This dissertation represents the culmination of Breeze Harper’s PhD in Geography at the University of California, Davis. In it she explores three different vegan food guides and what types of ethical (or unethical) consumption patterns they prompt. The guides under study come from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Queen Afua, and Food Empowerment Project. They are examined not just from the perspective of food choice, but also to uncover implications on the social, political, and economic front.

[Abstract excerpted from original source.]

“In this dissertation, I analyze how neoliberal whiteness, race consciousness, decolonization, and anti-racism operate within three different vegan food guides: PETA’s Vegan Shopping Guide, Queen Afua’s Sacred Woman, and Food Empowerment Project’s Ethical Food Choices. PETA, Queen Afua, and Food Empowerment Project are all located within the landscape of vegan politics to produce “ethical” spaces across multiple scales (i.e. consciousness, the body and the home). However, these three sites represent different engagements with food commodities for achieving ethical consumption. Such differences are not so much about food, as much as they are about the social, political, and economic relationships underlying the food commodity chain. This manuscript will reveal that these ‘differing’ vegan guides, actually effect and are affected by whiteness; both in its historical (i.e. colonial whiteness and Jim Crow segregation) and contemporary forms (i.e. neoliberal whiteness). These connections will be revealed and articulated through the primary framework of critical race materialism and the lens of critical food studies. […]”