Hello,
Have you come across overt or implied bias in the portrayal of vegetarians and vegetarianism in the media, especially in TV shows and movies? It could be outright mockery and ridicule of a vegetarian character by another character, or showing vegetarian characters with all the negative and undesirable qualities, such as being stupid, dim-witted, weak, or evil.
I’ll offer an example that just occurred to me.
The British TV show “[Midsomer Murders](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118401/)” is a long-running detective series. It’s a generally good show and I’ve watched a lot of the episodes many times.
But I just remembered two episodes which portray vegetarians in bad light, as part of the main story line and characters. Seems like a constant bias if they explicitly make these characters vegetarian.
Season 10 Ep. 6 “[Picture of Innocence](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0908628/?ref_=ttep_ep6)” — The murderer is a strict vegetarian. At the beginning of the episode, he is shown taking photos of his daily meals, which are always “a veggie burger and peas”. And a bit later in the episode, he says to someone that he switched from frozen peas to canned peas and that has made a big difference in his photos. He’s a weirdo, socially awkward, and a stalker of women. He is obsessed with one woman in particular and kills off all the men who he thinks have used her. And then in the end, when he’s been convicted, he asks his solicitor if he will get vegetarian meals in prison.
So this character is an extreme caricature filled with mockery and marginalizing.
Season 6 Ep. 1 “[A Talent for Life](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0647470/?ref_=ttep_ep1)” — In this episode, the wife of a local doctor is a life-long vegetarian who has a “live and let live household” where her husband does fishing and brings back the fish he caught, but the wife doesn’t eat the fish, saying “fish might not be the brightest of God’s creatures, but to class them as vegetables is a bit unkind.” But apparently, the doctor is a serial womanizer and has had dozens of affairs without ever getting caught by his wife. So the wife, who is a “life-long vegetarian” is portrayed as being so dumb and dim-witted and oblivious as to not realize that her husband has been having affairs, whereas the entire village knows this. So near the end of the episode, when her close friend reveals the affairs of her husband, she can only exclaim, “You mean to say that I have been the object of ridicule my entire life?” And the heroine, so to speak, of the episode, who is the close friend of the vegetarian, is said to have always made fun of her vegetarianism, and that the vegetarian woman has never had any sense of humor about it.
So basically what the makers of the show are saying, is that if people ridicule vegetarianism, we should just take the ridicule in good humor and not try to explain in earnest what it’s all about.
Are there any entirely positive depiction of vegetarians and vegetarianism in the media?
Dining and Cooking