Multispecies Childcare: Child Veganism and the Reimagining of Health, Reproduction, and Gender in Switzerland

ABSTRACT Influenced by nutritional science, feeding children is generally thought of in terms of children’s health and well-being. Here, I ask whether child veganism, with its focus on animal welfare and environmental concerns, challenges this model. Drawing from reproductive studies, I focus on Swiss vegan parents’ ideas about food to illuminate a “multispecies,” less anthropocentric form of childcare. While their ethic opens up new perspectives on health and childcare, I discuss how “sustainable” reproductive practices can also solidify gender stereotypes and modes of ordering species.

Sophie was a Swiss mother 2 of four children aged 8 to 12 at the time of my interview with her in 2021 as part of a study of child veganism. After becoming vegans four years prior, Sophie and her husband had decided to also feed their children a vegan diet. Not only was Sophie convinced that a vegan diet was healthy, in her eyes veganism also had the compelling advantage of not causing harm to (nonhuman) animals or the planet. The way Sophie frames her choice of diet for her children contrasts with mainstream Swiss food and parenting culture in two ways: Swiss nutritional guidelines advise against a vegan diet for children for nutritional reasons, while Sophie considers veganism a "healthy" choice for her children; and Swiss parenting culture tends to expect that parents will place their individual child and the child's health at the center of their childcare decisions, yet Sophie gives a central place to the well-being of animals and the planet in her choices. In this article, I explore the narratives of Sophie and other Swiss vegan parents regarding how they feed their children and the way they consider other species, to grasp what we can learn about health and childcare from their concerns and dilemmas.
In Switzerland, child nutrition is discussed by health professionals and parents first and foremost as a matter of health, reflecting the dominant approach to food in Europe. In western, Euro-American contexts, nutritional science has foregrounded "healthy eating" as a hegemonic approach to food since the nineteenth century, at the expense of other ways of assessing food (like pleasure, taste or tradition) (e.g., Coveney 2000, Harman et al. 2019, Lupton 1996, Ristovski-Slijepcevic et al. 2008. Dietary advice operates on the premise that there is a direct causal relationship between the nutritional composition of food and its effect on health, and thus that a good, healthy diet must be based on a careful balance of nutrients (protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, etc.) (Coveney 2000, Scrinis 2013). It is within this "healthist" (Crawford 1980) and "nutritionist" (Scrinis 2013) approach to food that Switzerland, like other European countries, advises children and pregnant women against adopting a vegan diet: medical authorities frame veganism as a "restrictive" diet that does not ensure the necessary nutrient intake (Federal Commission for Nutrition 2018, Müller et al. 2020, and Petit, Nydegger). However, medical anthropologists have drawn attention to the polysemic meanings of "health" beyond its narrow, medical definition as an attribute of individual bodies (in relation to food, see Cuj et al. 2021, Paxson 2016, Ristovski-Slijepcevic et al. 2008. Yates-Doerr and Carney (2016) invite us to be attuned to "nonindividualized forms of health" (2016:317) like the ones they describe in their ethnography of Latin American kitchens. They argue that the form of care that takes place in the kitchen targets the health of "a patchwork of families, communities, lands, and spirits" (2016:315) beyond the health of individual bodies. Does child veganism likewise mobilize notions of health that go beyond the individual human child? Who/what do vegan parents care for through child veganism?
That children and their individual health should be parents' main concern is a central element of the "intensive" parenting culture that characterizes Switzerland (Baumgarten andMaihofer 2021, Ballif 2023, Zimmermann and LeGoff 2020)Z. S. Hays (1996: 8) first introduced the notion of "intensive mothering" to describe US parenting culture as "child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive." This typically middle-class ideology defines the "good" mother as the primary caretaker, intensively committed and seeking expert guidance, a model that developed during the twentieth century and that others describe as "scientific motherhood" (Apple 2006) or "total motherhood" (Wolf 2011). Providing the family with "good" and "healthy" food is a key "maternal" responsibility (DeVault 1991, Harman et al. 2019. Parenting culture studies describe the cultural dominance of the ideal-typical figure of the "intensive" mother in various European and North American contexts (Faircloth 2013, Faircloth, Hoffman, and Layne 2013, E. Lee et al. 2014, Hamilton 2022. With little state support for families, scarce parental leave, and a lack of daycare facilities, the Swiss gender regime has been described as "maternalist" and "traditional," relying on mothers to assume childcare (Levy, Widmer, andKellerhals 2002, Madörin et al. 2012). Switzerland has a notably dense network of parenting experts advising new parents (including on nutrition), and those experts often reinforce heteronormative ideals of the family (Ballif 2019, Ballif 2020, Ballif 2023, Chautems 2022. Swiss mothers' experiences are marked by a sense of responsibility to protect the health of their children before and after birth, including through careful food choices (Burton-Jeangros 2002, Hammer andInglin 2014). Against this backdrop, I wondered whether child veganism, with its concern for animals 3 and the environment, redefined parenting as less childcentered.
I approach feeding children as a reproductive practice and analyze it through a "reprolens" (Inhorn 2020: 47) to highlight how various aspects of social life and cultural forms, including kinship, gender, nature, and the nation, are reproduced through feeding children. Picking up on the long tradition of looking at the role food plays in collective identities (Douglas 1966;Lévi-Strauss 1970[1964 ;Bourdieu 1979Bourdieu [1984), feeding children can be defined as an act of biological as well as sociocultural reproduction. Analyzing vegan parents' multispecies approach to childcare thus looks at the way reproducing and caring for new living beings is conceptualized and how cultural and social meanings are reproduced or contested through their choices. This perspective builds on and adds to the burgeoning interest in food in reproductive studies, e.g., in the way some foods impair reproductive capabilities (R. Mykitiuk 2018, Lamoreaux 2022), or how a type of food like cows' milk can encapsulate reproductive imaginaries (Wiley 2015, Dahl 2017; and previous explorations of veganism from the perspective of morality (Arppe et al. 2011) or as a social movement (Véron 2016, Bertuzzi 2017, C. Wrenn 2017. What I find is that Swiss vegan parents share a "multispecies ethic": an ethical perspective based on the notion that caring for their children involves caring for animals and the planet simultaneously. Vegan parents' endeavor to center non-human species resonates with the efforts of multispecies ethnographers to transform anthropology in the last decade. Multispecies ethnographies challenge the anthropocentric nature of human and social sciences by shifting their focus to "creatures previously appearing on the margins of anthropology -[. . .] animals, plants, fungi and microbes" (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010: 545) and to "our symbolic and material relations with other animals" (Wilkie 2015: 324). While the field of multispecies studies is diverse in its degree of politicization (Wilkie 2015), many multispecies scholars share core values and concerns with vegan and critical animal studies, positioning veganism as a means to end animal exploitation (e.g., Taylor andTwine 2014, Wright 2015). Yet, as Yates-Doerr (2015: 309-310) points out, multispecies approaches run the risk of reproducing modes of ordering species as fixed, stable categories, which are typical of Euro-American taxonomy. In her ethnography of eating practices in Guatemala, she reminds us that species "do not exist outside the practices through which they come into being" (Yates-Doerr 2015:319).
Instead of assuming what species are and which species matter, I aimed to understand how Swiss vegan parents classify and categorize beings that count in their childcare choices. I set out to understand their multispecies approach, including its complexities and contradictions, and how it either reproduces or challenges categories and social hierarchies. Similarly, it was not my aim to offer a definition of what veganism is or should be -I redirect readers to vegan studies 4 for this discussionbut rather to observe how people use the notion and how it relates to their multispecies ethic.
After describing how I investigated child veganism in the context of Swiss reproductive and food cultures, I unpack vegan parents' "multispecies ethic": how they seek to care for their children, animals, and the planet as distinct yet interconnected concerns; how this ethic calls for a radical reimagining of human-animal relations and reproductive culture in Switzerland; how they integrate their multispecies ethic into childcare; and how they deal with challenges in practical situations where priorities must be decided. I finally discuss what a multispecies approach to childcare can teach us about intensive parenting, childcare, the notion of health, and the social order.

Vegan families in Switzerland
Child veganism in Switzerland is a contentious topic. In a country where about 1.4% of the population are vegans (Kalte 2021), nutritionists and pediatricians advise against a vegan diet -defined as a diet that excludes all animal products -for children because of the risks of deficiencies in crucial micronutrients (Federal Commission for Nutrition 2018, Petit et al. 2019, Müller et al. 2020). The public health and medical associations of other European countries such as France, Germany or Spain hold a similar position, in contrast to North American and British nutritional authorities who recommend veganism to the whole population. The reluctance of Swiss nutritional authorities to recommend veganism to children reflects wider discussions of what constitute a proper, healthy, and sustainable diet for the nation. Changing food practices fuel increasingly emotional debates about Swiss traditions, heritage, and food culture (Godin and Sahakian 2018). Meat and dairy consumption occupy a central part of Swiss food traditions in the three linguistic regions (German, French, and Italian-speaking) (Krieger et al. 2019). The meat and dairy industries are heavily subsidized and defended by powerful national lobbying groups. And yet, nutritional guidelines in recent years have addressed the health problems associated with the consumption of meat and dairy and promoted "less but better" meat consumption in Switzerland (Sahakian, Godin, and Courtin 2020). While the nineteenth-century Lebensreform movements established a vegetarian tradition in the German-speaking part of Switzerland (Rindlisbacher 2022), in the French-speaking region, debates surrounding meat and dairy consumption remain tense and polarized.
I conducted a research project aimed at analyzing competing perceptions of child veganism circulating in Switzerland between 2020 and 2021. Initially based on classical ethnographic methods, the research project was transformed into online fieldwork (Howlett 2022) when COVID-19-related travel restrictions and social distancing rules made the planned participant observation of family meals and vegan events as well as in-person interviews impossible. I collected conceptualizations of child veganism from local social media forums, websites of Swiss vegan associations, and publications of Swiss-based health care professionals over the course of a year to gain a comprehensive view of main viewpoints on the topic. I conducted online "expert interviews" with selected medical professionals and vegan activists. I conducted another set of online interviews with 17 parents self-identifying as "vegans," who were recruited through ads posted on the observed social media forums and via snowball sampling -these are the focus of this article. I adopted an open-ended approach to what veganism means, leaving it for participants to identify themselves and their family members as vegans or not. All conceptualized veganism as a commitment to abstain from using any animal products and as a deliberate choice made during their adult life. However, they were not always strict in its application (e.g., some considered themselves vegans while occasionally consuming cheese).
The interviewed parents were 12 heterosexual women and 5 of their male partners and were aged between 29 and 50. In Switzerland, like elsewhere, veganism tends to be most popular among women and highly educated social groups, 5 which these families illustrated: 15 of the parents had a university or vocational tertiary education diploma. All mothers and five fathers were vegan and had been for 1 to 14 years. All families had decided to cook strictly vegan meals at home at some point in the past, with two exceptions: a single mother whose teenage daughter was not a vegan and a family who occasionally bought cheese. However, most fathers and some children ate vegetarian or omnivore meals outside the home. The children in these families were quite young, which meant that most parents encountered relatively little opposition when they decided to transition to vegan meals. Out of 20 children, ten were between 0 and 5 years old, seven were 6-10 years old, and the last three were 11-16 years old.
In these interviews, I first asked questions related to parents' motivations for veganism and their dietary history. To get a sense of participants' food practices despite the impossibility of direct observation, I then asked questions about practical situations to gather examples of concrete food decisions. As a Swiss-born heterosexual parent, I shared a language and cultural and geographical references with the participants, as well as the experience of raising children in Switzerland, which considerably helped building rapport and a kind of "remote embeddedness" (Howlett 2022: 394) in the lives of participants despite the online setting (Kim et al. 2021). Because I am not a vegan, however, some parents were wary of my opinion on veganism, especially given the context of heightened debates in Switzerland. I made clear that the goal of my research was neither a defense nor a criticism of veganism; I assured them of my respect for their lifestyle and shared my own dietary journey.

Multispecies ethic
Parents' narratives of how and why they chose to feed their children with a vegan diet contested the dominant child-and health-centered parenting culture. Their children's diet was not just about optimizing their children's individual health and development but rather about aligning all living beings' interests. This is apparent, for example, in Iris's account of the reasons why she transitioned her family to a vegan diet: To me it was obvious, I thought "I have a responsibility towards my children and towards the planet, of offering a better world actually, precisely, for one and the other". It was essential for me to have a minimal impact on this planet. (Iris, 37, three children) Iris framed her choices as a "responsibility" toward more than her offspring and believed that a plantbased diet serves a more general purpose of ensuring a "better world" for generations to come. Similarly, Pasche Guignard (2016) has found that French and Swiss eco-conscious mothers tend to shift the focus away from the child and their health to consider the well-being of the family as a whole and include notions of sustainability and social justice in their consumption choices. For Beatrice, veganism was only one facet of a larger effort to change humans' impact on the planet.
In my view, and my husband agrees, veganism is part of a package, this package includes also for example positive education and reducing consumption, fast consumption, a zero-waste lifestyle, so it's a general package to try and stop consuming that much. And I think either humanity does that, or it will collapse, we don't have a choice, I think. (Beatrice, 32, one child) This way of connecting childcare decisions to broader concerns about the future of human life on our planet is the reason I refer to their approach to childcare a "multispecies ethic." I avoid calling it a "vegan" ethic because my interlocutors themselves highlighted that their approach to childcare encompasses more than veganism. It was about conditions of life on our planet and the relationships between humans and other species. Additionally, while all the interviewed parents shared a commitment to (mostly) abstain from consuming animal products, they acknowledged that some of their choices might not be considered strictly vegan by others.
Vegan parents' multispecies ethic echoes K. Dow's (2016aDow's ( , 2016b notion of an "ecological ethic of reproduction." In her ethnography based in the village of Spey Bay, Scotland, Dow argued that people thought of having children in relation to "the kinds of environments into which children will be born," rather than only the passing on of biogenetic substances as is usual in Euro-American kinship models (Dow 2016b:653). But while the emphasis among Dow's interlocutors was on human embeddedness in "domestic, economic, social, political, and ecological environments" (2016b:656) -reflected in her use of the term "ecological ethic" -vegan parents' imaginary is marked by distinction and relations between species.
On one hand, Swiss vegan parents treat "animals," "the environment/the planet," and human "health" -in their own words -as distinct concerns. This triptych animals-environment-health reflects a wider cultural and scientific understanding of veganism. Likewise, surveys of motivations for choosing a vegan diet in Europe and North America have tended to identify animal welfare, the environment, and health as the most frequent (see note 5). Of the 17 parents I interviewed, 15 explained they became vegans mainly "for animals:" to avoid exploiting and killing farm animals, out of love and compassion for them. Animal welfare is also the main motivation for almost three quarters of Swiss vegans, according to a survey of vegans in Switzerland by political scientist Kalte (2021). Only one parent became vegan for mainly health-related reasons (to alleviate symptoms of an autoimmune disease). Five parents mentioned the "environment" or the "planet" as another motivation, like Charlotte: Our veganism starts with animals, with [animal] abuse and with the fact that we don't support the system [of animal farming]. Then, well, it's also the environment that concerns us, because I have a little boy, I would like him to live on a planet where we have not eaten all the resources the Earth can give by early July, it's all of that. (Charlotte, 34, one child) The "environment," as for other all vegan parents I met, stands for the plants, water, and landscape in which animals and humans live. Many emphasized that meat and dairy production have a significant environmental impact. Therefore, being a vegan was considered "good enough" for the environment and to offset their consumption of food products like bananas or cashews, which require long-distance transportation.
Understood as distinct concerns, animals, the environment, and human health were nevertheless conceptualized as closely connected. Many parents, such as Dalia, felt that food choices should be beneficial for all three aspects at the same time.
There's the question of [animal] suffering. There's the question of sustainability, the planet, and there's human health, but all three are not always aligned, unfortunately. In our view, they should be aligned. (Dalia,50,three children) Iris underlined the interconnections between animals, the planet, and human health, in which food choices are embedded.
Everything is a bit interlocked, actually. I realized one does not go without the other because, as soon as you want to do good for the planet, animals are part of the planet, so eating animals not only harms the animal but also the planet through the environmental impact, and harms my health at the same time, so these three areas, I couldn't separate them. (Iris, 37, three children) Vegan parents' multispecies ethic thus contrasted with Swiss approaches to child nutrition and health, replacing it with a more holistic vision where food choices are linked to wider concerns about the future of the planet and its inhabitants. They thus redefined health in a multispecies way, advocating for a more balanced consideration of human health, animal welfare, and environmental preservation. They also challenged the medical authorities' view that child veganism is unhealthy. However, health in their narratives is still the attribute of an individual (human) body, aligning with the prevailing concept of health in Switzerland.

Multispecies reproductive imaginaries
Vegan parents' multispecies ethic entails a reimagining of human-animal relations and reproduction. Vegan mothers repeatedly deplored that calves were usually separated from cows in Swiss farms, comparing their own maternal experiences with that of cows. Such parallels and expressed senses of solidarity with animal mothers disrupt dominant "reproductive imaginaries" (Ginsburg andRapp 2020, Hudson 2020) in Switzerland while also reproducing gendered stereotypes of reproductive roles.
In Switzerland, cows are a ubiquitous presence in the landscape and are often seen grazing alongside roads and railways. Switzerland has a proportionally high amount of dairy farming because the mountainous topography of about 70% of the country makes land unsuitable for crop farming. Cows are also a core symbol of Swiss national identity (Crettaz andPreiswerk 1986, Orland 2005). Representations of a "happy cow" are central features of materials promoting meat or dairy consumption in Switzerland (Sahakian et al. 2020). Consequently, a core focus of vegan associations in Switzerland is the deconstruction of the image of the "happy cow." They highlight that in most farms, dairy cows are inseminated every year to ensure their milk production; that calves are usually taken away to facilitate collecting the cow's milk; and that male calves are usually slaughtered for meat. Thus, it was not a surprise that cows came up relatively often during my interviews with Swiss vegans as symbols of animal suffering and reproductive harm.
Vegan parents' multispecies ethic draws on the figure of the cow in a gendered way to compare experiences of raising a human baby to that of raising a calf. Charlotte explained that becoming a mother, one year after becoming a vegan, led her to imagine herself in the place of a cow who sees her calf taken away from them right after birth. I think that being a mom and putting myself in the place of a cow -and I watched videos -or knowing that a cow cries over her calf for weeks and weeks, thinking that a calf never gets to drink his/her 6 mother's milk, why? Because we human beings we want our glass of milk, that the doctor recommends, but that we absolutely don't need. It's horrible to think that, if my son was stolen from me, just because someone wanted my milk and make cheese or stuff we don't necessarily need, for two seconds of pleasure, because at the end of the day it's two seconds; your cheese, you enjoy it for two seconds, and then it's done. (Charlotte,34,one child) Charlotte drew parallels between her and a cow to denounce the way dairy cows are treated in Switzerland. Although Charlotte never mentioned vegan feminist authors to me, her sense of solidarity with other animal mothers resonates with their arguments. In An Animal Manifesto, Adams (2006) called for reproductive freedom for all females by pointing out that producing meat, eggs, and dairy relies on the manipulation and exploitation of female reproductive capacities. Vegan mothers' primary concern was the inability of cows to feed and raise their calves, rather than the constant insemination of farm animals. In that sense, they expand their call for justice for female animals to the whole reproductive process, from the right not to have children (Adams' main concern) to the right to raise and feed their offspring.
Some mothers drew a parallel between human milk and cow's milk. Humans' consumption of cow's milk is the main reason for the separation of cows and calves. Milk is thus problematized as a symbol and vector of injustice.
All dairy products rely on the exploitation of a mother's body, and I thought "I might have eaten a piece of gruyere [cheese] while I was breastfeeding my daughter, without realizing what I was doing!" I had the right to breastfeed my baby and cows didn't! (Madeleine, 42, one child) Eating cheese while breastfeeding appeared to be multispecies treason, as Madeleine's lactating body was nourished by the product of another female's lactation.
The parallels drawn between human and animal mothers are interesting in terms of reproductive imaginaries in three ways. First, vegan mothers contest the speciesist hierarchy ingrained in the Swiss food system, which distinguishes between human and animal mothers, by placing cows and themselves on an equal footing and advocating for equal rights for all mothers. This raises a question regarding the point of reference of such a call: Are they advocating for human mothers' lives to resemble cows' reproductive practices or vice versa? Widespread narratives about childcare, gender, and nature tend to portray mammals as models that humans should strive to follow in their childcare practices. In Switzerland (Chautems 2022) like in other European countries (Faircloth 2013(Faircloth , 2017, promoters of breastfeeding draw on the animal model to argue that extended breastfeeding is a "normal" and "natural" way for mammals to feed their babies. Here, vegan mothers' hope is for cows to be able to raise their offspring more like humans do. Human reproduction serves as the standard for defining what constitutes a "good" and "normal" way of raising babies. Second, vegan parents' multispecies ethic calls for untangling human and animal reproduction. Borrowing from a common trope in vegan rhetoric, Charlotte pointed out that "we are the only mammal who drinks another mammal's milk," which led her to conclude, "Milk is not made for us humans." Fiona said she reads a children's book called "That's not my momma's milk!" (Barcalow 2018) to her son. This book is meant to teach children that a "momma's" milk is made for her baby, with female animals and humans pictured nursing their babies. Indicating that each mammal species should drink their own milk is a way to introduce boundaries between species that these vegan mothers feel are missing in Swiss reproductive and food culture. Vegan parents' multispecies ethic is founded on establishing connections between species rather than erasing boundaries. Quite to the contrary, the idea of "stable distinctions between humans and other species" (Yates-Doerr 2015: 310) persists.
Third, the fact that it was vegan mothers (and not fathers) who expressed their concerns over cows' fates draws attention to profoundly gendered imaginaries underlying their multispecies ethic and their distribution of carework. Parallels between vegan mothers and cows build on an imaginary of "the mother" as the primary source of care and food for children, a heteronormative, biologizing, and gendered ideal that is prevalent in Swiss maternalist culture (Ballif 2019). Vegan mothers assumed most food-and childcare work -the very role they wished cows could enjoy too. Five mothers out of twelve were not currently or only occasionally in paid employment, a situation shared by only 17.5% of Swiss families (Federal Statistical Office 2021). These mothers said this allowed them to devote enough time to these tasks. For this group of parents, multispecies childcare required a privileged social position as members of white, middle-class families and the reproduction of the traditional family model. In these families, raising vegan children also expanded women's traditional roles as carers to include animals and the planet. In Switzerland as in other European and North American countries, women make up two-thirds to three-quarters of vegans (see note 5), an over-representation of women that has been linked to their socialization as caretakers (Gaarder 2011). It is thus not very surprising that in the interviewed families, mothers were more likely to introduce (and feel responsible for) a vegan diet for their children and assumed a large part of the extra work they attributed to their vegan lifestyles.

Multispecies education
The family diet was the most obvious way through which vegan parents sought to implement a multispecies education. Parents who transitioned to veganism when their children were already born started to offer exclusively vegan food to their children as an extension of their own convictions, sometimes after a transitory period. But the multispecies ethic of vegan parents extended, beyond food, to their childcare practices.
A further way to transmit their multispecies ethic to their children was sharing their ideal of interspecies relations through educational practices and to move away from the dominant speciesist culture. When it came to choosing books, TV shows, and activities, parents sought to immerse their children in what Cole and Stewart (2014) called a "vegan children's culture," based on the contention that mainstream culture socializes children to "the human use of other animals, especially as 'resources' for food, clothing, play, entertainment, education and so on" (Cole and Stewart 2014: 6). Most of them purchased children's books labeled as vegan or carefully selected material that did not include references to animal exploitation (such as that in farming, circuses, or zoos). Audrey used a pen to cross out images of happy farm animals in her daughter's children book and explained to her that farm animals were actually not happy. Beatrice previewed episodes of her daughter's favorite cartoon to eliminate parts where characters were eating meat or engaging in other activities she felt were incompatible with her ethic. Beatrice also sought to introduce a sense of multispecies solidarity to her daughter by asking dairy cows for forgiveness. Because she lived in a rural area and was a stay-athome mother, her daughter and she often encountered cows when they took walks outside.
[When] we go see cows, I explain to her simply that these are not numbers, that these are beings with a personality. Last time, we even asked the cows for forgiveness, sometimes we seem quite extreme [laughs]. Because we saw that it was a couple of days after they had taken the calves away, and the calves were in igloos [outdoor domed shelters] not far from the cows. (Beatrice, 32, one child) Vegan parents also hoped their children would adopt their ethical approach to food for themselves. Having fully embraced the idea that food is a "choice" that can be mobilized for social change -an approach made possible by the privileged social position of these families, vegan parents trained their children to see their food choices as linked to animal welfare and subordinate their cravings to an ethical assessment, thus purposefully moving away from child-centered parenting. This was discussed by parents of older children (5 to 16 years old), some of whom had not been vegans from birth. In two families, the children, aged 8 to 12 when the interviews took place, sometimes asked them to buy nonvegan food, such as ice cream, pastry, or cheese. I asked parents how they managed these situations. The mothers, Sophie and Violet, said they reminded their children that these products contained dairy, but they agreed to buy them occasionally. The fathers, Steve and Vincent, took a stricter stance and tried to appeal to their children's consciences. Steve explained that he asked his children to put their pleasure in balance with the harm dairy farming caused.
So, what we do, we tell them "Outside you can have your own experiences. If we are here, we will remind you that your choice is made consciously. If you choose to have a dairy ice cream." They know that milk comes from cows, and that to have milk, a calf has been eaten or at least killed. So then, we tell them, "Are five minutes of ice cream in your mouth worth a calf's life?" (Steve,41,four children) Similarly to American and Canadian mothers interviewed by Cairns and Johnston (2015), Steve understands his children as "emerging citizen-consumers who have the potential to build a more sustainable future through their food choices" (Cairns and Johnston 2015: 80). When Vincent's 8-year-old asked for an ice cream, he recalled telling her about the way the egg industry shreds male baby chicks (only female chicks are kept alive to produce eggs) to provide her with the information he considered relevant to make her own choice.
What I wanted to do is to give her a sense of responsibility in relation to this suffering, to make her acknowledge that living beings have been involved in what she eats, and also that we can do better, that we don't need to do that. I stopped using euphemisms, I showed her pictures of shredded baby chicks, and I showed her pictures of slaughterhouses, I have also, with difficulty, showed her the picture of halal slaughtering process in Switzerland, she didn't want to look. For me it's not about traumatizing her, it's about showing her that that's what we are asking to be done. [when we eat animal products]. (Vincent,33,one child) Animal welfare and vegan activism in the past three decades has largely used visual images of animal slaughtering and suffering to try and raise people's consciousness to the need to stop animal abuse (Véron 2016). The "moral shock" tactic relies on the hopes that seeing the evidence of animal abuse in farms or laboratories will convince people to pay more attention to the issue or to turn vegan (Jasper and Poulsen 1995;C.L. Wrenn 2013). These parents extended this logic to their children. Sophie, the only one in the sample currently involved in vegan activism, chose to show her children the same images she uses for street activism. Sophie did not say precisely how old her children (aged 5 to 9 when she became a vegan) were by the time they saw these pictures.
We had warned them, these are scary images. The two girls said, "No, we won't watch," and the boys did. The first time, I remember, my son was sick all night; it was an emotional shock really, a bit hard. And over time, the girls started to watch too [. . .]. Of course, the first time they watched they cried; there were floods of tears. Now, these are not images we gladly show to them because they are too violent and hard. But I can't understand that parents give a piece of dead meat to children and let them imagine that the cow volunteered to give her body and her life. No, I think it is important not to lie to children. (Sophie,39,four children) Sophie's strategy is a striking contrast to the general attitude of omnivore parents who seek to protect their children "from the harsh realities of animal slaughter," as Cairns and Johnston (2018: 570) found among Canadian mothers. In these families, parents refrained from explicitly forcing their children to adopt a vegan diet or forbidding them to buy non-vegan food. Instead, they placed their children in front of a moral choice: endorsing animal suffering or choosing veganism. In their educational practices, vegan parents thus sought to reproduce -in the sense of transmitting -their multispecies ideal.

Multispecies dilemmas
In practice, parents encountered situations where their multispecies ethic was challenged. Combining concerns about their children's well-being, animals, and the environment sometimes proved difficult. Parents felt sometimes torn between their children's well-being or health and their wish to avoid animal products. Thus, Emilie chose to buy leather shoes for her daughter.
The very first pair of shoes we bought for [our daughter], the only pair that met all our criteria, in terms of support, soft soles, etc., was made of leather. (Emilie,29,two children) Concerns for her daughter's comfort and motor development trumped Emilie's otherwise strict avoidance of animal products. Emilie also made a difficult choice of formula for her baby. Unable to breastfeed, she quickly introduced formula and, at first, chose a soy-based one. Regular formulas contain cow's milk and, thus, are not vegan. In Switzerland, a Swiss brand produces a soy-based formula that is easily accessible in pharmacies (albeit approximately 50% more expensive than regular formula). However, soy formulas have been at the center of a controversy since the mid-1990s because of the suspected role of soy as a hormonal disruptor (e.g., Testa et al. 2018), and for this reason as well as other nutritional concerns, the Swiss pediatrics association does not recommend their use (Commission de Nutrition de la Société Allemande de Pédiatrie and Commission de Nutrition de la Société Suisse de Pédiatrie 2006). Against this backdrop, feeding soy formula to her daughter made Emilie "panic." At first, it was ok, and then, I panicked. My midwife had told me stories about the risks associated with soy, and everybody tells you such stories, so I panicked. [. . .] For two or three months I didn't want to give her any soy anymore, I was freaking out, so we gave her goat's milk, I don't know, just because I didn't want to give her cow's milk. (Emilie,29,two children) Goat's milk formula, although not vegan, was seen as a second-best solution to Emilie. Eventually, Emilie's husband, who is not entirely vegan, convinced her to return to soy-based formula as a matter of "coherence" with Emilie's values. For a few months though, concerns over her child's health made Emilie compromise with her vegan ethic.
Sophie, an otherwise strict vegan, confessed she would make her fellow vegan activists "scream" if they knew she was in favor of animal testing for vaccines (the interviews took place during the COVID-19 pandemic when vaccine development regularly made the news).
For such essential things as health, I think it is important to keep raising some animals, to understand things. (Sophie,39,four children) Occasionally, it was environmental concerns, not animal welfare, in conflict with children's interests. Livia, for example, tries to balance her son's food preferences with environmental concerns.
Concerning avocados, I am aware it would be better to avoid consuming them because it harms the environment, but my son loves bananas and avocados, so we buy some for him. (Livia,32,one child) Livia chooses to please her son by buying exotic fruits that are mostly grown outside of Europe, despite the ecological consequences.
In these dilemmas, parents' choices are ultimately guided by factors such as "[feet] support," "risks associated with soy," "health" or "love" for a particular food. In each case, the motivation to make a choice centers on humans and (regretfully) endorses some level of animal or environmental harm (with the exception of Emily's decision to return to soy formula). In recalling these dilemmas, parents often shared that they felt at odds with vegan movements because they made exceptions to the avoidance of animal products. Although most identified as "vegans" (except for Iris and Dalia who preferred the term "plantbased"), they felt they had a "more flexible" approach to veganism than other vegans they knew. Vegan parents perform a constant balancing act between the interests of children, animals, and the environment.

Conclusion
In many ways, children are linked to imaginaries of our collective future. Especially in times of multiple, intersecting crises (climate, economic, health, social), "the child" is the vector of hopes and fears for the future of the planet. Calls to address the climate crisis are often framed as a responsibility to "our children;" and political discourses frequently refer to future generations as an impetus to advance one model of society or another (Sheldon 2016, Rosen andSuissa 2020). Parents are positioned as responsible for implementing social changes (e.g., raising eco-conscious citizens). Childcare practices and imaginaries are therefore a window on fears and hopes about the future. In the face of current overlapping crises, this suggests that anthropologists should further engage with how people seek alternative ways of raising children through what could be called "sustainable reproduction" modes, further widening the scope of scholarship on families, reproduction, and the environment (Dow 2016a, Jamieson 2016, Phoenix et al. 2017, MacKendrick 2018. I set out to understand how vegan parenting redefines childcare in a context in which parenting is expected to focus on children and their individual health. Vegan parents' multispecies ethic complicates the model of intensive parenting as child-and health-centered. Their focus shifts away from their individual children to encompass a more holistic notion of a "good future" and livable life for all beings. Some even put their children in emotional distress to make them aware of injustices suffered by animals. They are doing so in an attempt to act in the present to make the future more livable. This is interesting in two ways. First, this reveals how ideas about childcare can (partially) reshape the notion of health in a context like Switzerland, where biomedical definitions of health dominate. Vegan parents re-claim their own notion of what constitutes a "healthy" diet against medical experts' opinions and resituate human health as part of a holistic view of the planet. Second, they reveal how childcare ideals can attempt to disrupt fundamental ideas about the social order. When vegan parents feed and educate their children, they do not just nourish their bodies, they refuse to reproduce the dominant Swiss food culture, hierarchization of species, and farming industry. Thus, looking at alternative modes of childcare is a heuristic tool to destabilize how we frame health and the family.
On the other hand, perhaps more importantly, attention should be drawn to the complexities and the tensions in the practice of sustainable reproduction, and to the stones that are left unturned. Vegan parents I talked to reproduce a typically Euro-American mode of ordering species and differentiating humans from other living beings. They do not radically contest the gender regime. In their reproductive imaginaries, they reproduce gendered stereotypes and a biological definition of motherhood. The parallels drawn between cows and human mothers are based on a presupposed shared capacity to lactate and assign to human and animal mothers a special nurturing, caring role on the basis of their biology. These parents thus express their multispecies ethic from within a traditional binary gender regime. MacKendrick (2018) argued that concerns for environmental health can result in reinforcing intensive mothering: The failure of governmental bodies to protect children's health from environmental threats (like pesticides in food or bisphenol A in plastic containers) pushes American, middle-class mothers to engage in labor-intensive "precautionary consumption," carefully choosing safe food and products for their children. Similarly, among vegan parents in Switzerland, the maternal subject is constructed as intensively committed to taking care of children as well as animals and the planet. Vegan parents' practical experiences illustrate the challenges of implementing alternative, less anthropocentric childcare practices in an omnivorous and child-centered society, and their potential to solidify gendered social structures. This urges for a careful, critical attention paid to the way sustainable reproduction practices are implemented and which inequalities they may reproduce.