This dialogue piece provides scholars of the rhetoric of health and medicine with a close examination of vegan and vegetarian diets/lifestyles through the perspective of several scholars, activists, and/or medical practitioners. Through these conversations, the authors illuminate many key areas of interest and future examination related to vegan and vegetarian diets through the lens of several subtopics including health impact, ethics, cultural influence on diet, gender, medical advice, emerging “meat” technologies, and societal rhetoric about vegans and vegetarians.The dialogue participants provide a discussion on how vegetarian diets—and vegan diets in particular—can progress individual and public human health, liberate non-human animals, improve the environment, and provide a vehicle in which several important social justice movements (for both humans and animals) can take root, all the while recognizing the many reasons reasons people might choose a vegetarian or vegan diet.

In the face of the $44 billion market—and rising—for foods labeled as “natural” (despite any formal regulatory oversight on the use of this term), this article examines multiple complex layers of community literacies and movements involving foods labeled as “natural,” including an increasing availability of “natural” foods and simultaneous rise in U.S. obesity rates, as well as grassroots movements that have challenged the use of “natural.” Then, using an online survey of 707 respondents in a localized community setting, I provide my own examination of literacies of “natural” foods by assessing specific consumer interpretations and regulatory knowledge of the word “natural” as it is found on food labels. Ultimately, I discuss what role these varying levels of literacies play in the rising U.S. movement to push back against the use of this claim in the face of an otherwise flourishing “natural” food market.