In her recent post for the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, Cynthia Miller Idriss rightly emphasises the significance of physical bodies for the radical right, in past and present. While her stress is on bodies as sites for regulation and discipline, for displaying rebellion and resistance, and for reproducing us-versus-them thinking, there is a particular practice related to the body: food consumption. More specifically — and maybe counter-intuitively — it is worth pointing out that a vegetarian or even vegan diet is in no way incompatible with radical-right thinking. Indeed, although these diets are usually associated with liberal/left-wing lifestyles today, there are “good” ideological reasons why members of the radical right turn meet-free — reasons to do with bodies and ideas.
Popular imagination assumes that meat and blood, having a masculine connotation, constitute the “natural” diet of the radical right. And indeed, the former chairman of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, used YouTube to teach his audience how to prepare a stew. In societies such as ours, which are fueled by cheap meat from animal-processing factories, such a preference is in fact not limited to the far right. Yet when it comes to far-right preferences for a meat-free diet, there is more to consider than one might intuitively assume.
