Former Arch Enemy vocalist Alissa White-Gluz recently shared her thoughts on the realities of living a plant-based lifestyle, addressing common misconceptions and the impact of modern influencer culture.
During an appearance on Knotfest‘s podcast “She’s With The Band,” hosted by Tori Kravitz to highlight the voices of women across the music industry, the singer, who has been vegetarian since birth and vegan since the 1990s, spoke candidly about her personal motivations and the current state of the animal rights movement.
Alissa White-Gluz pointed out the hypocrisy often seen in public reactions to animal rights activism. She noted that while rescuing certain animals is widely celebrated, advocating for others is frequently met with mockery.
“I have seen animal rights, not even just veganism, but just animal rights in general, go through a rollercoaster of successes and losses. It’s always a very interesting thing where if somebody rescues a beagle from an animal testing facility, which actually just happened — a bunch of beagles were rescued and the activists went to jail — but they’re applauded as heroes, because they saved dogs. But if those same people were walking out with another animal — let’s say a very similar animal who actually is more intelligent and shares more DNA with humans, a pig — then people probably wouldn’t applaud them. They would just comment ‘bacon’. And the thing is they can comment that all they want — I know where bacon comes from; you’re not blowing my mind,” she explained.
She also dismissed the stereotype of the overly aggressive, preachy vegan.
“I think people have this weird misconception, because they maybe have never met a vegan, and they’re, like, ‘Oh, vegans just walk up to you and say, ‘I’m vegan and you should be vegan.’ That has never happened. That doesn’t happen. I have some friends that I’ve known for years that I didn’t know they were vegan, and then we were, like, ‘Oh, me too. Cool. Okay, great.’ You know, acquaintances,” she continued.
The vocalist expressed frustration with how veganism has been commodified and misrepresented as a passing internet diet, rather than an ethical lifestyle choice.
“I think that, unfortunately, right now we have reached a point where there’s so much oversaturation in the influencer culture that veganism got kind of sucked into a diet trend, which it is not,” she clarified. “Just to make it perfectly clear, for someone who has never met a vegan, you probably won’t know that they’re vegan until you maybe go out to eat with them somewhere and they place an order. And then you still might not know unless you straight-up ask them. It’s not something that ever comes up in conversation.”
Following a surge in vegan awareness around 2018 and 2019, driven by influential documentaries like “The Game Changers“, Alissa observed a manufactured backlash. She specifically pointed to the meat and dairy industries, suggesting they financially backed campaigns to sway public opinion.
“The carnivore diet took off, and quite transparently the meat industry paid influencers to say that they were vegan and stopped being vegan. This is a fact,” she asserted. “They started actually seeing their business suffer because of people who wanted to be healthier or wanted to help animals, especially in dairy… There are vegan influencers who were never actually vegan, who were paid to say that they were vegan: ‘And here’s why I’ve stopped being vegan now’ and make these videos and rage bait everyone. I mean, that’s marketing, right? It’s pretty intelligent marketing, actually. There’s laws being passed in different parts of the world saying that you can’t call soy milk, soy milk, and you can’t call oat milk, oat milk. It has to be ‘soy beverage’ because they’re so afraid of the word ‘milk’ being used to describe something that didn’t come out of a cow’s boob. So I can see that they’re struggling, and that makes me feel good, that we’re making some impact, but I think that they have succeeded in marketing against veganism quite a bit, which sucks, because, again, at the end of the day we’re just people that don’t wanna hurt animals.”
For Alissa White-Gluz, the core motivation remains simple and unchanged: compassion.
“I went vegan because I love animals and I don’t wanna hurt them. That’s it,” she clarified. “And if other people feel that same way and they don’t wanna hurt animals, we’re at a point in time now where it’s actually really easy to avoid hurting them. So they could find that, ‘Hey, I found a way to stop hurting animals. It’s really easy. It doesn’t cost anything. All that it involves is me choosing to eat that thing instead of that thing. Cool. Same price, same nutritional value. One thing is made from plants and the other thing is made from dead animals.’ It’s so easy now.”
She emphasized that personal freedom is paramount, provided it does not inflict harm on others. “I don’t care what you do — I don’t care. Do whatever you want it. I mean, it applies to everything. Drive whatever you want, sleep with whoever you want, eat whatever you want, wear whatever you want, as long as you’re not hurting anyone. All those things, when they’re done without hurting anyone, I don’t care. It’s up to you. You have free will. Go enjoy it. But if you choose to wear a real fur coat, you’re hurting someone. So now it’s not just about you. Now you’re involving somebody else, and you’re taking their life — many lives, actually, for a fur coat.”
Rather than demanding absolute perfection, the singer encouraged people to simply do what they can to reduce animal suffering.
“I’ve had to really think about this a lot because in my head it’s so easy to be vegan that I’m, like, ‘Well, why would it be a problem? It’s so easy.’ But I think that if people love animals and care about animals, or care about their health or care about the environment, even if they’re able to just do it a little bit, it helps,” she added. “Because, look, if there’s people that are vegan half the time, that’s the same as if we had half the amount of people vegan all the time. So it’s the same impact. So if people are, like, ‘Yeah, I’m mostly vegan,’ but they like to have their cheese or whatever now and then, they’re still doing a great job. And so I think that there’s no need to like strive for perfection and feel like they’re like locked into something. Again, for me, I don’t waiver because I don’t want to, but if other people have a hard time with it, even if they do it most of the time or some of the time, it’s still a good help. And I think that everybody has the ability to do that,” she concluded.
