Get a look at the new face of veganism.
The mousy hippie chick who couldn't imagine eating a brown-eyed baby cow any more than she could imagine eating the family pet has grown up.
She's a sexy, sassy babe with a smart-aleck attitude about the food choices you are making.
Fashion has met food, and the work of a couple of escapees from the world of modeling has put veganism on the runway, creating a perceptible bump in the fastest-growing food trend among girls and young women.
Credit for the new look of veganism goes to Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, authors of Skinny Bitch, "a no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and start looking fabulous," and a new companion cookbook, Skinny Bitch in the Kitch.
The cookbook extends the sensational hold veganism - a fringe discipline even on its best day - suddenly has on the popular imagination.
"I think they are fabulous," said Casey Hall, 23, of Baltimore, who stopped eating meat when she was 11 and became a vegan at 18. "I like their cursing and their up-front attitude."
Freedman and Barnouin, whose books have sold more than 850,000 copies, use a combination of girl power and gross-out stories from the barnyard, and it is an approach that resonates in the tender hearts of young girls, who represent the fastest-growing segment of the vegetarian population.
Roughly 1.4 million American children younger than 18 - and 11 percent of girls between 13 and 17 - identify themselves as vegetarians or vegans, according to the American Dietetic Association. That compares to just 7 percent of the adult population.
Not so long ago, you could scratch a vegan and find an anti-establishment punk rocker - angry and in your face.
Freedman and Barnouin make their case much differently: If you eat better, you will look better.
"Now the Skinny Bitches appeal to all these girls who wish they lived in L.A. and wore Juicy Couture pants," said Hall, who teaches yoga and tends bar.
For the true believer, giving up meat, fish and dairy is the right thing to do for the other living things.
Veganism eschews not only the flesh of living things, but the eggs, milk and honey they produce.
Obscure uses of animal byproducts in such processes as bleaching flour and making wine or beer put those things off-limits, too. Also shunned is the wearing of wool, silk, fur, bone, coral, pearls or leather.
