“It was a very conscious effort to kind of counterprogram,” he said. “Our whole idea was to present this lifestyle in an aspirational and modern way. We want to present it in a way that looks appealing, as opposed to deprivation-oriented.” Or as Ms. Piatt described it, “There’s no body odor coming off the pages.”

People have adopted veganism for virtuous reasons, but vanity plays an undeniable role as well. It’s not uncommon to hear vegans mooning over “the glow,” an irresistible incandescence that starts to emanate from within after a few weeks or months of eating only plants. (To cite one example: “The Oh She Glows Cookbook.”)

“There are definitely some really nice superficial benefits to the whole thing,” said the popular British blogger Ella Woodward, 24, whose book “Deliciously Ella” chronicles her success in conquering health problems with a plant-oriented (she eschews the V-word) regimen. “My skin is so much cleaner and clearer.”

Vegan cooking itself has gone through a stark transformation, and so has the way it is sold: In some coastal pockets, at least, stern sermons have been replaced by the seductive allure of la dolce vita. Nonvegans are welcomed, not shunned. “The message has changed,” said Kathy Freston, an author and vegan proponent. “And we have moved away from that old dogma.”

Whether practiced by straightedge punk bands crossing the country in a van or animal-rights activists gathering for a rally, the embryonic incarnation of veganism usually came with a touch of puritanical renunciation. Vegan America remained a colorless, flavor-averse realm of microwaved bean burritos and tofu strips layered like paving stones over desiccated pebbles of brown rice, if not the “mashed yeast” choked down by Woody Allen in “Annie Hall.”

“That’s still what people think of when they think of vegan food,” said the musician Moby, 50, who has been a vegan for 28 years. But lately he has been immersed in the writing of chefs like Thomas Keller and Alice Waters as he gears up for the November opening of Little Pine, a vegan restaurant he is opening in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Moby wants it to be, he said, “a wonderful restaurant even when judged by conventional standards.”

Vegan glam is on full display at Crossroads, a restaurant on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, where this month servers grandly hauled to tables a gleaming “seafood tower” that looked like something Orson Welles would order at an Old Hollywood nightclub. Instead of lobster, it had lobster mushrooms; in place of calamari, sustainably harvested hearts of palm. And was that oysters Rockefeller? No, it was an artichoke leaf cradling a shiitake mushroom that had been poached in olive oil and covered with spinach and bread crumbs.