Informed by several intellectual turns and sub-areas of sociology this article explores veganism as a practice and argues that its nascent social normalisation can be partly explained by specific modes of material work with food performed by vegan practitioners. Based primarily on interview data with UK-based vegans the research identifies four modes of material constitution – material substitution, new food exploration, food creativity and taste transition – which are of particular importance in strengthening links between the elements of the practice. The article argues that these are significant for offering an explanation for the recent growth of vegan practitioners in UK society and that they are also of value to the broader endeavour of understanding sustainable food transitions and intervening for more sustainable food policies.

This article reports upon research on vegan transition, which I bring into dialogue with Sara Ahmed's figure of the killjoy. Ahmed's work on affect and the feminist killjoy is found to be apt for considering contemporary vegans and their transgression of normative scripts of happiness and commensality in a dominant meat and dairy consuming culture. The decentring of joy and happiness is also found to be integral to the critical deconstructive work of the vegan killjoy. Ahmed's ideas further complement the frame of practice theory that I draw upon to understand the process of transition especially in the sense of opposing the meanings of dominant practices. Although food and veganism are not commented upon by Ahmed, the vegan subject constitutes, I argue, a potent further example of what she terms an "affect alien" who must willfully struggle against a dominant affective order and community. Drawing upon interviews with 40 vegans based in the UK, I illustrate examples of contestation and negotiation by vegans and those close to them. The article finds in the figure of the killjoy not only a frame by which to partly understand the negotiation of relationships between vegans and non-vegans but also an opportunity for further intersectional labour between veganism and feminism.

This article approaches snacking from a practice theory perspective in order to understand how this reframing may afford new insights. In doing so it also contributes to sociological thinking on eating practices and their reproduction as well as reflecting upon the ontological assertions of practice theory and its theory of social change. In particular this article argues that the re‐conceptualisation serves to clarify a sociological research agenda for eating practices associated with snacking. It is argued that setting snacking within routine temporalities and spatialities and as bound up in the recursivity between practices and relations is especially important for thinking about snacking sociologically. In common with applications of practice theory in the field of sustainability transitions the aim is to move beyond individualistic assumptions of behaviour change and instead situate snacking as an eating practice with health implications that has emerged within the social, temporal, economic and cultural organisation of everyday life.

Knowledge production within the climate sciences is quickly taken up by multiple stakeholders, reproduced in scientific citation and the broader culture, even when it is no longer accurate. This article accomplishes two goals: firstly, it contributes to the clarification of the quantification of emissions from animal agriculture, and secondly, it considers why the dominant framing of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) on this subject focuses on maximizing production efficiency. Specifically, analysing the FAO’s own work on this topic shows that the often-used FAO estimate that emissions from animal agriculture amount to 14.5% of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is now out of date. In returning to the FAO’s own explanation of its data sources and its more recent analysis of emissions from animal agriculture, this article finds that the figure of minimum estimate should be updated to 16.5%. The tendency of the FAO to prioritize a technological approach focused on making animal production more “eco-efficient” is critically examined in light of many other evidence-based calls for reductions in animal consumption. An explanation for this FAO approach is offered in terms of a type of epistemological bias.

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