Vegetarianism in Contemporary Scottish Fiction

As the home of Aberdeen Angus, Ayrshire bacon, and haggis, Scotland has an especially meaty reputation. In our fiction we spot meat constantly: Neil Gunn takes us hunting, Archie Hind’s Dear Green Place (1966) steps inside a Glasgow slaughterhouse, and Morvern Callar and Shuggie Bain are both working shifts at meat counters when we meet them. Despite the ubiquity of meat in Scottish culture and fiction, a number of notable characters are, quite simply, refusing to eat meat. 

Vegetarianism is a lifestyle which avoids meat products, and it is represented with considerable frequency in Scottish fiction from the 1990s to the present day. With meatless meals booming in popularity in recent years, it is perhaps unsurprising that this shifting culture is reflected in fiction. There are many motivations for someone to reduce their meat intake or entirely eliminate meat from their diet, including health concerns, anxieties around the climate impact of meat, and religious and ethical considerations. For instance, Glaswegian Jimmy adopts a vegetarian diet in Anne Donovan’s 2003 novel Buddha Da when he starts attending meditation sessions at his local Buddhist centre. Barbara at the centre answers his early investigatory questions on vegetarianism and explains that eating vegetables just ‘seems lighter somehow’ (p. 63). This sense of lightness could be simply physical, yet the religious motivation behind the dietary change suggests that meat does not simply provide a digestive heaviness; meat’s ethical ‘weight’ may serve as a barrier to the pursuit of enlightenment. When Jimmy’s own vegetarianism is later queried by his family, he responds that ‘it’s about respectin all living beins, animals as well as people’ (p. 89). With religious and ethical motivations, Jimmy extends compassion to animals and so removes them from his plate. 

Jimmy’s vegetarianism is met with derision and hostility by his wife Liz. While presumably some annoyance stems from her ‘havin tae make two dinners every night’, the resistance to this change illustrates something of particular interest: vegetarianism is culturally considered as deviant (Donovan, p. 87). Melanie Joy coined the term ‘carnism’ to name the mainstream ideology that means meat-eating is an automatic standard: ‘we see it as a given, the “natural” thing to do’ (p. 29). Meat consumption is so heavily normalised in a carnist culture that the very rejection of meat is aberrant. 

Vegetarianism’s suggestion of being oppositional to norms is frequently utilised to demonstrate a character’s deviance from cultural standards in fiction. Miles Garth, an ethical consultant in Ali Smith’s 2011 novel There But For The, arrives as an unexpected guest at a dinner party in Greenwich where the host is unaware of his vegetarianism; a hasty omelette is conjured for his main course to eat with couscous. During the meal, Miles locks himself in the host’s guest bedroom and refuses to leave for several months, challenging not just middle-class etiquette and social norms, but notions of private property itself. His refusal to engage with carnist practices foreshadows a far greater social deviance. 

This oppositional quality surfaces again, as Anais Hendricks in Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (2012) connects her vegetarianism explicitly with a rejection of authority. A socially vulnerable figure, Anais is a teenage girl in the care system with pending criminal charges, and she regards both red meat and authority figures like teachers, police officers and social workers as ‘suspicious’ (p. 101). She explains that: ‘Authority figures are broken, and they’re always bullies as well. Red meat is just an arm or a leg or a face – without skin on it. I cannae deal with raw meat’ (p. 101). She breaks down the disconnect between butchered animals and meat as a foodstuff, recognising the violent processes that transform bodies into meat, just as she spots a cruelty in people with power. Abstinence from meat operates in tandem with Anais’s rejection of authority, as she refuses to engage with a system that she deems violent. She identifies as a pacifist but cannot be accused of shying from confrontation, becoming physically engaged in fights when she feels the need to defend someone being bullied. Her fighting, albeit reluctant, might seem at odds with her rejection of meat: a similar joke is shared in Ellen Galford’s 1990 novel Queendom Come when one character jests about another’s seemingly contradictory diet and preparedness to fight, stating that ‘[f]or a vegetarian, she’s awful ready with her fists’ (p. 16). Yet Anais demonstrates that her vegetarianism is ideologically in line with her physical defence of those being victimised, both being a kind of advocation for the vulnerable. 

Staff at the children’s home remind Anais that her vegetarianism must be officially registered, but she refuses to assist in these attempts to control her and document her formally. When discovered with blocks of chocolate in her room pilfered from the home’s kitchen, she states that she is ‘protesting at the lack of vegetarian options’ (p. 271). Anais’s vegetarianism is in perfect keeping with her dedication to protecting the exploited and subjugated, and her thrawn resistance to the powerful.

Other younger characters find that vegetarianism propels them into further forms of protest, this time presenting an organised challenge to an authority’s choices to shift the status quo. Ely Percy’s Duck Feet (2021) sees teenage Kirsty Campbell petition for vegetarian options at her school canteen when staff are unable to serve her any main meals without meat: ‘Ah went and wrote a petition against school meals’ (p. 88). Her petition is a demonstration of her discontent, appealing to the authority of the school to demand accommodation. By collaborating with her peers to gain their support, she is soon successful in creating change in the lunch system. 

Carol J. Adams ‘treat[s] vegetarianism seriously as a political act of resistance’ in and of itself in The Sexual Politics of Meat, as a means of recognising and challenging the systemic oppression of animals for food (p. 19). What is visible in Scottish fiction is that politically active characters adopt vegetarianism in addition to their other radical interests. Clio Campbell, a musician and political activist in Kirstin Innes’s 2020 Scabby Queen, is best known for her protestation of poll tax through song. Despite her political drive, she rejects animal rights activism in 1996 as a distraction from human needs: ‘I’ve got no energy to spare on bunny rabbits till we’ve made sure that all of our own are all right’ (pp. 177–78). By 2003, Clio describes herself as a vegetarian, her continuing work in activism having encouraged her understand these struggles for human and animal rights as connected (p. 234). Innes’s political characters lean towards vegetarianism in her first novel, Fishnet (2015), too. Sonja protests the closure of a sex worker support centre, Sanctuary Base, and runs a blog with posts tagged with terms including ‘politics activism sexism’ (p. 87). When asked to talk with the novel’s protagonist, she chooses a café with ‘no meat on the menu’ and no dairy milk for their meeting, explaining how hard it is to find good vegetarian food in the city centre (p. 104). Characters who are committed to resisting cultural oppressions, from policies that disempower the working class to the demonisation and neglect of sex workers, find vegetarianism to be a practice in line with their other political beliefs.

Laura Wright’s work on veganism, a closely connected lifestyle which completely rejects all animal products, suggests that 

[a]s an identity category and a lifestyle, veganism constitutes a subject position that allows for environmentally responsible consumer choices that are viewed, particularly in the west, as oppositional to and disruptive of a capitalist system that is largely dependent upon big agriculture. (p. 727)

From this perspective, meat and animal products are so connected with capitalist systems that those who refuse to consume them are often considered to be antagonistic to society at large. For those who ideologically reject capitalism, in turn, they may reject meat as a product emblematising its systems.

We might think we have found such a figure in Mark ‘Rentboy’ Renton from Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), a heroin addict in Leith with explicitly anti-consumerism views. He thieves books from Waterstone’s and famously chooses to reject a life that prioritises ‘mortgage payments’, ‘washing machines’, and ‘cars’ (p. 187). Renton practises vegetarianism, which may at first seem to be a deliberatively provocative choice in line with his general resistance to social norms and capitalist culture. Yet, his vegetarianism has ‘nothing to do with politics or morality; he just hated the taste of meat’ (p. 148). At an uncomfortable breakfast, he eats bacon to avoid being problematic for his hosts, and his friends are keen to point out the hypocrisy of his diet knowing his previous cruelty to dogs, cats, mice and pigeons. While some vegetarians are motivated by a revulsion towards violence or because they are boycotting a violent agricultural system, for Renton the decision is solely a matter of taste. Vegetarianism here is more a dietary choice than an ethical lifestyle.

So it seems that not all vegetarian meals are intentionally politically disruptive. Some are simply necessary. Kerry Hudson’s central family in Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma (2012) live in serious poverty throughout the novel, and food security is a constant concern for the central characters. When money is ‘tighter than ever’, Ma makes herself and her daughter Janie ‘big soup pans of potato curry or vegetable chilli for the week’ (p. 142; p. 142). Nick Fiddes comments that the high prices of meat often force impoverished people into vegetable-heavy diets, but takes care to highlight that abstaining from meat due to its prohibitive cost does not make a person a vegetarian, stating that many people affected in this way will take meat when it is possible (p. 169). Certainly, this is true for this pair: when Ma and Janie have access to money, their shopping list first calls for ‘burgers, fish fingers’ (p. 131). For Hudson’s characters, their diets are shaped by their financial circumstances in the extreme and their meat-free meals are eaten due to a lack of choice. Fiddes reminds us that vegetarianism proper needs to be a free, continuous choice. 

When vegetarianism is presented in these texts, it is rarely if ever employed to raise the profile of ethical causes and animal rights agendas. There is no great emphasis on the suffering of pigs in concentrated animal feeding operations, nor is the climate impact of a meat-heavy lifestyle critiqued with any great depth. Rather, vegetarianism is noted in order to express something about the characters who practise it; their choice reveals their commitment to a religious journey or their distrust of violent systems. 

Primarily, vegetarianism seems to demonstrate a kind of deviance in contemporary fiction, where those willing to reject carnism often reject other systems that rely on subjugation and oppression or are more comfortable in challenging normative customs. To indicate that a character is vegetarian presents readers with another facet to their personality, fleshing them out and revealing something about their relationship with the world around them. For characters who appear only briefly, noting their choice of a vegetarian dish can function as a shortcut to communicating their radical political capacity, their ethical commitments, or their potential to upset convention.

This selection of characters with very different circumstances and personalities indicates that there is no one way to be vegetarian in fiction. If we expect vegetarianism to be only adopted by women, Renton and Miles present themselves as a challenge to that belief; if it is presumed to be a middle-class pastime, this perspective is complicated by Kirsty and Anais; if it is a youth thing, the grey hair of diners at Sonja’s veggie café argues once more against that. Sometimes radical, religious, or just motivated by an individual’s palate, Scottish writers are employing vegetarianism in a wide range of ways for many different purposes. Scottish texts present us with complicated figures, with moral codes that shift and develop as they age and behaviours that contradict, to produce nuanced characters rather than two-dimensional stereotypes. As the culture around vegetarian diets continues to shift in the real world, I expect Scottish writers will continue to play with their representation. Vegan characters have already begun to surface, as with Helen McClory’s finely realised Maddie in the novella ‘Powered Milk’ that concludes Mayhem & Death (2015). I for one am very interested to see how depictions of vegetarian characters will develop in future Scottish fiction.