The Half-Crazed, Sour-Visaged Infidels, or Why Vegetarianism Failed in the Past
Over two thousand years ago, there was a man who could walk on water and heal the sick. He was a man of inner serenity and great wisdom; he was even said to have died and then reincarnated. His name was Pythagoras. Kids today learn about Pythagoras in school because of his theorem on right-angled triangles: you may still recall the equation a2 + b2 = c2. Pythagoras was also the first to suggest that Earth is round and that the light of the moon is reflected. But there was more to his life’s work than math and astronomy—although walking on water was likely not among his real achievements, just the stuff of legends.
People said Pythagoras looked striking: He was very tall and handsome. “God-like,” some said. There was even a rumor that he was actually the son of Apollo and the grandson of Zeus himself. What also made him stand out was the way he dressed: he wore white robes and pants, an unusual style, since practically no one in Greece of the sixth century BCE dressed in trousers. Yet his looks and his choice of fashion were not the reason why he became something of an outsider and a laughingstock for many comedy writers. The reason—or at least one of them—was his diet.
If you lived in Paris circa 1650 or in London in the 1830s, and you decided to stop eating meat, you wouldn’t tell your friends you were going vegetarian. You would probably tell them you were going Pythagorean. Until the word vegetarian got coined in the nineteenth century, it was Pythagoras’s name that was used to describe a diet that excluded animal flesh.
Pythagoras believed in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. In one lifetime you could be born a human, but in your next you could well end up as a pig and get slaughtered for bacon. According to one story, Pythagoras once stopped a man beating a dog because he was convinced that in the yelps of the animal he recognized the voice of a dead friend. If souls did truly migrate from humans to animals, how could anyone ever touch meat? What if the steak on your plate was made of your great-grandmother? To avoid such risks, Pythagoras and his disciples lived on a simple diet of bread, honey, and vegetables, a diet he also believed to be healthier than a meat-based one (as modern science shows, he was probably right). For Pythagoras, as for most vegetarians until quite recently, going off meat had little to do with animal welfare. It was not about them, the other creatures. It was all about us, humans, and how being cruel impacts our psyche.
As smart as he was, Pythagoras didn’t come up with his dietary ideas all by himself. He was quite likely influenced by the priests of ancient Egypt, where the concept of voluntary rejection of meat was already known five thousand years ago. There might also have been some exchange of thoughts between Pythagoras and his famed contemporaries: Buddha and Mahavira (the reformer of Jainism). It appears as too much of a coincidence that the lives of these three great philosophers overlapped and that their teachings were so in tune. But even though they all believed in the transmigration of souls and preached abstention from animal flesh, Buddha and Mahavira managed to change Asia, while Pythagoras and his students remained the subjects of ridicule.
So why has meat eating endured in Greece? Did vegetarianism fail there because Pythagoras was not associated with a religion like Buddhism or Jainism? Maybe. It also likely failed because in ancient Greece meat was usually consumed at public festivals that cemented the society and saying no to sacrificial flesh made Pythagoreans outcasts: to reject meat was to reject the whole system of the polis. Meat eating also likely endured in Greece because there was no powerful vegetarian emperor there who would support the meatless movement the way India’s famed ruler, Asoka, supported the teachings of Buddha. What’s more, in the times of Pythagoras, meat was prized in Greece as the food to fuel Herculean muscles and boost the performance of beloved athletes—some of whom were quite carnivorous. The wrestler Milo of Croton, for example, was famed for consuming as much as twenty pounds of meat per day. The ancient Greeks, just like Paul Rozin’s students at the University of Pennsylvania, believed that “you are what you eat.” They thought that consuming the flesh of a nightingale was a recipe for insomnia and would likely conclude that eating boars would make an athlete strong. But what was probably of particular importance to the Greeks’ ongoing love affair with meat was that the vegetarian foods of the ancient Mediterranean were not as tempting to the senses as those served in India, with all their spices, vegetables, and fruits. Followers of Pythagoras were known to subsist on little but bread, water, and a dash of wine, while in India vegetables stewed with spices were served on scented rice, followed by dishes of flavored curd, saffron caramel, and sweet cakes with pomegranates and mangoes.
Despite Pythagoras’s teachings, meat eating prevailed in Greece, and for the rest of antiquity, vegetarianism in Europe was but an elitist philosophy, a domain of outsiders. In the Rome of gladiators, vegetarianism was for radicals, for people who rejected the status quo. If you wanted to stay out of trouble, it was better to hide your veggie ideology behind a slab of meat on your plate. That’s what Seneca did, and the poet Ovid. Just to be safe.
Meanwhile, in the southeast corner of the Mediterranean, another seed of vegetarian ideology started to take root. Had it succeeded, our Western food culture might have been quite different than it is now.
It’s only April when I’m standing on top of Mount Nebo, a 2,680-foot mountain in central Jordan, but the air is so piercingly hot I can practically feel my skin turning into parchment. All I can see around me are barren, brownish hills with just a smudge of vegetation here and there. I was hoping for great views, but I’m not lucky: the air is not clear enough for me to spot anything past the calm mirror of the Dead Sea below, shimmering on the horizon. But when Moses stood at this same spot thousands of years earlier, ahead of him was a perfect panorama of the Valley of Jericho—the Promised Land he admired from this point for the very first time. What he also saw, and I could have seen if it wasn’t for the weather, was a site where humanity’s relationship with meat could have changed profoundly: Qumran. It was called the City of Salt back in biblical times, but it doesn’t look like much anymore: just a sand-swept archaeological site, little more than ruins in shades of tan. Yet back in its heyday, sometime between the second half of the second century BCE and 68 CE, Qumran was a vibrant settlement that had several ritual baths, a library, a communal center, and a sophisticated water system. According to some biblical researchers, it was also the place from which a vegetarian version of Christianity was readying to spread around the world.
For those who believe in the Bible’s Old Testament, the history of vegetarianism is quite straightforward. It doesn’t begin in ancient Egypt or in Pythagorean Greece but right at the birth of humankind. After all, it was in the Garden of Eden, among many trees “pleasing to the eye,” that the world’s two very first vegetarians lived—Adam and Eve.
If ever one book and one movement could have unhooked the Western world from meat, it was the Bible and Christianity. As it was, both did the exact opposite and cemented our meat-eating ways for good. The Bible itself is either pro-veg or pro-meat, depending on whom you ask. Both sides seem to agree, though, that at first the world according to the Old Testament was indeed vegetarian, as suggested by the famed Genesis quote: “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” Meat eating came later, after the flood, as a kind of concession from God to his naughty kids: OK, OK, there you go, if you really want, you can eat meat. Or in the actual words of the Bible: “Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.” It’s a permission granted to humans living in the fallen world of sin, in an imperfect world—and that is why some philosophers interpret it as proof that, for the God of the Old Testament, vegetarianism is the right way to go and meat eating is just a temporary solution until people will again be ready for the purer state of meatlessness. In past centuries, such an interpretation of the Bible’s message caused scores of people to be burned at the stake. But the history of Christianity could have developed differently, and instead of fighting vegetarianism, the Christian religion could have embraced it.
In the spring of 1947, in the desert close to Mount Nebo, a few young Bedouin shepherds were looking for their stray goat when they came across a hidden cave. Inside, they discovered a real treasure: several jars filled with fragile pieces of parchment and papyrus. What the shepherds stumbled upon were the remains of Qumran.
Some of the ancient scrolls found in the Qumran caves tell stories from the times of Jesus that didn’t make it into the canon of scripture. And if the biblical scholar Robert Eisenman has it right, a few of those stories may shed a new light on the history of vegetarianism. According to Eisenman, the Qumran scrolls suggest that James the Just, known also as “the brother of Jesus” (possibly a biological one), strictly abstained from meat and was the leader of a vegetarian church community in Qumran and Jerusalem. Both Christianity and our diets would likely be different today if the followers of James and not the followers of Paul the Apostle had won the leadership of the early church. James’s disciples claimed that Jesus was not a god, while those of Paul the Apostle believed in Christ’s divinity and worshipped him. That, of course, was a major bone of contention and was among the reasons why Paul treated James as an archrival and fought him every way he could. Meat eating became another disputed point between the two (to Paul vegetarianism was simply a “weakness”). It was Paul and his followers who won the conflict between the early church sects, and Paul’s ideas, including those about eating meat, prevailed. In 68 CE when the Roman army went to quench the Great Revolt of the Jews in Jerusalem, they destroyed the Qumran settlement for supporting the rebels. It was game over for the vegetarian sect. With time, James got written out of the Christian dogma, marginalized, and forgotten—and so did his vegetarian ideas. Yet it’s possible to envision a world in which it’s not Paul the Apostle who manages to secure the biggest following but James the Just, a world in which Christianity, instead of embracing meat eating, forbids it. But that is not how history played out, of course.
Instead, meat eating became an important part of Christian orthodoxy, and vegetarianism a sign of heresy, to the point that a pale face was thought to indicate a flesh-abstaining apostate. Since so many of the heretical sects in medieval Europe preached plant-only diets, consuming animal flesh was seen as a sign of piety. In a way, the vegetarian ideas of the orthodox church’s enemies fixed the followers of the church even firmer in their meat-eating ways. In order to separate the “correct” church from the dissidents, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 went so far as to declare that during communion believers were consuming the actual flesh of Christ, and not just a wafer-shaped symbol of it. A Catholic communion became a way to oppose heretical sects and vegetarianism itself. Today, someone who is a strict vegetarian and also a strict Catholic is put between a rock and a hard place at Sunday mass: eat the host and break your vegetarian beliefs (it’s meat, after all), or decline it and stand against religion.
Meanwhile, back in the Middle Ages, refusing to eat meat may have gotten a vegetarian in real trouble. In the fourth century CE, Timothy, patriarch of Alexandria, conducted tests among the clergy: those who wouldn’t swallow animal flesh were suspected to be heretical Manicheans (known also as vegetarian demon worshippers). In France, hundreds of Cathars were burnt at the stake for believing that meat was a product of the devil. The same thing happened to the vegetarian Bogomils in Istanbul. Of course, both these groups didn’t die solely because of their refusal to indulge in meat. Abstaining from animal flesh was just a sign that their religion and politics were on the wrong side. The Bogomils were a thorn in the side of the Byzantine rulers because they preached the liberation of the Slavs. The Cathars died because they were caught up in the war between northern and southern France.
It was bad for vegetarianism that it got attached to politics and religion and, what’s worse, to the weaker, losing camps. On the flip side, during the Middle Ages the masses would not have followed a vegetarian ideology without it being strongly backed by religion. In medieval Europe, if you had a chance to eat meat, you’d be a fool to refuse it. There was rarely any food to waste, particularly food so nutritious and calorie dense as meat. Europe wasn’t India, with its abundance of beans and lentils, which are great meat substitutes. A vegetarian religion, either vegetarian Christianity à la James the Just or based on one of the so-called heresies, could have made eating meat sinful, morally aversive, and this might have been enough to keep starved peasants away from animal flesh. As it was, meat eating endured because those who encouraged it proved more powerful.
Yet mighty enemies likely weren’t the sole reason why vegetarianism didn’t catch on in the Middle Ages. The heretical doctrines may have lost some support from the poor by being simply too radical and too ascetic. As Robert Eisenman once told me, the connection between vegetarianism and purity goes back all the way to the community of Qumran. For them, avoiding meat was about “not polluting the Heavenly Host with unclean foods” (in Eisenman’s words). A similar thread comes up later on in Europe. The medieval heretics not only claimed meat eating to be a sin, but they also believed in more far-reaching purity: they preached total sexual abstinence, and they forbade alcohol. In other words, they weren’t much fun. That’s a theme in the history of vegetarianism that reappears over and over. Even in mainstream church doctrine, not eating meat was tantamount to mortification of the body, a bit like wearing a cilice. You did it during official fasts; you did it if you were a monk. Temporary vegetarianism was thought to decrease the flow of semen and control lust. Again: not fun.
Catholics and heretics would probably also agree on another issue: abstaining from meat had little to do with the suffering of animals. Just as for Pythagoras, vegetarianism was about the human soul, not about cows and pigs. God clearly gave animals for humans to rule. Besides, animals were nothing like humans, who were created in the image of God. That’s what St. Francis the meat-eating animal lover believed. That’s what St. Thomas Aquinas believed, too; he even said: “It matters not how man behaves to animals.” And to St. Augustine not killing animals was merely a superstition. This permission to think of animals as inferior, granted by the Bible and ratified by church philosophers, boosted our appetites for meat until the dawn of the industrial era. It took a long time, until the mid-nineteenth century, for humanity to start considering animal suffering as a reason to stop killing them for food.
John Harvey Kellogg was a very short man, barely five feet four inches. He claimed only his legs were short and preferred to receive visitors when seated, but he made up for a small frame with a big ego. He was controlling, imperious, extremely ambitious, and ridiculously hardworking—he often clocked twenty-hour workdays. His goal was to improve the health of Americans by changing their daily habits. He always dressed in white, from head to toe. He believed that clothing should be comfortable and opposed impermeable fabrics, corsets, and high heels. Inspired by contemporary writers who advocated the health benefits of plant-based diets, he gave up meat and went vegetarian. What’s more, he believed animals to be “sentient creatures” who deserved to be treated not as “sticks or stones, . . . but beings” and not killed for food.
Kellogg was a medical doctor and a skilled surgeon, and his training and reputation helped him convert others to vegetarian diets. During one of his popular lectures, he placed a steak under one microscope and a pile of manure under another and, after comparing them, declared that there were more bacteria in the meat. In 1876 he became a superintendent of Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, which he renamed Sanitarium and turned into “the” place to go for the wealthy and famous of the day who wanted to improve their health. At the height of its popularity, the heavy, imposing building of the “San” saw seven thousand guests per year, including Henry Ford, J. C. Penney, Amelia Earhart, and Thomas Edison. The diet offered at Battle Creek Sanitarium was soon made completely vegetarian and, admittedly, rather bland: zero spices, low fat, and low protein. Thankfully, though, products developed under the guidance of Kellogg’s wife, Ella, in the Sanitarium’s test kitchen proved more appealing to the senses: granola, soy milk, and peanut butter, which at the very beginning were destined for patients who couldn’t chew up nuts well (Kellogg claimed proper mastication to be very important for health). Then, of course, there were the cornflakes—flattened and baked maize kernels that became such a tremendous success.
With his outlandishness, Kellogg fit well with the rest of the vegetarian leaders in the nineteenth-century UK and US. They were a truly colorful bunch: radical, vocal, often naïve, and eccentric. Though they may have failed to turn their fellow Americans and Britons into plant eaters for good, they didn’t fail completely. In a way, they had a great impact on the way we eat and turned the majority of us into part-time vegetarians.
Think about it: What’s the so-called traditional British or American breakfast food? Eggs, bacon, and sausage. In other words—heaps of meat. And yet what do most of us actually eat to start the day? Cereal, PB&J, pastries. Less than 20 percent of Americans have meat for breakfast, and by far the most common morning staple is cold cereal, with peanut butter sandwiches being another big favorite. If you like these foods and eat them often, you should thank nineteenth-century vegetarians and in particular John Harvey Kellogg and his wife, Ella. But the Kelloggs weren’t the only ones who developed vegetarian substitutes that went mainstream. There was another line of products promoted for meatless living that took America by storm: graham bread, graham crackers, and graham flour.
Sylvester Graham wasn’t a doctor. He wasn’t formally trained in medicine, just self-taught. And yet he propagated some radical ideas in health care, such as exercise, fresh air, and frequent baths. The youngest of seventeen children of an elderly minister and a mentally ill woman, Graham was a sickly child who nevertheless grew up to be, as some claim, “the father of American vegetarianism.” Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, the “Prophet of bran bread and pumpkins.” Although Graham didn’t invent whole-grain breads and flours, he did a lot to promote them, believing them to be a healthier option than white, refined products. Graham also believed in the healthiness of plant-based diets and worked hard to popularize them. Just as early vegetarians were called Pythagoreans, in the nineteenth-century US they became known as Grahamites. In 1832 the movement was given an unusual boost: a cholera epidemic. Most Americans believed that to keep from getting sick, one had to eat tons of meat and avoid veggies and fruits as evil incarnate—they were thought to cause disease. Even governments supported such claims: for example, the Board of Health in Washington, DC, advised that potatoes, beets, tomatoes, and onions should be eaten in “moderation.”
And yet, the beet avoiders were still getting sick and dying. Graham, meanwhile, took another stance. Besides advocating baths and fresh air, he told Americans to eat the feared veggies and forget the meat. Since he was a skilled orator, his lectures attracted thousands. And since the meat-based diet wasn’t working against cholera, some people were ready to try the vegetarian one. Many Grahamites claimed they started feeling better on the new regime, and vegetarian ranks started to swell.
The mid-nineteenth century was a pretty good time for vegetarians. Not only were they no longer burned at the stake (which is always a plus) but also the first nonreligious vegetarian organizations were starting to form. This relative boom in the vegetarian movement wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the fact that meat became more easily available across western Europe and the US. More vegetables, cereals, and meat substitutes showed up in stores, too, so it became easier to base your diet on plants. The center of the vegetarian universe moved to Great Britain, a country where the meatless Indian cuisine was well-known, where urbanization put people and their ideas closer together and made them long for nature, where the Protestant religion afforded more freedom to contemplate animal rights than Catholicism ever did, and where Charles Darwin preached that animals and humans were not so different after all.
In 1847, in a simple but stately Northwood Villa in Ramsgate, UK, a group of Pythagoreans set up a meeting. Some had been off meat for as long as thirty-eight years, and yet, as one contemporary journal reported: “They all looked truly patriarchal, healthy, strong, and full of intelligence and love.” They arrived in Ramsgate to form a new organization, the Vegetarian Society, the first of its kind in the world. That day over 150 people committed to a “fruit and farinaceous diet” (farinaceous meaning “rich in starch”). It was also then that the term vegetarian was officially adopted, from the Latin vegetus, which means “one who lives a healthy life.” Soon similar organizations sprouted up in other countries—in 1850 in the US, in 1886 in Australia.
If “fruit and farinaceous” doesn’t sound very appetizing to you, that’s because it wasn’t. Vegetarian food was one of the main reasons why the nineteenth-century vegetarian movement didn’t attract the masses. Simply put, it was bad: bland, overcooked, unseasoned. If you went to a vegetarian restaurant circa 1890 or even 1920, you wouldn’t get “portabella carpaccio with pickled eggplant and caper purée,” a dish currently offered in Vedge, a vegetarian restaurant in Philadelphia. You would get “pale, languorous carrots, fraternized with pecks of weepy boiled beets, and . . . at least a silo full of various greens and grasses,” as one journalist reported. Spices, and even salt, were considered as harmful as alcohol and religiously avoided. Vegetables were often boiled into mushiness—one writer actually recommended that all veggies be so thoroughly cooked as to “prevent any crispness.” Even John Harvey Kellogg subsisted on little but apples, graham crackers, potatoes, and oatmeal gruel. To upper, aristocratic classes, with their taste buds trained on gourmet feasts, vegetarian food must have been impossibly boring. To lower, aspiring classes, it offered nothing to aspire to.
And if bad vegetarian cuisine wasn’t enough to keep people eating meat, the nineteenth-century vegetarian movement scared some potential followers with its asceticism—just as the Pythagorean and the heretical thoughts did before it. Grahamites wanted to fight many evils. Meat was evil. Tobacco was evil. Alcohol was evil. Sex was evil. Graham lectured that sexual intercourse overstimulated the body and made it prone to diseases. Kellogg went even further, calling for female circumcision so that women wouldn’t derive any pleasure from sex. The leaders of the movement gave personal examples of austerity, too. Kellogg slept on the floor with newspapers for a mattress, while William Alcott (an American promoter of vegetarianism) started his days at 4:00 a.m. with a cold-water bath. Meanwhile, Leo Tolstoy (an on-and-off vegetarian) called for the rich to give away their money and land in order to go back to nature. You can guess Grahamites didn’t win many followers with that, either.
The vegetarians didn’t only struggle with the image of being excessively puritanical. They were also often considered too radical, too naïve, or, simply speaking, wacko. They were called “half-crazed,” “sour-visaged,” “infidels,” and “food cranks.” And, admittedly, some of them had pretty unusual ideas. Over one hundred years before the first hippie communes, Amos Bronson Alcott (the father of Little Women’s Louisa May) started a vegan community in New England, which he named Fruitlands. Alcott actually believed that he was planting the seeds for a garden of Eden version 2.0 and that Harvard, Massachusetts, was the promised land. Everyone in Fruitlands wore specially designed tunics and lived on plants grown in the commune’s soil—which, by the way, remained unfertilized, because Alcott claimed manure was too filthy. That proved costly, particularly combined with the inhabitants’ lack of agricultural skills. Once the first winter arrived, Fruitlands went bankrupt: the crops had failed, and there was nothing to eat.
But at least Fruitlands did exist for a couple of months. A vegetarian metropolis in Kansas called Octagon City never really took off. The plans were grand: the city was to be sixteen square miles, with an agricultural college and scientific institute, and to support itself by exporting fruits, graham flour, and graham crackers. Yet before Octagon City managed to start exporting anything, the first settlers were chased away by snakes, outlaws, hostile Indians, and . . . mosquitoes.
Such failing, far-out ideas as Fruitlands and Octagon City would have been reason enough to keep the masses from joining the vegetarian movement. But fate handed the critics of vegetarianism an easy weapon: the premature deaths of several of the movement’s leaders. First, Graham died at the age of fifty-seven. Then William Alcott expired at age sixty. These deaths were followed by those of James Simpson, president of the Vegetarian Society, at age forty-eight, and Anna Kingsford, famed British vegetarian physician, at forty-two. Even though these deaths had little to do with the absence of dietary meat and were the results of tuberculosis, preexisting medical conditions, or poisoning with industrial fumes, the word spread. People started to wonder: maybe vegetarian living wasn’t so healthy after all.
And then came the wars. Despite the nineteenth-century vegetarian movement suffering from some bad press, it was still relatively strong. After all, it did manage to convince many Americans and Britons to remove bacon and sausage from their breakfasts. But the two world wars pushed Western diets firmly back toward meat. To begin with, it’s hard to care for animals when you see so much human suffering around. As one novelist wrote: “These days nobody wept for horses.” Nobody wept for chickens and pigs, either. Besides, if you were an American or a British soldier, you could hardly be a vegetarian. Army rations were heavy on meat, so if you wanted your stomach full, you had little choice but to eat everything up, which most did with pleasure, of course. For the many poor who swelled the military ranks, the newfound abundance of animal protein was a dream come true. They could finally, often for the first time in their lives, eat as much meat as they wanted, meat that for so long had symbolized unreachable power and luxury and that was loaded with umami, fat, and the flavors of the Maillard reaction.
Meanwhile, for American and European civilians, meat was such a rare treat during the wars that it became even more of a status symbol than before. Social psychologists would tell you this was an example of the scarcity principle at work: the less available something is, the more we value it. When a 1940 survey was conducted to find out what Americans craved to eat the most, first place was taken by ham and eggs, followed by prime ribs, chicken, lobster, and baked Virginia ham. No vegetarian dishes made the list.
At the same time, something strange was happening in UK: the numbers of vegetarians-by-choice actually went up during World War II. Did the hardships of war make the British link animal suffering with the human one and inspire them to stop eating meat? Not exactly. What really happened was far more prosaic. In Britain, if you registered as a vegetarian, you were allotted a bigger ration of cheese, much more attractive than the tiny and unreliable meat ration. If you wanted to feed your family, the choice seemed obvious. Yet as soon as pork and beef became available again after the war, all these “vegetarians” were more than happy to sink their knives and forks into meat—probably even more so than before, since the new postwar abundance of meat became a symbol of peace and prosperity.
War scarcity, human suffering that left no place for caring about animals, meat-loaded army rations—that would have been enough to stamp out the vegetarian movement. But it also didn’t help the movement’s PR that Hitler was a vegetarian. Several of the dictator’s biographers wrote about his commitment to a plant-based diet. He was quite a hypochondriac: he mistook stomach cramps for cancer and worried about his muscles trembling. A vegetarian diet was supposed to help preserve his precious health. At the same time, in a move that seems bizarre to many, Hitler outlawed vegetarian societies in the Reich. It wasn’t bizarre at all, though. Not only did the Führer want to set himself apart from the plant-munching weirdos, he also didn’t like the radical, counterculture currents that were part of the vegetarian movement.
As years passed and war scarcities became a distant memory, as new, more scientifically sound studies started showing the benefits of meatless diets, the numbers of vegetarians in the West inched up. Still, just like the Grahamites in the nineteenth century or the Pythagoreans in fifth century BCE, these modern plant eaters were considered outsiders who dared to reject societal norms. As Rags magazine reported in 1971: “To many Americans, vegetarianism represents another weirdo protest of the head generation against mom-and-apple-pie-ism.” But something was different in the ’60s and ’70s: being a weirdo wasn’t so bad anymore. In the era of entertainment media and television, granola-loving hippies were news. They grabbed attention and became a group celebrity. But when the ’70s waned into the ’80s, and consumers tuned their TVs to shows such as Dallas and Dynasty, depicting upscale lifestyles, hippie values lost out to materialism. Whatever symbolized power and strength was good and desirable, whether it was steaks or Patek Philippe watches.
So far Western vegetarians hadn’t managed to unhook humanity from meat—not the hippies, not the Pythagoreans, not the Grahamites. A few reasons for this failure have reappeared, refrain-like, throughout history. They were too radical, these vegetarians, too eager to reject mainstream values. They were too ascetic and puritannical, turning down not only meat but other sensory pleasures as well—sex, alcohol, tobacco. They lacked the support of the mighty of the day. They got mixed up in politics on the wrong side and lost. Maybe the West would have been far more vegetarian if Pythagoras had lived not in democratic Greece but in Rome and had managed to convince a powerful emperor to follow his diet, an emperor who could have done as much to spread of vegetarianism in Europe as Asoka did in India. Maybe the West would be vegetarian if James the brother of Jesus had led Christianity instead of Paul the Apostle and if the Romans hadn’t wiped out the Qumran community for joining the Great Revolt. In the past it was religion that had the power to turn nations to plant-based diets. Vegetarians could not have won by preaching animal rights: there was too much human misery for the masses to care about the suffering of animals.
But maybe vegetarianism was never likely to succeed in Europe for one simple reason: the lack of meat replacements. Europe was no India with its abundance of protein-rich pulses, fatty oilseeds, and spices for flavoring vegetable dishes. For the poor, vegetarianism was hard to follow: when you have little to eat, you don’t say no to a roasted duck. Meanwhile, the elites, who didn’t suffer from the empty-plate syndrome, weren’t eager to sacrifice their culinary pleasures. European plant cooking was mouth-numbingly bland. For those who put good eating on a pedestal, overcooked carrots and wilted greens don’t hold much appeal. This martyrdom of taste buds championed by vegetarians from Pythagoras to Graham might have been a mistake. Maybe if the rich could have eaten gourmet foods without meat, more would have supported the meatless movements. As it was, meat eating prevailed. The long-held symbolism of meat, powered by its scarcity and combined with the umami and fat of its flavor, and with our protein hunger, proved stronger than the arguments of vegetarian philosophers.
You would think that it’s much easier for modern, twenty-first-century vegetarians to convince others to follow their path—but that’s not necessarily the case, either. Not only are there genetic reasons for why some of us find it harder to give up meat and try novel diets (such as a plant-based one), but also basic human psychology often stands in the way of vegetarian arguments—and keeps us hooked on meat.