America Has Never Really Known What to Make of Vegetarians

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Anthony Bourdain was beloved for his openness to new experiences, for his willingness to eat anything—brains; shark; cobra heart, still beating—with anyone. But he did reserve one bias: The man hated vegetarians. “Serious cooks regard these members of the dining public—and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans—as enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit,” he wrote in The New Yorker in 1999. “To live life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous.”

Obviously, not everything about this passage has aged well. For one, cooks of all levels of seriousness are now not just tolerating vegan and vegetarian diets, but venerating them. In 2021, one of the fanciest and Micheliniest restaurants in New York, Eleven Madison Park, excised animal products from its menu. McDonald’s sells burgers made with Beyond Meat; your local diner probably offers meat alternatives too. But even so: Only about four percent of people in this country avoid meat today. And if an American does choose to do so (especially if that American is a he), he is probably used to, if not Bourdain-level animus, at least some questions, provocations, and strange looks.

For a rare lifestyle choice—one that is selfless, and also fundamentally personal—vegetarianism tends to drive people pretty bonkers. A 2015 paper found that vegetarians (and vegans) are viewed as negatively or more negatively than “several commonly stigmatized groups.” They are, in the popular imagination, abstemious killjoys, enemies of pleasure, unhinged animal fanatics, self-righteous cranks; they are evangelists, sentimentalists, snobs, radicals, naifs. Online, you can find long lists of (mostly unfunny) anti-vegetarian jokes, or buy a bumper sticker that says CARNIVORE in the style of the streetwear brand Supreme. Last week, at the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island, I saw someone wearing a T-shirt that said VEGETARIAN: ANCIENT TRIBAL NAME FOR THE VILLAGE IDIOT WHO CAN’T HUNT, FISH, OR FIGHT FIRES.

The merch is new, relatively speaking. But neither vegetarianism nor the suspicion of it is a 21st-century, or even 20th-century, phenomenon. Humans have voluntarily avoided meat for hygienic, ethical, religious, or health reasons since at least as early as 500 B.C.E. The diet has fallen in and out of favor at various points since then, but has been stably present—if niche—since the Renaissance.

The American Vegetarian Society was founded in 1850, and vegetarianism was trendy for much of the 1800s and early 1900s among East Coast abolitionists, spiritualists, suffragettes, transcendentalists, cultural reformers, and intellectuals—the types of people, in fact, who founded this magazine in 1857. And yet, an unsigned Atlantic article from June 1905 begins with a fantastically savage insult: “It would be absurd to deny that among the confirmed Vegetarians there are good men, though meagre. That not all of them are free from the tyranny of chronic indigestion may account for, and perhaps should excuse, some of their dietetic vagaries.” Later, the writer admits that “vegetarians may be, often are, good men; but no one will contend that they are jolly. For steady companionship the redoubtable feeders are to be preferred, — men whom neither roast nor pudding can intimidate.”

In fairness to The Atlantic, the magazine was reflecting the conventional wisdom of its day: Vegetarians have long been met with “criticism, resistance or confusion,” as the librarian Tammy Kiter writes in a blog post for the New-York Historical Society. And in fairness to the essayist, vegetarian food was, at the time, pretty dire. The most popular meatless protein of the day was protose, which got most of its heft from peanut butter. One modern food blogger made it 2010 and had this to say: “I didn’t spit it out, I ate it, but it was not … ‘good.’”

No wonder vegetarians were seen as hair shirts, performatively suffering under what the Atlantic writer Katharine Fullerton Gerould called, in 1912, the “fallacy of ‘plain living and high thinking.’” Vegetarians made—and still make—some people uncomfortable because they encounter abundance and choose something else. They feel like an affront to the status quo, or at least to a very basic impulse: the pursuit of pleasure at any cost. Indeed, the idea that vegetarianism is somehow inhuman arises again and again, as in a 1932 poem by Leander T. Decelles:

To take no life, the thought is sweet;
Yea, let your vegetables grow;
But human beings, alas, must eat.

This perception never totally went away, but it did abate. The food got better. So did the research about the link between diets heavy in animal fats and poor health outcomes. Americans’ understanding of the way our farming systems interact with, and put strain on, the environment became more sophisticated (though it was not until 1997 that the words climate change and meat appeared together in The Atlantic.) In 1971, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet became a national best seller. Four years later, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation, the foundational text for the modern animal-rights movement. By 2009, Max Fisher was publishing a series of vegetarian recipes for The Atlantic. But he was still bracing against the stigma associated with how he had decided to feed himself: “Learning to accept that many people will never accept my lifestyle is just part of living without meat,” he wrote. “In fact, it’s the hardest part.”