This project is a result of collaboration with Bernhard Forchtner. We examined a German neo-Nazi group of vegans called Balaclava Kuche, who through their own vegan show promoted anti-Semitic views on Youtube. In the paper, which was published in 2017 in journal Food, culture and society, we analysed the group’s messages and how they were communicated through food and recipes. With reference to sociologist Eder’s theoretical framework to do with food, nature and society, we theorised from this on “how the contemporary extreme right performs in a new media ecology” to demonstrate “the significance of cultural structures related to nature, (here via food,) for the reproduction of identities.” We concluded that this can be explained through four positions, as illustrated in Figure 1 below (Forchtner and Tominc, 2017): Romantic harmony, Solidarity engagement (perceiving nature as peaceful) and social Darwininsm, Prometheanism (where nature is seen as untamed). In these cases, the first example is where there is desire to align nature with culture, and the second where the two are separated. Unlike in a stereotypical understanding of veganism as peaceful, we see here that this is not always necessarily the case.
Citation for this article which can be found here:
Bernhard Forchtner & Ana Tominc (2017) Kalashnikov and Cooking-spoon:
Neo-Nazism, Veganism and a Lifestyle Cooking Show on YouTube, Food, Culture & Society, 20:3, 415-441.
Ana Tominc 