Voice with Every Bite

Through an examination of vegetarians' practical boundary-work, this paper not only highlights the significance of people's dietary identity but also accounts for how the triadic relationship among social groups complicates people's boundary-work. This paper illuminates vegetarians' strategies for managing cultural membership and identity in a triadic group relationship—namely, meat-eaters, vegetarians and vegans. In the triadic group constellation, I distinguish three types of hierarchical boundary-work from nonhierarchical boundary-work. Unlike non-hierarchical boundary-work, which merely marks and reproduces social differences, hierarchical boundary-work represents and reproduces unequal social categorizations. Focusing on the enactment of dietary identity, I argue that vegetarians conduct a type of hierarchical boundary-work to represent their selfidentification as “the second best” in the triadic constellation. I detail four ways in which vegetarians conduct the-second-best boundary-work ; moreover, I also show that hierarchical boundary-work in general and the-second-best boundary-work in particular can be used to examine the management, maintenance and reproduction of selfidentification in various social communities.