is forbidden, nor does their concept of boundary have other than a cognitive, differentiative meaning (A/not A). An interest-ing attempt to move in another direction in the explanation of vegetarianism has been made by Julia Twigg (1979). Twigg explains the revulsion of the vegetarians towards meat by a hierarchy of foods in which red meat in particular is associated with (mascu-line) power and sexuality. This hierarchy allegedly stems from a primitive fear of blood and of transgressing the barrier between humanity (culture) and animality (nature). The animality symbolized by red meat (blood) is ambivalent in the classical sense, which identifies the most sacred and the most feared (and therefore tabooed). From this point of view, veganism would in fact crystallize the implicit fear that the dominant culture feels towards ‘ambivalent animal power’ (Twigg, 1979: 19–20). On the other hand, Twigg also detects a more general ambivalence of the vegetarian attitude towards nature, which is simultaneously regarded as something inherently good (the pantheistic oneness




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and harmony of nature). Society (culture) is therefore identified with falseness and inau-thenticity. Vegetarianism therefore represents a classical Rousseauist yearning for a pre-social, paradisiacal state in which man lived in harmony with nature (Twigg, 1979: 21–23).

However, this explanation does not take into account the variations within the general position it totalizes as ‘vegetarianism’. The attitude of vegans and raw foodists towards the boundaries of the forbidden as well as towards that conceived as ‘alive’ or ‘dead’ (Twigg, 1979: 24) are by no means identical, as we shall see. Twigg also tends to univer-salize certain ‘mythical’ and ahistorical contents (primitive fear of blood, association of animality with aggressiveness, power and uncontrolled sexuality), thus projecting the primitive beliefs directly into modern context in the guise of an affective reaction. Yet a more plausible context for the vegan ideology, for instance, is its specific historical con-nection with the animal rights movement, not an archaic phobia attached to blood or a primitive fear of sexuality. Moreover, neither the vegan nor the living food ideology seems to represent the sort of pristine Edenism that Twigg (1979: 25) considers as the hallmark of vegetarianism: both are very conscious of the possibilities inherent in mod-ern technology, provided it is used in an enlightened manner.

Yet, there is an undeniable affective ambivalence, especially in the vegan attitude towards the forbidden (the products of animal origin). This seems to entail a strong emo-tional rejection, coupled with a powerful affective tension (attraction/repulsion): prohi-bition seems to generate both disgust and fascination, in a very classical Freudian manner (see Freud, 1991; the same emotional ambivalence was later theorized for instance by the French philosopher Georges Bataille; see Bataille, 1995). Drawing freely on these two sources, the affective oscillation strongly present in veganism could also be presented in a triangular form (Figure 2).

Culture

Nature

Cooked

Prohibition

Raw (pure) Rotted (impure)

Figure 2. Affective oscillation present in veganism





In this scheme, the three corners of the triangle are ‘Raw’ (pure nature), ‘Cooked’ (culture) and ‘Rotten’ (impure nature, death). The original topological (and static) dichotomy of nature/culture is replaced by the idea of two opposite movements. Culture can be seen as a process of transcending nature, but transgression can be either an ascent (progression) or a collapse (regression) – culture is not merely ‘progressive’, it can entail a regression. Similarly, nature is not merely a pure and unpolluted paradise lost, but contains a ‘rotten’ or ‘accursed’ part, irrevocably modified by cultural prohibi-tion. In other words, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ can no longer be posited as unambiguous, neutral axes or topological positions. Instead, they are constituted by the dual dynamic of rise and fall, and by the central position of prohibition, which from the outset intro-duces a moral dimension to the scheme. Yet both the prohibition and the actual ‘con-tent’ of the corners are here presumed to be social by nature, which means that they should be decided or ‘filled’ each time only after a sociological and a historical analy-sis. This enables us to shed light on the role of prohibition also among vegans, and above all on the difference in attitude towards injunction among living foodists and vegans.

Neither vegans nor living foodists oppose culture as such, only the exploitation and domination of nature by contemporary culture. Culture is ambivalent: while being an ideal image of spirituality, in its current form it is also a destructive force. But the moral principle behind veganism is specifically an absolute prohibition on killing the other. The transgression, in particular the ingestion of meat, is therefore ‘sinful’ in a completely different way from the occasional lapse on the part of living foodists when they eat chocolate, cheese or pastry. Incorporation of the rejected substance can lead to actual physical symptoms of revulsion. A similar moral condemnation is extended to the entire ‘wasteful’ lifestyle of modern culture, with the maximal use of products posited as its opposite. The underlying idea in fact is not a pristine and untouched nature, but one that is symbolically ‘pure’ and used in the correct way.

When it comes to the different methods of preparing or elaborating foodstuffs, the vegans are in fact more tolerant than the living foodists: food can be cooked or raw, as long as it doesn’t come from the animal kingdom. For the vegans, the prohibition touches a strictly defined category of objects (animals), whereas for the living foodists it is directed more towards specific methods of preparation. The difference might also be formulated by saying that it lies in the way each group perceives the category of death. What is dead, and hence forbidden, for the vegans are killed animals and anything that derives from them, whereas for LF eaters what is dead are primarily the things that have been cooked (be it animals or vegetables/fruits/plants). In other words, the difference is not only about perceiving some things as ‘polluted’ and therefore refusing to incorporate them, it is more fundamentally about different visions concerning what is dead and a common refusal to eat dead things (see also Twigg, 1984: 28). This, of course, raises interesting questions about the way modern (Western) people perceive death on a more general level: the all-embracing individualization of society seems to comprise every-thing, including death. We are all paradoxically alone with our subjective, biological ‘use by’ date awaiting us, even though this fate is shared by all living things (see e.g. Baudrillard, 1976: 265–266). On the other hand, death is massively and indifferently




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produced in huge industrial extermination camps that we, humans, have reserved for other species (see e.g. Vialles, 1994: 22). From this angle especially, the vegan reaction against eating meat could also be interpreted as a protest against this atomized state of affairs by reassuming a strong collective and symbolic responsibility for taking life: Thou shalt not kill.

Veganism is essentially about something other than just a diet. In the discourse, it has been linked with the ‘sacred’, either in the sense of exclusion or taboo (see Karatmaa, 2001: 13), and with an assumed ‘experientiality’ and ‘immediacy’ of the vegans’ view of nature (Peltokoski, 1999: 49–54). However, as emphasized by both Freud and Bataille, the impure, rejected area is never exclusively a realm of disgust and revulsion, it also has a distinct attraction (the denied thing exerts a pull). This attrac-tion is evident in the relationship of both vegans and living foodists to certain forbid-den things:

… at least I don’t do it because I have a fancy for it, if I were to slip – I do slip sometimes – at least it’s not because I fancy it, not because I would like to have something non-vegan, because it’s not usually … You are kind of aware of those realities, like, if you’re in the market hall and there are these lovely felt hats with ear muffs, I admit I’ve tried them on, but I wouldn’t dream of buying one, because it’s wool, you can try it on, but that’s different. (Vegan interviewed by Karatmaa, 2001: 41)

Ambivalence (attraction/repulsion) nevertheless only applies to the more ‘innocent’ objects of prohibition (woollen clothes for vegans, and chocolate, cheese and pastries for LF eaters). However, both groups are quite strict about the prohibition on meat eating. In the case of vegans, this is based on an unequivocal moral injunction, which is absolute to the extent that the mere idea of transgression can cause physical revulsion. On the other hand, the physical reaction is to a large extent conditioned by the underlying prohibition and peer pressure:

… I might find myself enjoying terribly, like it really smells good, wonderful, I’m feeling really hungry, and then you realize, hey! it’s the grilled steak that smells here. Then I feel terribly embarrassed and I’m, like, I hope no one saw me, that I started to feel embarrassed openly... (N6/4). (Karatmaa, 2001: 38)

Although the prohibition is quite unambiguous, ambivalence remains on the affec-tive level among the vegans, whereas living foodists explain their rejection of meat eating on the basis of purely subjective feelings: it makes one ‘feel heavy’, it makes one tired. Eating meat is never a personal catastrophe, however, and discretionary exceptions are allowed in special circumstances. Nevertheless, eating meat is not com-pletely unproblematical for living foodists either, although some of them specifically refuse to take a stand on the issue on a moral level: ‘Heavens, of course I’ve eaten [meat] … like, there are meat people who can’t imagine eating food without a bloody steak … But I don’t take any moral or any other stand on this kind of thing’ (Gunilla, 75, retired).





Relationship to the permitted and the prohibited

There are at least three areas where we can search for an explanation of the difference in attitude between vegans and living foodists regarding boundaries between the permitted and the prohibited. First, in the case of LF, the norm or ideal behind the choice of diet is purely subjective: personal health, responsibility for which is exclusively one’s own, and the effects of which one experiences exclusively in one’s own body and mind. This links LF seamlessly to the individualist ethos of mainstream culture.

Well, I think that, in my case, it’s based on healthy … on health, my personal health, like, I know for sure, I can tell when I eat this food, I’m right away … lots of complaints, but now my health is totally the most important thing, so that without this [LF diet] I wouldn’t get along, I’d be walking with a stick. (Hellevi, 68, retired)

The second explanation has to do with the reference group and the lack of peer pres-sure. One particularly notable thing is that Finnish living foodists do not seem to form any kind of community amongst themselves. This probably explains in part their flexible attitude towards prohibition and recommendations: since there is no peer pressure, every act of eating is merely a subjective choice. This allows the rules to be modified to suit personal preferences and also allows them to be bent when necessary. The penalty is not excommunication (not even from the virtual community), nor does transgression put the person’s group-based identity in jeopardy; the transgression is seen, much more tradi-tionally, as a momentary ‘lapse’ or a conscious allowance for ‘exceptions’:

When I left all the chocolate and all the lovely delicacies, at the time it was, it was kind of really easy, since I’d made my decision that I wouldn’t eat them. But then it kind of slipped after a couple of years so that I began nibbling at them again, so it came back …. (Anette, 51, educator)

By contrast, the boundary between the permitted and the prohibited plays a much more crucial role in the vegans’ relationship to community, whether their own or that of mainstream culture. On the one hand, they can relax when they are amongst themselves, which reduces the pressure and possible rejection caused by their difference: ‘You feel quite comfortable with them and you can communicate much more easily with them than with other people’ (Karatmaa, 2001: 50). On the other hand, by far the strongest ethical pressure to comply with the rules structuring the life of vegans arises from their own community: ‘Somehow the vegans always moved in large groups. And they had terribly tight internal control. If someone lapsed, everyone went at them: you can’t do that’ (Peltokoski, 1999: 129).

Vegans’ relationship to mainstream culture is similarly ambivalent. On the one hand, they do not want to convert others, only to exert an influence through their own example. But it is precisely this act of setting an example that places them apart from the rest of society and prevents communication (see Karatmaa, 2001: 50).

In situations that call for social flexibility, the strategies of vegans and living foodists differ in interesting ways: some vegans are not willing to make any allowances for other people in any circumstances, whereas some living foodists take recourse to a more subtle




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strategy, lying: ‘When I go someplace else I have this [LF] bread with me and then I declare with a big lie that it’s because I can’t eat wheat’ (Hellevi, 68, retired).

This too reveals clearly the difference in motives: those who have given up meat eat-ing for ethical reasons are able to ‘stand proud’ behind their principles, whereas those who have chosen LF for purely subjective reasons are liable to feel embarrassed about their choice and try to hide it, as if it were some kind of subjective vice or irrational quirk, and this in spite of the fact that they too seek to justify their choice in very rational ways. Cognitive reasons are no match for moral grounds, though, when one has to justify one’s choices publicly. However, the reactions of other people around them had affected the behaviour of living foodists interviewed for the present study: in their experience, LF is considered a ‘justified’ choice only if the reason for adopting it is some serious illness:

There’s always some wag at work who never gets tired of cracking jokes about my diet … Otherwise people take the attitude that, OK, of course you have the right to do whatever you can since you have that horrible illness [chuckles]. (Hilkka, 52, in administration)

There is also an interesting difference in the reactions of the community to the two diets. Although a moral choice is a more ‘serious’ argument, it may paradoxically be easier to ignore as being an ‘ideological’ choice, one that one does not necessarily have to accept oneself, even though one may respect it as an ethical choice all the same. Reactions are very much less sympathetic when the choice is made exclusively on the basis of personal wellbeing. Those who have made such a choice are easy targets for aggression because everyone would of course like to eat more healthily. This neverthe-less makes a choice that entails great personal sacrifice seem like wilful eccentricity, one that the person in question has to explain endlessly, precisely because its effects apply only to his or her own body (which could therefore be the body of anyone at all, any subject, any person). Compared to this culture of atomistic subjects, an animal represents such utter ‘otherness’ that it practically never enters the sphere of choices that concern human subjects.

The third factor that affects attitudes towards the boundary between the permitted and the prohibited is the age of the members of the group. According to our estimate, the average age of the most radical vegans is under 30, whereas the average age of respon-dents to the LF questionnaire was 58. The members of the Finnish Association of Living Food still seem to be primarily the same people who ‘discovered’ the diet in Finland in the 1980s and 1990s. For some reason, the idea of living foodism seems not to have the same pull now as it had in its heyday in the 1980s. In 2006 the association had about 500 members (Väänänen & Mäkelä, 2007). Veganism, on the other hand, which in Finland must be considered a movement of the 1990s, is still going strong, although the member-ship of the Vegan Society of Finland has also declined: in 2003 it had 950 members, in November 2006 only 700 (Kaipiainen, 2003: 3).1

According to vegans, the ideologically fundamental problem resides in the system itself, which is based on a hierarchic inequality between humanity and nature, and on the exploitation and killing of animals. In veganism, the threat is global and affects every-body: both oneself and others (animals and the ecosystem). Veganism, much more clearly than LF, is a critique of modern capitalism, and it has its own, holistic, programme for





change that calls for action. In this sense vegans differ from practically all other modern dietary movements, which are almost always about the wellbeing, health or appearance of the subject.

Although living foodists do in some way share the idea of the perilousness of the system, their enemy is less sharply delineated: it is a kind of anonymous ‘modernity’, where additives are gaining ground and where agriculture is based on mass production that uses predominantly unhealthy methods. Living foodists do not want to subject their own body to the harmful effects of this system, they want to control their body them-selves. Moreover, these harmful effects are perceived in a rather narrow sense, as physi-cal substances that can invade the body, not as principles that concern the very foundations of the system. The threat to the world in the LF ideology is diffuse (‘the world is a dan-gerous place’). The benefits or harmful effects of food are determined primarily in terms of their effects on the body of the individual subject; the body is the primary object of both protection (guarding boundaries) and care (aspiration to health).

Conclusions: Living food and veganism – individual vs collective?

In a broader sociological-theoretical framework, the ideology represented by the LF movement actually comes quite close to theories of individualization as they have been developed in modern Western societies. Even when eating with others, the complex meal prepared for the eater’s own body, with a view to promoting its health, has the effect of setting the eater apart from others rather than uniting him or her within the primitive communion of the meal (see e.g. Falk, 1992: 22–29). We might even claim, somewhat provocatively, that communion is replaced by pure incorporation, union with the other by union with one’s own body.

The LF community does not involve the act of eating itself, but is constituted (if it exists) in other ways, such as through ideas about health or methods of food preparation shared with others who follow the same dietary regime. In addition to setting its follow-ers apart from other members of the general eating community, the living food diet also means that its adherents must prepare other food for their spouse or family. Even on a social visit, living foodists set themselves apart from others whether they want to or not. In the case of vegans, however, this isolation can be partly conscious and intentional, a precondition for spreading their message, whereas living foodists prefer not to distin-guish themselves from others. On the other hand, vegans also seem to prefer the com-pany of other vegans, which has the effect of mitigating their ‘difference’ and emphasizing the ‘uniformity’ of the movement.

It was also notable in the case of living foodists that they are often adherents of other ‘alternative’ diets and health regimes as well. They are distrustful of standard medical science and nutritional recommendations, yet they also use them discriminately to their own benefit. The interviews with living foodists also revealed the idea of a kind of ‘body wisdom’: the body is a subject that ‘knows’ and ‘demands’. Personal experience and the ‘voice of the body’ are crucial criteria for living foodists when trying out different alter-natives. The body’s adaptation to a specific type of diet is perceived as ‘purification’ (which may initially involve rather intense withdrawal symptoms). The same applies to




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vegans’ aversion to meat and other forbidden substances, although both groups feel that it is about the ‘real’ and ‘genuine’ taste of food that has to be rediscovered through a process of ‘purification’:

My theory is that veganism has refined my sense of taste so that I feel ‘real tastes’, and it has also purified me somehow, so that I know what I really want to eat at any given time … I therefore suggest that you taste once the things you desire and be rid once and for all of any mistaken ideas about how wonderful they are. However, it requires a few years of dedicated veganism before the body is ‘cleansed’. (Saarelainen, 2000: 17)

In the light of our study, the LF regime seems like a mixture of pieces of information culled from subjective experience and scientific discourse. One interesting question is which elements of standard science are assimilated and why; it would be natural to think that, if a belief system takes a suspicious attitude towards traditional nutrition recom-mendations and standard science, this would apply across the board. As Mary Douglas has noted, threats and dangers are not only defined technologically in modern society, technology itself has become a threat and a danger. The politics of knowledge and scien-tific discourse, and the counter-effective results of science, have reinstated a world of threats for the assessment of which no unbiased instruments exist (see Douglas, 2000: 38; see also Beck, 1994: 8–13; Giddens, 1991: 28–29). One possible reaction in this situ-ation is an eclectic gathering of bits and pieces, a process that makes selective use of certain kinds of information while rejecting other types of knowledge. On the other hand, Finnish living foodists do not seem to have a community that would exert pressure for uniformity on their behaviour or beliefs. This allows for flexibility and different personal interpretations.

The vegan strategy is different: they reject modern techno-capitalism in its entirety and take a considerably more stringent attitude towards dietary rules. Veganism has in fact often been described from a sociological perspective as a kind of defence of the private subject against the uncontrollability of reality: the individual seeks to compensate for the extreme fragmentation, uncontrollability and vulnerability of reality by making lifestyle choices that are unambiguous, and even ritualistically precise.

In the present study, however, we wish to refine the explanation presented above by emphasizing the stronger and more active status of community among vegans. This comes across particularly well when we compare veganism with another type of ‘norma-tive diet’, living foodism. Although group solidarity in movements of this kind is no longer based on local and face-to-face interaction as much as are more traditional social movements, it is nevertheless stronger and more actively present in the life of vegans than among living foodists. Taking into consideration the different motives of vegans and living foodists for their choice of lifestyle (ethical and collective vs health-related and subjective), we find ourselves dealing with two different ways of managing the ‘fragmentariness of postmodernity’ in which both the idea of the enemy and the status of injunctions and rules are fairly different.

Veganism and living foodism were discussed above also as two different strategies for surviving the increasing number of ever-more faceless globalizing threats that beset the individual today. Living foodists emphasize a subjective rationality that carries a strong





experiential component, whereas in the case of vegans the community that supports sub-jective identity and patrols its boundaries becomes paramount. An analysis should nev-ertheless be able to say something also about why these survival strategies are articulated specifically in the dimension of eating, of food. In analyses of veganism (and also of vegetarianism on a more general level), this issue has been approached principally in terms of the body: the ‘body’ is seen variously as a kind of last stronghold of unsullied nature in the midst of distorted consumerist culture (Peltokoski, 1999: 34–36), as a sym-bol of community, which makes defending the boundaries of the body equivalent to protecting the boundaries of community (Karatmaa, 2001: 14–15), and as a receptacle of the relationship between humanity and nature, and its problematization, the cusp of the protest against the fragmentation of everyday life (Husso, 1993: 103). The body is some-thing that is ‘whole’ as opposed to the fragmentariness of external reality (Twigg even regards vegetarianism as ‘a this-worldly form of salvation in terms of the body’; Twigg, 1979: 24). This interpretation too places a strong emphasis on the traditional idea in anthropological theory of the opposition between the continuity of nature and the discon-tinuity of culture (see e.g. Lévi-Strauss, 1964: 285; in a broader sense, the transition from nature to culture in the myths studied by Lévi-Strauss corresponds to the transition from continuity to discontinuity).

In his analysis of the changes that have taken place in the constitution of the body, Pasi Falk (1992) writes that the flexibility of modern culture and the fragility of its social bonds have led to a situation where the boundaries of ‘self’ are linked to the body of the individual more firmly than in primitive cultures, where the constitution of the subject, i.e. the self, is primarily collective. As collective order becomes more loosely defined and less stringent, boundaries move into the body of the individual, which has the effect of tightening the control of the flow (in/out) across the boundaries. As a consequence, eating (among other things) becomes a considerably more individualistic event than in the ritual eating community, where the boundaries of the body are relatively open and contact with the other is primarily constituted by ‘sharing’ (whereas its privileged form in modernity is exchange). As the need to control the flow of substances into the body increases, so eating in modern culture becomes problematical in new ways. This can be seen in the form of different dietary movements, the need to keep appetite under constant control and eating disorders.

In the present analysis, the body is neither a vessel of the ‘whole’ or the ‘pure’ nor merely a miniature image of the community, but the result of a specific historical pro-cess. By the same token, living foodism and veganism should be examined not only in terms of a structuralist, synchronic analysis, but also diachronically, within the frame-work of the recent history of the Western, modern society. Why were the 1970s and 1980s the heyday of the purely individualistic LF diet, whereas the broader community and ethical movement associated with veganism have come to the fore especially since the 1990s? Only historical analysis might be able to provide a more detailed answer to this question than we have attempted here.

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland-funded research project ‘Life regulation practices and the nature–culture problem’, conducted in the University of Helsinki in 2004–2007.




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Note

1 On the other hand, we must take into account the fact that many vegans are also active in the Finnish animal rights organization Oikeutta eläimille. This is especially the case among the younger and more radical generation (see also Konttinen & Peltokoski, 2004: 23–24).

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Author biographies

Tiina Arppe is an Academy Research Fellow in the department of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. She is a specialist in French Social Theory and has written about Rousseau, Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille, Baudrillard and Girard among others. Her recent articles include: (2005) ‘Rousseau, Durkheim et la constitution affective du social’ (Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 13: 5–31); and (2009) ‘Sorcerer’s apprentices and the “Will to figuration” – The ambig-uous heritage of the ‘Collège de sociologie’ (Theory, Culture & Society 26(4): 117–145). She has also translated several French theorists into Finnish, including texts by Derrida, Bataille, Baudrillard, Kristeva and Bourdieu. Her current research project concerns the problem of affectiv-ity in French Social Theory.

Johanna Mäkelä, Head of Research, is a sociologist who specializes in food and consumption, and has studied social and cultural aspects of eating since the beginning of the 1990s. Today Dr Mäkelä is head of Food Research at the National Consumer Research Centre in Helsinki, Finland, and is currently working on research projects that explore e.g. future and sustainable food consumption, consumers’ food choices and practices in everyday life contexts, corporate social responsibility in




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the food chain, and participatory methods. Her recent publications include: (2009) Nordic chil-dren’s foodscapes: Images and reflections (with Johansson et al., Food, Culture & Society 12(1): 25–52); Meals: The social perspective (In: Meiselman, HL [ed.] Meals in Science and Practice. Interdisciplinary Research and Business Applications. Cambridge: Woodhead Publications, 37–49).

Virpi Väänänen, who has a Masters in Social Sciences, worked as a research assistant in 2005–2006 at the National Consumer Research Centre in a project focusing on the living food diet.




Living food diet and veganism: Individual vs collective boundaries of the forbidden

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