Vegan Food Deserts: Between Inaccessibility, Identity, and Gentrification

Veganism as lifestyle and dietary practice, has accelerated in recent years as individuals are drawn towards its associations to environmental conscientiousness, health, and ethical food consumption. Simultaneously, veganism has also incurred a rather "paradoxical" narrative of one complicit in creating further barriers of access. Expanding upon traditional conceptions of the food desert, this paper seeks to concretize the notion of a 'vegan food desert', but also go beyond inaccessibility, and addressing the tethers to identity and neoliberal urban restructuring in Toronto. Through a mixed-methods approach that synthesizes the quantitative and qualitative; a framework predicated upon patron Google reviews data served as the foundation for the analyses. The results suggest a suburbanization of vegan food deserts, a retail landscape that caters to the affluent and exacerbates barriers for the visible minority populace, an intersection between the retailers to physical gentrification, and indications of a gentrification language in action, viz., symbolic gentrification.