Kate Nash: Full of Contradictions But Above All, Real! – Viva!life 91

Kate talks to Viva!’s head of comms, Faye Lewis, about veganism, capitalism and the commodification of morality!

Featured in Viva!life 91/Spring 2025

Kate Nash is a hugely successful British singer-songwriter, actress and activist, renowned for her witty lyrics and genre-defying music. She rose to fame in 2007 with her debut album, Made of Bricks, featuring the hit Foundations, earning her a BRIT Award for Best British Female Artist. Over time, Nash’s sound evolved from indie pop to punk-inspired styles, as witnessed in albums like Girl Talk.

Beyond music, she gained recognition for her role as Rhonda ‘Britannica ’Richardson in the Netflix series GLOW. An advocate for women’s empowerment, Nash champions breaking stereotypes in the entertainment industry – and she’s also a committed vegan and animal rights supporter!

It’s hard not to admire Kate Nash as beneath her catchy tunes and bold lyrics lies a woman constantly challenging the insidious forces of modern life. Her stance on veganism, for example – rooted in something deep and complex: anxiety. We live in a world fraught with uncertainty, the dread of environmental destruction and mass exploitation which can push us into making radical lifestyle changes – like choosing to remove all animal products from our diet. For Nash, veganism isn’t just a diet, it’s an act of defiance against a system that thrives on cruelty and commodification.

“I was vegetarian for about eight years,” Nash tells me, leaning in with the kind of unfiltered honesty that makes her music resonate so deeply. “That was because I had a bunny rabbit called Fluffy and she was connected to my OCD and anxiety issues… I made a deal with the universe: if I do this, then this won’t happen.” Fluffy the bunny unwittingly became a totem of Nash’s fraught relationship with control. The decision to become vegetarian wasn’t just an ethical choice, it was a form of personal exorcism: “I started thinking, ‘if I don’t eat animals, then she’ll be okay.’”

But it didn’t stop there. A pivotal turning point arrived in the shape of the film Okja. For those unfamiliar, Okja is a satirical dystopia about factory farming and a genetically modified super-pig called Okja, destined for slaughter, whose bond with the young girl who raised her sets off a cross-continental rescue mission. It’s a masterpiece of moral ambiguity and capitalism’s grim handshake with consumerism. “I’d avoided all the documentaries about cruelty and mass farming,” Nash says, “then I watched Okja and I guess I was in a vulnerable place. That final scene really struck me… After that, I just thought, ‘I don’t want to be part of this destruction.’” The film ends with Mija and Okja metaphorically disappearing into the sunset back to their tiny Korean farm.

It was easy to trace the thought processes in Nash’s journey from vegetarian to vegan as she continued to peel back layers of her own ethical engagement. “My mum grew up on a farm so I understand farming roots. There’s this idea that once, humans killed animals out of necessity and the animals were sacred. Now it’s just insane cruelty on a massive scale. I didn’t want to participate in that anymore.”

It’s the ethical quandary many of us avoid, even as we devour documentaries and climate reports from the comfort of our sofas. Nash sees veganism as a clean break – not just from eating animals but from a system that commodifies life in every form. “What I like about being vegan is that it’s a very easy way to do something good. It’s like a political statement,” she explains.

“I don’t think where we’ve got to is okay. I think it’s so unethical and cruel and it’s not even food at this point.”

If the way Nash describes meat-eating sounds a bit like the dystopian nightmare of Okja, that’s because, to her, it is. “I can’t always guarantee I’m not participating in cruelty unless I remove myself from it altogether. I don’t live near a farm; I don’t have friends who can hand me eggs from chickens they’ve looked after properly. So I just stepped out.”

And here’s the uncomfortable bit for omnivores, who like to tell themselves that ethics are too complicated to untangle – an argument Nash knows too well. “We’ve mass-produced everything. Carrots originally weren’t even orange, they were purple! Something to do with the Protestants… but basically, it’s all been manipulated, and we’re so far from nature that it’s not just about eating animals anymore, it’s about the entire system of how we’re living.”

She pauses, clearly aware of how deep the rabbit hole of ethical living goes. “I think we’ve pushed capitalism to the max. There are food banks in supermarkets but they throw food away at the end of the day. What are we doing?” It’s not just the absurdity of the system that bothers Nash but the sheer helplessness one feels when trying to rebel against it.

Which brings us to the vegan industrial complex, because yes, that’s a thing now too. “There’s so much positivity around vegan products,” she acknowledges, “but the vegan community needs to be a little more critical. Mass-produced food – whether it’s meat or vegan – isn’t good for us. If you don’t learn to cook from scratch, you’re just buying into another processed-food industry. It feels like capitalism is taking advantage of people being vegan and are just pumping out crap.”

This isn’t the evangelical veganism of your worst nightmares. Nash doesn’t hold herself up as a paragon of perfect morality nor does she judge those who struggle to balance their ethics and appetites.

There’s a note of pragmatism in her voice, a recognition that the systems we live in, whether food or otherwise, are so broken that no one solution will fix everything. Veganism, for Nash, is a form of resistance, a way to practice self-care in a world that values convenience over wellbeing. But it’s also a way to reject a system built on mass cruelty and exploitation.

“We’re in this weird place where even our personalities have been commodified,” she says, her eyes widening. “You’re asked to sell yourself constantly, brand yourself, be an influencer! They’ve tricked us into thinking it’s a game to connect with family and friends. It’s not. It’s a way to make billionaires richer while making us more insecure about who we are.”

And here we return to boundaries – those elusive moral lines in the sand that we set up to protect our sanity. “I’ve always thought personal boundaries with ethics are important and I try to be aware of my privilege, having a platform from which to speak to young people. I became aware of that really early on and it was intense; I wasn’t sure what to do with it.”

Making her feminist zine, Ignorant Youth, was one way of channelling that responsibility, of building a space for conversation without the glare of a stage or the cacophony of social media. “I don’t like that the world expects us to be perfect all the time,” she admits. “It’s bad messaging for young people, this idea that you can never mess up, or you’ll get cancelled. That’s not living.”

Nash is just as critical of vegan culture, which she believes can be too unforgiving. “I don’t like the vegan culture of pressuring people to be perfect. People who make an effort are valuable. It took me a long time to stop eating meat and even after I did, I craved it for ages. The idea that we all have to get it right from day one is ridiculous.”

What emerges from our conversation is that Nash isn’t simply a celebrity who went vegan because it’s trendy nor is she an ideologue who thinks she’s saving the world one salad at a time. She’s an artist who, like so many of us, is grappling with the impossible tension between personal ethics and a world that thrives on exploitation. “There’s a lot of negativity online, and it’s like we’ve regressed into teenagers. I think it’s the way apps are built – they encourage you to behave like you’re 16 forever, constantly branding yourself.”

She reflects on how the lack of thoughtful debate has created a culture of silence and coercive control, particularly among younger generations. “The instinct for me is not to comment online,” she says. “I’ve thought about that – is it good? Is it bad?” For her, meaningful discussions happen offline, in real life. “I get so much more out of an argument in the van with my band or a debate in the pub,” Nash explains. She sees these safe spaces for disagreement as crucial for personal

growth: “You might think about it an hour later and realise, ‘You know what, they were actually right about that.’”

This approach to debate highlights the importance of considering others ’perspectives, whether it’s about lifestyle, ethics, or conditioning by society, something she believes we’re all subjected to from childhood.

In the end, Kate Nash isn’t offering a solution because, let’s face it, there isn’t one. Not a neat, digestible one anyway. She’s just trying, like the rest of us, to live ethically in a world that seems hell-bent on punishing that very impulse. “We can’t be perfect,” she says, almost with a sigh. “But we can try to live with boundaries, with respect for ourselves and the world we live in.”

It’s a messy, human conclusion, much like Nash herself. Far from the pristine, green-washed vision of a perfect vegan utopia, Nash’s version of ethical living is deeply personal, riddled with contradictions and, above all, real.