Vegan labor: the intensification of family foodwork at the intersection of dietary and gender norms

ABSTRACT

Drawing from a case study of child veganism in Switzerland, I bring together parenting culture studies and food studies to ask how veganism relates to the ideology of intensive mothering. Describing five kinds of “vegan labor” – extra foodwork that vegan parents attributed to their vegan lifestyle –, I find that adopting an alternative diet intensifies parental commitment in a gendered way. Discussing these findings against the backdrop of the Swiss culture of nutrition and gender regime, I underline how examining alternative diets can further our understanding of parenting culture, gender roles, and foodwork. Intensive mothering relates to the local culture of nutrition and the meanings attached to specific diets; coupled with socioeconomic privilege, it can also serve as a resource to mitigate social scrutiny and judgment.

KEYWORDS:

• Intensive mothering
• veganism
• gender roles
• foodwork
• Switzerland

Introduction

“I couldn’t maintain my family’s vegan lifestyle if I resumed working.”¹ This is what Dalia,² a Swiss stay-at-home mother of four, shared with me during an interview in 2021. Dalia, 50, held a Ph.D. in management and had been fired from her position as a teacher and researcher three years before. At the time of our interview in 2021, she devoted her time to her children, assuming school runs to their private school and purchasing and preparing vegan meals for her family – tasks she felt were incompatible with resuming paid employment.

Dalia’s commitment to feeding and caring for her family is illustrative of the intensive mothering culture that predominates in Switzerland (Baumgarten and Andrea 2021; Zimmermann and LeGoff 2020). The notion of “intensive mothering” was first introduced by S. Hays (1996) to describe US parenting culture as “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive.” Like the US, Switzerland offers scarce state support for families (either financial or logistical) and traditional family values persist, which favor the responsibilization of “mothers” as primary caretakers. As the wording signals, the ideology of intensive mothering builds on a gendered and heteronormative imaginary of the family wherein the “mother” is assumed to be a heterosexual, cisgender woman – an ideology that contributes to the marginalization of queer, trans, and other non-normative experiences of parenting (Averett 2021). Intensive mothering is also profoundly shaped by social inequalities, with white, middle-class mothers often adhering more narrowly (although not entirely) to this ideal of motherhood as well as possessing the means to implement it while parents from poor or racialized backgrounds lacking resources and sometimes resisting intensive mothering (Bloch and Tiffany 2014; Brenton 2017). Despite these nuances, parenting culture studies have documented the cultural dominance and pervasiveness of intensive mothering as an ideology across diverse social groups in Europe and North America (Faircloth 2013; Faircloth, Hoffman, and Layne 2013; P. Hamilton 2022; E. Lee et al. 2014).

Feeding children is a key aspect of intensive mothering, as feminist food scholars have argued (Cairns and Johnston 2015; DeVault 1991; Harman, Cappellini, and Faircloth 2019; Parsons, Harman, and Cappellini 2021; Pasche Guignard and Cassidy 2016). Foodwork, like other forms of housework, is generally unequally distributed along gender lines in heterosexual families, including in Switzerland (Bochud, Chatelan, and Blanco 2017). But even more than household duties, feeding children has been described as an activity “suffused with moral discourses” (Harman, Charlotte, and Benedetta 2019, 1) and an object of social scrutiny, because it involves care for the next generation. Typically, breastfeeding advocacy campaigns have been found to reinforce the responsibilization of mothers for optimizing their children’s outcomes (Blum 1999; Kukla 2006; E. Lee 2008; Murphy 2000). Likewise, the responsibility for childhood obesity is frequently located with mothers, as has been found in public health and media discourses in Australia and the US, for example (Bell, McNaughton, and Salmon 2009; Herndon 2010; Maher, Fraser, and Wright 2010). Experiences of Swiss mothers are similarly marked by a sense of responsibility to protect the health of their children before and after birth, including through careful food choices (Burton-Jeangros 2002; Burton-Jeangros, Hammer, and Maffi 2014; Hammer and Inglin 2014; Hammer et al. 2022). At the intersection of parenting and food studies, Brenton (2017) coined the term “intensive feeding ideology” to describe the “intensive mental, emotional, and physical labour” (Brenton 2017, 867) that mothers in the US associated with good mothering – a “pervasive cultural expectation” (Brenton 2017, 867) that resonates particularly with middle-class mothers.

Here, I ask what following an alternative diet does to intensive mothering. Veganism is an alternative diet in Switzerland in the sense that it is followed by a very small minority of the population (1.4%) and is not recommended to children by public health authorities. Drawing from a case study of child veganism in Switzerland, I ask what is the extent of work that goes into implementing a vegan diet in a family and how this work is gendered. Through the description of five kinds of “vegan labor” – tasks that vegan parents identified as directly linked to their vegan lifestyle, I find that feeding children a vegan diet is associated with an intensive parental commitment in a mainly gendered way. Discussing these findings against the backdrop of the Swiss food culture and gender regime, I underline how examining alternative diets furthers our understanding of foodwork, ideologies of good parenting, and their stratification along gender and class lines. The analysis contributes to current literature on parenting, gender, and food by refining our understanding of the intricacies of food cultures and gender regimes and, specifically, how both dietary and gender norms reinforce each other in reproducing a traditional social order.

Alternative diets and gender roles

Feeding children an alternative diet has been found to reinforce maternal commitments. In interviews with Canadian mothers of various class backgrounds,³ Cairns, Johnston, and MacKendrick (2013) found that striving to provide organic and healthy food to one’s children in an industrial food system required considerable resources. Mothers of various class backgrounds shared the ideal of the “organic child,” an idealized figure of a child kept “pure” from harmful chemicals. This commitment to organic feeding “reinforced gendered notions of care-work” (2013, 111) as mothers understood themselves as primarily responsible for the quality of their children’s food. In the US, MacKendrick (2014, 2018) also found that fear over the impact of chemicals and pollutants on children’s health has led many mothers to engage in what she has called “precautionary consumption.” To avoid harmful substances in groceries, mothers adopt “yet another responsibility” (MacKendrick 2014, 722) to protect their children. Webster (2019) explored gendered roles in European families where children need a ketogenic diet for health reasons and found that the intensive food and care work required was performed overwhelmingly by mothers. In contexts where intensive mothering is a hallmark of “good” parenting, implementing a diet that follows strict and restrictive criteria may thus reinforce the already established gendered parental roles.

As an alternative diet, veganism is of particular interest from the point of view of gender because it is associated with hegemonic notions of femininity and masculinity, in different ways. On one hand, veganism is a largely gendered movement worldwide, with more women than men adhering to veganism (Gaarder 2011). The main reason probably lies within the concerns for animal welfare and the environment that underly veganism, concerns that resonate with hegemonic notions of femininity, be it because of women’s socialization as caretakers, or because women’s experience of oppression in the patriarchal system makes them more sensitive to other marginalized groups’ oppression, including animals (Adams 1990; Donovan 2006; Gaard 2002; Gaarder 2011; Kemmerer 2011). Ethical consumption more generally is also grounded in gendered ideals of care for others (Cairns and Johnston 2015; Johnston, Kate, and Merin 2018; Johnston, Szabo, and Rodney 2011). Consequently, one can expect veganism, when practiced in a family context, to translate into a predominantly maternal responsibility.

On the other hand, some feminist circles have discussed veganism and gender, unlike other special diets. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, C. Adams (1990) laid the foundation for the feminist vegan movement by arguing that speciesism and sexism are intertwined and both based on the domination of a category of beings by men. Meat consumption has long been associated with hegemonic masculinity, like the role of eating beef in the performance of “traditional masculinity” in the US illustrates (Buerkle 2009; Dowsett et al. 2018; Love and Sulikowski 2018; Sobal 2005). Building on these insights, the vegan feminist movement frames veganism as a political strategy of resistance against patriarchy, speciesism, and heteronormativity (Adams 2010; Gaard 2002; C. Hamilton 2016; A. Lee 2008). However, it is not certain that practicing veganism is linked to contestation of gender roles in practice. Previous studies of vegan men in the US suggest that despite pushing against many values attached to traditional masculinity, they still upheld classic gendered tropes (Greenebaum and Dexter 2018; Mycek 2018).

Meanings attached to veganism in terms of gender range from fulfilling women’s traditional role as caretakers to active resistance against patriarchy – discourses that are different but not necessarily in contradiction. This article contributes with an empirical account of the practical implementation of veganism in families and its impact on gender roles.

Methods and context

Veganism seems to be increasingly popular in Switzerland, with 1.4% of the adult population identifying as vegan, and a rise in vegan purchasing trends over the past two decades (Kalte 2021; Mann and Necula 2020). This is happening in a context in which the population is still mostly following a traditional diet rich in meat and dairy (Krieger et al. 2019), but where a “good” diet tends to be increasingly associated with sustainability and environmental-friendliness (Godin and Sahakian 2018; Siegrist, Visschers, and Hartmann 2015). Switzerland features both a larger proportion of vegetarians and lower meat consumption than neighboring countries and the persistence of a pro-meat movement (Mann and Necula 2020; Sahakian, Godin, and Courtin 2020), a contrasting food landscape that gives rise to heated discussions and debates.

In terms of parenting culture and gender, Swiss families are mostly structured along traditional gender roles. Mothers perform the bulk of unpaid childcare and housework – even more so than in neighboring countries (Baumgarten and Andrea 2021; Federal Statistical Office 2021; Levy, Widmer, and Kellerhals 2002; Valarino and Gauthier 2015; Zimmermann and LeGoff 2020). With the birth of a first child, two-thirds of women reduce their working hours (vs. only 16% of men). Only 13% of mothers work full-time (vs. 84.7% of fathers) (Federal Statistical Office 2021). This “traditional” and “maternalist” gender regime (Giraud and Lucas 2009; Madörin, Brigitte, and Nadia 2012) has been linked both to culture and policies (Zimmermann and LeGoff 2020). Swiss parents receive scarce state support: parental leaves are short and were implemented much later than in other European countries; daycare provisions are insufficient to meet the demand, and expensive; and the hiring of care or domestic workers is unaffordable for most families (Madörin, Brigitte, and Nadia 2012). Healthcare providers and parenting experts play a pivotal role in reproducing traditional family arrangements through their advice and surveillance of childcare practices (Ballif 2020, 2023a; Chautems 2022; Preissler 2022).

It is against this backdrop of changing food culture and persisting traditional gender regime that I conducted a research project on child veganism in Switzerland. Although Swiss medical experts recommend veganism to healthy adults, they do not recommend it to children or pregnant women (Bieri, von Siebenthal, and Köhler 2018; Federal Commission for Nutrition 2018; Müller et al. 2020; Petit, Nydegger, and Müller 2019), as in other European countries (e.g., Lemale et al. 2019; Redecilla Ferreiro et al. 2020; Richter et al. 2016). This stands in stark contrast to the US, Canada, or the UK, where official nutritional guidelines endorse veganism. In this context, I used an ethnographic approach that combined different methods to map out the main discourses in favor and against child veganism to see what this can teach us about Swiss parenting and food culture. This article primarily draws on the set of 17 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with vegan parents. These were conducted to explore how people view and implement an approach to childcare that is framed as dangerous by mainstream experts. These interviews formed one part of the research project, along with the collection of medical discourses on child veganism (medical articles and reports, qualitative interviews with their main authors) and vegan perspectives (as expressed on vegan association websites, social media forums and publications as well as through interviews with key vegan activists).

Most parents were recruited through ads posted on social media forums, to which 11 mothers responded. Through snowball sampling, one further mother was recruited. Although I intended to interview all of their partners, only 5 agreed.⁴ All 17 participants were vegans, except one father who defined himself as vegan at home but otherwise omnivore. All were living in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Among the interviewees were 12 cisgender women and 5 of their male partners. The interviewed parents were aged between 29 and 50. They had between one and four children, but most were raising a single child (8 out of 12 families). The 20 children were aged from newborn to 16 years old; half of them were younger than five. Most of the interviewed parents held a university degree (bachelor’s or higher); one father was a student; and another one did not hold a degree. The parents worked or studied full-time, except for five mothers who were not currently or only occasionally in paid employment. This sample is consistent with the socioeconomic profile of Swiss vegans, who tend to be female, well-educated, and young (Kalte 2021). In Europe more largely and in North America, veganism is similarly more popular among women and correlated with racial, educational, and economic privilege (Dyett et al. 2013; Janssen et al. 2016; Radnitz, Beezhold, and DiMatteo 2015). One characteristic of the participants was their migration background: five of them were second-generation migrants holding a double citizenship (Switzerland and either a European or US citizenship) and 6 held a foreign nationality (European). Although migration is very often correlated with discrimination and a lower socioeconomic position in Europe, these parents were rather representative of the majority of highly skilled migrants to Switzerland (Sandoz 2019).

Because of the travel restrictions and social distancing rules in place at the time of the interviews (January to March 2021), interviews had to be conducted online. Questions explored parents’ dietary journeys, decisions made concerning their children’s diet, relations with medical experts, and practical situations such as school lunches or birthday parties. Interviews’ duration ranged from 40 to 110 minutes (average: 77 minutes). As a Swiss-born heterosexual parent, I shared a language and cultural and geographical references with the participants, as well as the experience of raising children in Switzerland, which considerably helped build rapport and a kind of “remote embeddedness” (Howlett 2022: 394) in the lives of participants despite the online setting (Kim et al. 2021). Because I am not a vegan, however, some parents were wary of my opinion on veganism, especially given the context of heightened debates in Switzerland. I made clear that the goal of my research was neither a defense nor a criticism of veganism and shared my own dietary journey.

All data produced and collected in the study were coded using NVivo to allow the identification and comparison of themes across sources. During the first round of coding, the theme of (what I would end up calling) vegan labor emerged inductively within the set of vegan parents’ interviews. I then conducted a second round of coding focusing on these passages to identify different categories of vegan labor while moving iteratively between data and social science scholarship in food, family, and gender. This led to the identification of five types of vegan labor and, transversally, their gendered distribution.

Vegan labor and its gendered distribution

In interviews, vegan parents described some types of “extra” foodwork that, in their view, omnivorous parents did not perform to the same extent or that they didn’t perform before becoming vegans. In Food and Femininity, Cairns and Johnston (2015) defined foodwork as “all of the labor that goes into procuring and preparing food, including food shopping, cooking, and clean-up, as well as the mental and emotional labor of writing lists, planning meals, and ensuring that others’ needs are met” (Cairns and Johnston 2015, 21). When it comes to feeding children, other types of labor include navigating nutritional information, negotiating relations with experts and institutions (schools, nurseries, healthcare professionals), managing the family’s food budget, and the relational work of negotiating food with children (Albon 2019; Boni 2019; Brenton 2017). The “extra” work vegan parents described is thus additional foodwork that they relate to their vegan diet – their “vegan labor”. In what follows, I present these different types of “vegan labor”, and how parents presented and justified its gendered distribution.

Introducing veganism into the family

In 9 out of the 12 families, mothers introduced veganism into the family diet, or the couple’s diet if they did not have children yet. Not all family members became entirely vegan, with some still eating animal products in or outside of the home, but these families ate mostly vegan meals following the mother’s lead. Audrey, 42, a stay-at-home mother of one, was a vegetarian when she started dating her (omnivorous) partner. Four years later, she turned to veganism after reading a book about animal welfare. She then convinced her partner to become a vegan as well:

My husband followed my lead because, poor him- I had stumbled across a video- I am ashamed- A video from- What’s his name? [She tries to remember the name of Gary Yourofsky, a famous US vegan activist] I started watching the video where the images [of animal breeding and slaughtering] are so disgusting. But really, watching that as a human being, you can’t. I didn’t look at the images. I listened to the sound. And this was a turning point for me. But I didn’t tell my husband I had not looked at the images. I made him watch. He said I was totally nuts. He had nightmares after that. He said: No, it’s not possible, we must stop this nonsense, it’s disgusting. So we [both] switched to veganism. (Audrey)

Audrey’s partner became a vegan and when their only daughter was born seven years later, she was raised on a vegan diet from birth. Sophie, 39, a stay-at-home mother of four, told me she led the transition of her family to veganism after watching videos of Gary Yourofsky and doing “lots of research” on the meat and dairy industries. Her partner Steve, 41, who was working long hours as an engineer at the time, said he relied on her newly acquired nutritional knowledge and became vegan as well. They chose to switch their children (aged 5 to 8 at the time) to vegan-only meals a year later. While the older child had become strictly vegan, the three others still asked for (and got) some vegetarian treats from time to time, like pastries or ice cream. Women’s transitions to veganism thus had profound impacts on the diets of other family members in most families.

Women leading the way to veganism is not entirely surprising given that veganism is far more popular among women globally. In one couple however, it was the father Vincent who said he led the way by researching veganism and watching videos online during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic – even though his partner Violet became vegan at the same time, convinced by Vincent’s arguments. Vincent had taken up sports during the lockdown and was looking on the internet for ideas to maximize his protein intake while reducing his meat consumption. Finding out that celebrities he admired and considered “masculine” convinced him to switch to veganism:

And then, I don’t know if you know the rap group Wu-Tang Clan? Yeah, there’s The RZA, one of the producers, and he’s been vegan for 30 years. I heard something he said: “No animal needs to die for me to be healthy.” And when someone from such a hyper-masculine culture like hip-hop affirms that and demonstrates it through their way of life for 30 years, I think, oh yeah, that’s a good reference. Then you realize that half of the Wu-Tang Clan are either vegetarians or vegans. They’re truly hip-hop idols, gangsta rap idols, saying, no, I don’t need that, I’m a gangster, even while having compassion for animals. And in terms of masculinity, I find those to be beautiful images. Look at Lewis Hamilton, the Formula 1 driver, also vegan. Brad Pitt apparently is vegan too, though it’s less confirmed. You think, oh, but wait, these are alpha males. These are men dominating their industry while also being kind to animals. (Vincent)

Vincent refers to “hyper-masculine,” “gangster” and “alpha male” role models as the impetus for his transition to veganism. His story recalls the figure of the “hegan,” a vegan man who upholds standards of hegemonic masculinity (Greenebaum and Dexter 2018; Wright 2015). So although in most families women’s traditional role as caretakers seems to fuel the transition to veganism, in Vincent’s case hegemonic masculinity – the other facet of traditional gender roles – proved crucial in the transition, allowing Vincent to retain his sense of masculine identity despite his dietary change. Despite their difference, both scenarios uphold traditional heteronormative gender roles, albeit in a different way. In the two last couples, both parents were already vegan when they met, which means none of them took the role of leading the vegan transition.

Learning about vegan nutrition

When transitioning to veganism or when expecting their first child, vegan parents sought to acquire new nutritional skills. Typically, they recalled reading books on vegan diet and health, attending conferences and vegan festivals, watching videos online, and making appointments with vegan nutritionists. Having moved away from the food culture they had acquired through their primary socialization in omnivorous families, vegan parents expressed having felt the need to learn about new foodways, including how to avoid deficiencies and which foods provide essential nutrients. Charlotte, 34, a chef and mother of one, said she wanted to acquire knowledge before her son was born:

Of course, since we were not born vegans, we don’t necessarily have all the necessary tools, so when I learned I was pregnant we thought: Yes, we are going to raise him/her as a vegan, but we are going to educate ourselves before, to have all the tools and not make mistakes. (Charlotte)

Charlotte’s partner Christophe, a full-time restaurant manager, similarly stressed how important he felt it was to “educate [him]self as much as possible” to ensure his son’s healthy development. In most families, however, it was mothers, as leaders of the family’s transition to veganism and in charge of foodwork, who felt responsible for and undertook this “reskilling” (Giddens 1991, 139) labor. While Sophie (39, stay-at-home mother of four children) narrated their reskilling journey as a common endeavor (“we educated ourselves”), Steve (41, full-time engineer) underlined that it was mostly his partner who did an “extraordinary job” informing herself about vegan nutrition while he was mostly focused on “professional objectives” at the time. Fiona (38, full-time teacher, one child) shared that her own mother also learned about vegan nutrition and recipes that she uses when she takes care of Fiona’s vegan son. In Switzerland, with limited and expensive daycare and after-school care provision, grandparents often step in to provide unpaid childcare. In Fiona’s family, two generations of women thus performed the vegan labor of acquiring new knowledge to offer a vegan diet to their (grand)son.

A core aspect of this quest for new knowledge was to find experts in vegan nutrition that would provide them with the tools to raise healthy vegan children. The expectation that parents should turn to experts to orient their childcare practices is a core element of contemporary parenting cultures, that R. Apple (1987) described as the rise of “scientific motherhood” (Grant 1998; Hulbert 2003; E. Lee et al. 2014). But vegan parents seem to link their reskilling efforts to their choice of an alternative diet – “since [they] were not born vegans,” as Charlotte put it – rather than to a more general notion of good parenting. Swiss nutritional guidelines qualify veganism as a “restrictive” diet (Federal Commission for Nutrition 2018, 63), one that “cuts out entire categories of food” (Müller et al. 2020, 7) and “departs from well-established feeding patterns” (Federal Commission for Nutrition 2018, 30). The same guidelines underline the need for parents to acquire specific nutritional skills if they, despite experts’ negative opinions, nevertheless feed their children a vegan diet. Vegan parents’ reskilling efforts thus reflect the social construction of veganism as deviant from dominant nutritional norms.

Vincent, a student and father of one who transitioned to veganism in 2020, explicitly connected his reskilling efforts to the fact that veganism was not endorsed by mainstream nutritional experts. He pointed out that a vegan could not rely on public health authorities to avoid nutritional deficiencies.

I know that as a vegan I must take this responsibility myself and do what it takes so that I don’t have any deficiencies because no public health body is acting to compensate for these deficiencies. (Vincent)

Whereas iodine and fluoride are added to table salt in Switzerland to prevent deficiencies, Vincent pointed out that there is no public health policy to supplement the population with vitamin B12, the most common deficiency among vegans. Parents’ reskilling thus derives from a culture that assumes most of the population eats animal products.

Procuring and preparing vegan food

Planning meals, purchasing and preparing food were tasks to which parents devoted time and energy. With few exceptions (like buying cheese for a vegetarian child), all families purchased exclusively vegan food, which requires a skillful knowledge of labels and nutritional content. Furthermore, most interviewed parents had additional food criteria. Most said they looked for “organic” and “local” food, and some cited “seasonal,” “unprocessed,” “bulk” and “fairtrade” as important criteria. Several interviewed families invested time and money to buy from smaller stores or a farmers’ market. Their approach was thus illustrative of an ethical approach to food, according to which food choices are understood as environmentally and socially significant (Johnston, Szabo, and Rodney 2011). As some have pointed out, ethical consumption requires resources to make food choices and sometimes afford more expensive products and is therefore linked to economic and racial privilege (Cairns and Johnston 2015; Kennedy, Emily, and Johnston 2018).

When I asked them if they thought being in a vegan family was more expensive than an omnivorous one, most said that they did not think it was the case, however. Like Emilie (29, one child), most stressed that vegetable proteins were cheaper than animal proteins and that their avoidance of processed food reduced costs:

I don’t feel like, given the price of meat and cheese, if I ate meat- I don’t feel like we pay more, really. A vegetable steak is cheaper than meat. […] It also depends on the vegan diet one has. Because all these new processed products – cheese, meat, vegan cold cuts, etc., - these are expensive. So, I think if one eats only that, replacing meat with [vegan processed food], it can become even more expensive. (Emilie)

It was thus through investing time to cook from scratch – thus adding to their vegan labor – that these parents kept their family food budget in control.

Overall, participants’ narratives suggest that mothers performed most foodwork for their families. In only two families, parents (Livia, Violet, and Vincent), all working full-time, said foodwork was equally shared. Most fathers typically assumed occasional tasks like weekly grocery shopping or cooking elaborate meals on weekends. This was the case in families like Beatrice and Bruno’s, in which stay-at-home mother Beatrice said she shopped and cooked in general, with Bruno (a full-time teacher) only in charge of snacks for their 17-month-old daughter and occasional cooking on weekends. Emilie, 29, a full-time teacher with a 2-year-old child and pregnant with her second child, explained that foodwork was her “role” in the family, a role that she was willingly taking.

We do the shopping together in general but it’s me who prepares the shopping list. I think, food- it’s mostly me who has- it’s not even a burden- who has this role. He does lots of other things around the house but food it’s me, also because I like it. (Emilie)

Eliot (32, full-time manager), Emily’s partner, answered “It’s my wife” to the question of who was doing the foodwork in the family, a “choice” they had made together. Sophie, a stay-at-home mother of four, said she cooked “almost 100% of the time” because her partner Steve “doesn’t like cooking, he has never really cooked” – with Steve himself confirming that his partner was “very involved at home” and doing almost all the food- and carework because they had “chosen” that Sophie would stay at home to homeschool their children while he pursued a career in engineering. Most mothers working full time also said they took charge of the family foodwork. Iris (37, three children), who worked as a nutrition consultant, said she was doing “90% of the shopping and 90% of the cooking” at home.

In contrast to what Fielding-Singh (2017) observed among middle-class parents in the US, fathers appeared as supportive of the family’s dietary standards and were not “undermin[ing] mothers’ attempts” (Fielding-Singh 2017, 98) at providing what they considered good meals, largely because they had themselves a vegan diet. This shows however that a shared dietary ideal does not necessarily translate into an equal division of foodwork.

Navigating relations with friends, families, and institutions: exclusive child feeding

To adhere to a vegan diet, many children in the families I describe ate exclusively homemade meals, including when eating outside the house, at school, or with friends, according to participants’ narratives. I call this type of vegan labor “exclusive child feeding” in resonance with the notion of “exclusive breastfeeding” that is commonly used in breastfeeding advocacy campaigns. In both cases, the language of “exclusivity” signals the total commitment to one type of food source, a commitment generally implemented through (bodily and mental) maternal labor (Kukla 2006).

In the Swiss context where veganism concerns a small minority of children, none of the families had found a daycare or after-school program providing vegan meals. Consequently, in three families, mothers said they prepared vegan packed lunches that their children ate instead of the provided lunch. Other parents were planning to do the same when their children started school. In two families, children did not attend nursery or school for reasons linked to their vegan diet.

The lack of vegan lunch provision led two families to pull their children out of public school, an uncommon choice in the Swiss context. According to the latest available report on Swiss education, less than 5% of children attended a private school at the primary or secondary level, and less than 1% were homeschooled (Centre suisse de coordination pour la recherche en éducation 2018). Dalia shared that food options were one of the main reasons behind her enrolling her four children in a private school: the private school seemed more supportive of her providing vegan packed lunches for her children than a public school. Three of Sophie and Steve’s four children were homeschooled at the time of our interview, but even when they had attended school in previous years, they would all come back home for lunch to shield them from potential criticism of their diet by other pupils: “I don’t want them to be forced to face the scrutiny of others” (Sophie). Unable or unwilling to assume the vegan labor of exclusive child feeding, three other families let their children eat the provided vegetarian or omnivorous meals at school/daycare.

Several mothers said they did not rely on their family or friends to feed their children either. When Dalia, Sophie, and Steve spent holidays with their (non-vegan) families, they did not share the meals their relatives prepared and cooked vegan food for their children and themselves instead. Bringing or preparing their own food was considered a strategy to not bother the rest of the family. Tina, Violet, and Vincent said they avoided sharing mealtimes with friends or family altogether to avoid “fueling debates,” as Violet put it. Audrey, a stay-at-home mother of one, shared she baked a vegan cake herself every time her daughter was invited to a birthday party so her daughter could take part in the celebration while eating her own slice of cake.

[When my daughter is invited to a birthday party,] I make a birthday cake, a yummy cake. I cut slices. So she always takes some birthday cake with her. I always do that, every time she goes to a birthday party, she’s got her Tupperware. And when she opens it, she doesn’t get cookies, she gets a great slice of cake. It’s not the official cake but at least she is not cast aside. (Audrey)

Not relying on other caregivers, institutions, family members, or friends to feed one’s children translates into more maternal foodwork, more money, and more time invested in feeding one’s children. Mothers rationalized this extra work as a direct consequence of their choice of a vegan lifestyle. Emilie (29, one child) saw the preparation of packed lunches as a way to take responsibility for her dietary choices:

In my eyes, it’s a choice we made [to raise our daughters vegan]. It’s a choice that’s not standard. It doesn’t bother me to shoulder the responsibility of this choice by [preparing packed lunches]. I envision doing everything I can to follow our convictions. (Emilie)

Audrey, Beatrice, and Bruno also insisted on feeding their respective daughters themselves because they didn’t trust their family to respect their veganism, with Bruno hoping to “avoid that they give her any non-vegan food.” Their respective children were never left alone with their respective stepparents out of fear that they would receive non-vegan food. Exclusive child feeding was in their case related to a desire to entirely control their child’s diet, a control commensurate with their commitment to veganism.

To enact exclusive child feeding and thus maintain their dietary ideals, five mothers (out of twelve) did not work at all or worked very limited hours while their partner worked full-time, a situation shared by only 17.5% of families in Switzerland (Federal Statistical Office 2021, 28). Beatrice, 32, had worked as a clerk in the financial and tourism sectors, but when she had her daughter, she stopped working. At the time of our interview, she had been a stay-at-home mother for a year and a half and had no plan to resume her paid employment, a choice she linked with her and her partner’s wish to raise a vegan child:

We don’t want to have someone else look after our daughter for several reasons. One is because we don’t want her to be exposed to or forced to eat animal products. The other is that we are trying to practice positive education, we are convinced it goes along with a vegan lifestyle, with a vegan ethic, because if one respects an animal one should respect a child as well. Which is not always the case, especially in my family. (Beatrice)

Beatrice and Bruno’s approach to education led Beatrice to take exclusive charge of their daughter, as they felt it was the only way to keep her in an environment where their values were respected.

Dalia framed her vegan lifestyle as incompatible with her career. After a Ph.D. in management and a career in academic teaching and research, she lost her job at a Swiss higher education institution at the time of the birth of her third child. She had a fourth child a year later and never sought to resume her career. Dalia described herself as intensely invested in the family’s foodwork: she described cooking “everything from scratch,” including hummus, bread, and salad dressings. She went on to say:

This is work. I was a professor before, I couldn’t do it again, I couldn’t work while keeping the same food standards at home. (Dalia)

As a result, she did not envision working outside the home again. In her life, vegan homemaking replaced paid employment. Implementing an alternative diet in an environment where most people and institutions do not offer provisions to ensure the continuity of that diet directly translated, according to parents’ narratives, into exclusive child feeding and redirecting some mothers’ time and energy toward the home and away from paid work.

Navigating medical surveillance

In Switzerland, nutritional experts and pediatricians do not recommend veganism to children because a vegan diet is considered to harbor too much risk of nutritional deficiency (Federal Commission for Nutrition 2018). Acknowledging that some children are nevertheless fed a vegan diet in the country, medical experts have published guidelines for the medical handling of vegan children (Bieri, von Siebenthal, and Köhler 2018; Müller et al. 2020; Petit, Nydegger, and Müller 2019). These guidelines all rely on enhanced medical surveillance. Recommended is a thorough nutritional anamnesis, the prescription of dietary supplements (at least B12 and vitamin D), and one to two blood checks every year to check for potential deficiencies (B12, iron, zinc, calcium, vitamin D). These medical recommendations form a prescription for parents of vegan children to perform tasks that are not required of parents of omnivore children.

In general, interviewed parents said they complied with official advice and took their children to regular checkups and blood tests. In all but one family, children received dietary supplements. However, they also all expressed a profound mistrust toward nutritional advice from healthcare professionals. They grounded their mistrust in the conviction that pediatricians were not properly trained in nutrition and thus lacked qualifications to advise parents on veganism; in the conviction that meat and dairy lobbies influence the content of pediatricians’ medical training in Switzerland; in their nutritional skills that they deemed superior to that of pediatricians; in their encounters with individual healthcare providers whose advice they did not find useful or correct; and in their refusal to see their vegan children treated differently than omnivore children.

Five families reported disagreements with pediatricians who tried to convince parents to compromise on their vegan childcare principles. This position was in line with the official recommendation of Swiss pediatric authorities but was experienced as inappropriate and unprofessional by vegan parents.

On top of the surveillance labor that official guidelines require of parents, and that most of them diligently abide by, vegan parents’ mistrust of mainstream healthcare providers seemed to engender even more work. Changing pediatricians translated into more appointments and more administrative work and mental load, and sometimes also increased travel time to the new doctor’s practice. In all families, this work was in vast majority performed by mothers, according to participants’ narratives. For example, Charlotte (34, one child) changed pediatricians after a disagreement.

My first pediatrician, everything went well, I was breastfeeding, but when the time came to introduce chicken and half a teaspoon of meat in the baby’s food, it turned into a catastrophe. I became an extremist [in my pediatrician’s eyes]. […] I had to say to this pediatrician that no, I didn’t give animal protein, I gave plant protein. It went down really badly. […] I had really become an extremist, she didn’t have an open mind as a medical professional should. (Charlotte)

According to Charlotte, her son’s pediatrician never “accepted” Charlotte’s refusal to give her son animal protein and stressed that a vegan diet was “not normal” and that her son would “not grow well.” Charlotte and her partner Christophe attributed this position to the pediatrician’s “ignorance” about vegan diets. When, a few months later, the same pediatrician could not offer a same-day appointment to Charlotte’s son, who was suffering from diarrhea, Charlotte interpreted this refusal as a disapproval of her diet. Feeling that her son was not appropriately taken care of, she changed to another pediatrician who was recommended by a friend for her “openness” to veganism.

Since her daughter had been born 17 months prior, Beatrice (32, stay-at-home mother) said she had changed pediatricians two times. During her pregnancy, she recalled her own GP warning her she would “kill” her unborn daughter if she did not eat meat, an attitude Beatrice characterized as “terrorism.” After her daughter’s birth, she changed pediatricians a first time to another one who was well-known in the region for his openness to alternative medicine. A conflict occurred nevertheless when Beatrice refused a homeopathic medicine⁵ for her daughter that contained fish on the grounds of her veganism. Beatrice recalls her daughter’s pediatrician giving her a 30-minute “lecture” stressing that the quantity of fish product was minimal, calling her attitude “extreme,” saying that she had “a psychological problem she needed to treat” and that she was “putting her daughter’s life in danger by refusing the treatment.” Feeling that her “sensitivities” were not respected, Beatrice changed to a third pediatrician, with whom she felt more comfortable but whose practice is 40 minutes away from their home. Beatrice still refused to have her daughter take regular blood tests, though:

I find it not right that my daughter, because she is vegan, must endure more tests and more trauma just because she is a vegan. And my pediatrician agrees with me. (Beatrice)

Beatrice openly opposed official guidelines by refusing the extra medical surveillance that comes recommended for vegan children. Beatrice shouldered most of the practical, administrative, and emotional work related to these medical encounters since her partner Bruno, a full-time teacher, said he hardly ever attended her daughter’s medical appointments.

In two families, mistrust toward care providers led parents to make more drastic choices. Tina (34, one child) said she chose to not disclose to her daughter’s pediatrician that they were vegans because she considered her daughter’s diet “her choice” to make. Iris (37, three children) explained she had cut all ties with mainstream medical experts, who they felt did not understand veganism. Iris, trained as a holistic nutritionist, kept track of her children’s health herself:

I watch my children closely. I watch their level of energy, of tiredness, their skin color, this kind of thing, their attention span. […] I don’t have a problem with [taking my child to see a doctor when they are unwell], but I believe that as a mother I have all the necessary skills to know if my child is well. (Iris)

Iris’ narrative exemplifies “medicalized motherhood” (Litt 2000), the social expectation that mothers monitor their children’s health – but in an exclusive fashion and at the expense of medical oversight.

Discussion

Vegan parents’ narratives underline the extent of practical, relational, and mental labor that they linked to their vegan diet. In their families, adopting an alternative diet translated into intensified maternal foodwork. This opens up three directions to deepen our understanding of how food relates to gender roles.

First, findings point to the importance for parenting culture and food studies to consider local and national “cultures of nutrition” (Cuj, Grabinsky, and Yates-Doerr 2021). The science of nutrition underlies most official dietary guidelines around the world and dictates hegemonic notions of what constitutes a good and healthy diet (Scrinis 2013). Yet, nutritional guidelines themselves are influenced by cultural values (Cuj, Grabinsky, and Yates-Doerr 2021). Swiss nutritional doxa is based on the assumption that omnivorism is “normal” and healthy. The extra work described by vegan parents is directly due to having adopted a diet that is different from the norm. Learning about vegan nutrition for example derives from the absence of training for Swiss health professionals in vegan nutrition. Vegan parents need to acquire nutritional skills themselves because finding a competent advisor is difficult in a context that largely assumes and recommends that children will not follow a vegan diet. Interviewed parents indicating that vegan parenting necessitated economic resources, time and skills can thus be related to cultural assumptions underlying Swiss culture of nutrition. This also explains why the types of foodwork that vegan parents describe is partly different from existing definitions of foodwork: the importance given to medical surveillance is correlated to the framing of veganism as medically problematic in Switzerland. Relating the intensity and nature of foodwork to a nation’s or community’s dominant culture of nutrition can thus shed light on the structural factors that influence families’ food workload.

Second, it seems important to consider how meanings attached to specific diets may reinforce hegemonic notions of femininity and traditional gender roles. The context matters of course: Against the backdrop of Switzerland’s traditional gender regime, the very gendered distribution of vegan labor that parents reported is largely congruent with what is the norm in Swiss families. It is also possible that the mode of recruitment of vegan families through Facebook groups in this study led to an over-representation of mothers engaging in intensive parenting since they might be more inclined to use social media and willing to share their experiences. But the way veganism is framed in these families, as a way to care for animals and the planet, plays a key role. Veganism, framed as a form of care, translates into an expansion of women’s role as caretakers (Ballif 2023b). In these families, veganism is not associated with resistance against patriarchy like in vegan feminists’ framing but with care. This underlines the importance for research at the intersection of food, gender, and parenting to consider meaning repertoires that communities attach to diets and how these affect the distribution of foodwork.

Exploring vegan child feeding makes a third important contribution to the study of the ideology of intensive parenting, which is to underline the complex intricacies of the way social privilege intersects with the social evaluation of “good” and “bad” parents. It is widely recognized that dominant definitions of good parenting are shaped by classed and racial inequalities, with mothers from poor and racialized backgrounds the most susceptible to being framed as bad mothers (Feldstein 2000; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998). Intensive parenting is typically a middle-class ideology, with middle- to upper-class mothers possessing the resources to implement such a parenting style, and thus works as a measure of good parenting.” However, parents from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds and fully aligned with the ideology of intensive parenting can still be framed as “bad parents.” This is the case of vegan parents in Switzerland as well as US parents who do not vaccinate their children (Reich 2016) because they do not follow mainstream medical experts. Other middle-class parents may be framed as bad parents for going over the top in their intensive mothering style, like the figure of the “crazy organic mother” described by MacKendrick and Pristavec (2019) in the US, a type of mother who exerts a too tight control over her children’s food, or the “helicopter mom” in the UK (E. Lee and Macvarish 2020). Class and/or racial privilege does not protect parents from criticism. However, such privileged “bad” parents can often escape social scrutiny and the involvement of authorities by leveraging their social, cultural, and financial resources. As Fielding‐Singh and Oleschuk (2023) note, intensive parenting “gone wrong” like child feeding practices considered excessive, overbearing, or misguided, tends to engender less social scrutiny than unhealthy or insufficient children’s food. On one hand, families I met in this study devoted time, energy, and money to finding sympathetic healthcare providers and acquiring advanced nutritional skills, which allowed them to live their lifestyle with minimal friction with experts. On the other hand, except for their choice of experts of reference, they narrowly embodied all other cultural expectations of good parenting. This suggests that intensive mothering is not only a result of cultural expectations but is also a resource that privileged parents can mobilize to preempt criticism and social scrutiny. This could open up new research avenues into the way class and other social privilege can sustain the emergence of alternative parenting styles such as veganism, which can both pave the way for more sustainable lifestyles but also further exclude low-income and racialized families.

Many vegan parents framed their extra-intensive and extra-gendered parenting style as a personal “choice.” Yet, their family foodwork was heavily influenced by ideologies of intensive parenting, the prevailing culture of nutrition, gender regime, and socioeconomic position. Exploring such figures of privileged bad parents is an important contribution to our understanding of parenting norms. They reveal lines of fractures and stratification within the ideology of intensive mothering, with the local culture of nutrition appearing as a contributing factor in delineating good parents from bad parents. Considering foodwork and intensive mothering in relation to an alternative diet thus contributes to refining and deepening our understanding of the different facets of intensive parenting, contributing to refined analyses how the way parents and reproductive subjects are stratified.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Charlotte Faircloth and Rebecca O'Connell for sharing their thoughts and comments on an earlier version of the article. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for guidance in improving the manuscript. Thank you to all research participants, who willingly took the time to share their experiences with me during the very challenging time of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Early.Postdoc Mobility grant nr. 191275 and Postdoc.Mobility grant nr. 202925).

Notes

1. I have translated all interview quotations from French.

2. Pseudonyms are used throughout the article, with partners given pseudonyms starting with the same letter (e.g., Sophie and Steve).

3. I use the term “mothers” here because this is how the authors describe their interviewees – and elsewhere because this is how female participants identified. I am nevertheless aware that not all cisgender female parents identify as “mothers” and that not all persons who identify as mothers are cisgender women.

4. The Ethics Commission of the canton of Vaud (Switzerland) waived the requirement for approval for this research project (decision nr. Req-2021–00,104). All participants have provided written informed consent by signing a document sent per e-mail.

5. In Switzerland, pediatricians trained in homeopathy can prescribe homeopathic treatments alongside conventional drugs.