The Mindful Carnivore (4 page)

Eastern and Western traditions of vegetarianism intersected in the seventeenth century, when European travelers returning from India brought back tales of a peaceable society where animals were treated with kindness, not eaten. As historian Tristram Stuart illustrates in his book
The Bloodless Revolution
, Europe had already begun grappling with the religious and moral implications of meat eating, and the introduction of Hindu philosophy had an enormous impact.

Here in North America, vegetarianism began to take root in 1817 when forty-one followers of the Bible Christian Church sailed from Liverpool, England, to Philadelphia. Before then, isolated groups—including some Quakers—had avoided meat. But, as historian Adam Shprintzen documented in his dissertation research, it was the Bible Christians, drawn across the Atlantic by the promise of civil and religious freedom, who sparked American vegetarianism as a movement.

Settling in Philadelphia—the Quaker-founded City of Brotherly Love—the Bible Christians began spreading their gospel. The Good Book, they argued, called for abstinence from flesh foods. Meat, after all, had not been consumed in the Garden of Eden, and the commandment “Thou shall not kill” could be reasonably applied not just to humans but to animals as well. Like alcohol, which the Bible Christians also condemned, meat was said to be harmful to the human soul, evoking the violence, cruelty, and aggression that led to war and slavery.

In 1830, the Bible Christians’ message struck a chord with Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, who had come to Philadelphia to lecture on the evils of alcohol. Graham believed that physical health was directly related to ethical development, and he soon began to preach about food, claiming that vegetables were humanity’s natural source of sustenance. Though he considered eggs an important part of a balanced diet, he argued that meat-free foods made people healthier in body, sharper in intellect, and more refined in morals.

As Shprintzen notes, Graham was not primarily concerned about animal welfare. If animals were protected as a result of the diet he advocated, that was a secondary benefit. What mattered was that eating flesh was an intense sensory experience that made humans act like “the lower animals.” Overstimulation of any kind—whether from eating spicy foods and meat, imbibing spirits, or seeking sexual pleasure—inspired dangerous primal urges. Successfully capitalizing on the social reform concerns of the day, Graham contended that animalistic behavior was at the root of all evils and that a plant-based diet was vital to alleviating poverty and abolishing slavery.

Overstimulation was also said to make the body susceptible to physical illness, and Graham took advantage of the 1832 cholera epidemic—which killed more than thirty-five hundred New Yorkers in less than two months—to heap blame upon “dietetic intemperance and lewdness,” especially meat eating, and to recruit new converts. Shprintzen points out that there was no lack of meat eating in nineteenth-century America. One cookbook, published in 1824, identified thirteen categories of American foods—seven of them were meat. And Charles Dickens, during a visit to the United States, wrote that “breakfast would have been no breakfast unless the principal dish were a deformed beef-steak … swimming in hot butter.”

Poor diet, Graham argued, was symptomatic of a degenerate, luxury-loving society. Making critiques that still resonate almost two centuries later, he asserted that industrialization had disconnected Americans from natural ways of living and from their food sources, and that whole grains were superior to white bread, which had become convenient and cheap. He advocated cold water and bland foods, including a coarse, all-natural wheat bread that became known as “Graham bread.” Little did he know that, by the early 1900s, his name would be attached to a tasty, sweetened, highly refined product he would have abhorred: the modern Graham cracker.

By 1850, meat-free diets had become intertwined with a growing American interest in holistic, preventative health care. That year, inspired by the recent formation of a vegetarian society in England, U.S. dietary reformers held a convention in New York City and founded their own organization, the American Vegetarian Society. Establishment of the society cemented the term “vegetarian” in the American lexicon. Though the word had been in use for at least a decade, adherents to meatless diets had also been referred to as being “Pythagoreans,” “Grahamites,” or followers of a “natural diet.”

Present-day vegetarians would not, I think, be surprised to learn that such labels were used to ridicule more often than to praise. In 1850,
Scientific American
assailed members of the American Vegetarian Society for having “a good conceit” of themselves, and the
Saturday Evening Post
suggested that the diet would make men “weak and cowardly.” From New York and Massachusetts to Georgia and Ohio, the popular press accused vegetarians of being timid, unnatural, overly sentimental, and bizarrely obsessed with animals.

The newly formed society and its
American Vegetarian and Health Journal
gave dietary reformers the opportunity to articulate the principles and aims of their movement. Vegetarianism, they contended, was healthy, in part because meat was often diseased and overly processed. By eating a plant-based diet, Americans could assure their quality of life, wresting control back from industrialized food producers. Because meat was expensive, vegetarianism assured stronger personal finances. And it assured economic equity: “Were there no hogs,” argued an 1853 article criticizing the Kentucky swine industry, “there would be a large surplus [of corn] for bread, the price would be greatly reduced, and the staff of life within the reach of all, however poor.”

Though the religiosity of Graham’s message had been set aside and bland foods were no longer championed—the society’s convention banquets offered both savories and sweets—American vegetarianism remained committed to moral reform. At its core, Shprintzen argues, was “an unwavering moral principle that equated violence against animals with a cruel and aggressive society … driven by lust, rage and desire.” Its proponents believed that vegetarianism was “a radical reform … laying, as it evidently does, the ‘axe at the root of the tree.’” It naturally resulted in peaceful relations among humans. It would lead to women’s suffrage and gender equality. It would hasten the end of slavery. The diet was, in short, the way to achieve all positive social change.

In the end, Shprintzen contends, this universal claim undermined vegetarianism’s effectiveness. There were, after all, plenty of other movements and organizations to join, each specifically dedicated to causes such as suffrage and abolition. And as slavery drew more and more attention among social reformers, vegetarianism became unnecessary as a central organizing principle. By 1854, the American Vegetarian Society and its journal were already dissolving.

As a social reform movement, vegetarianism was dead. As a diet, however, its life had only just begun.

After the Civil War, vegetarianism was linked primarily to health and fitness and was promoted by a growing number of health institutes focused on naturopathy and preventative medicine. Foremost among these was Michigan’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, founded by Seventh-day Adventist leader Ellen White. In keeping with a vision White claimed to have had in 1863—instructing Adventists to abstain from meat, tobacco, and alcohol—the sanitarium promoted meat-free living as a path to physical health and vigor. Under the direction of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the institute expanded rapidly, drawing guests from across the nation and inventing an assortment of new health foods, including nut butters, meat substitutes, and a cereal dubbed “granola.”

In 1898, John Kellogg and his younger brother, Will, began producing these foods for mail order. By purchasing such products, Shprintzen argues, vegetarians continued to move away from social reform and toward “a fascination with the possibilities of personal empowerment through consumption.” Eight years later, Will Kellogg struck out on his own to start the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which would, of course, become Kellogg’s, the cereal giant.

By the 1890s, a new national organization—the Vegetarian Society of America—had emerged. And Chicago had become the new center of American vegetarianism, due in large part to financial support from the city’s elite, who saw the diet as a way of perfecting human health, encouraging progress away from our savage origins, and creating moral, industrious, financially successful citizens.

Simultaneously, as Shprintzen illustrates, America was becoming obsessed with physical fitness, particularly the development of muscular men: rugged, hard-working individualists who could triumph in the new industrial economy. At the center of this trend was the magazine
Physical Culture
. In contrast to earlier vegetarian publications,
Physical Culture
carefully avoided politics and ideology. What it promoted was vigorous masculinity, frequently praising Theodore Roosevelt as a symbol of strength, vitality, and moral character. (The fact that Roosevelt was a meat eater and avid hunter made no difference. Like earlier public voices of American vegetarianism,
Physical Culture
paid little attention to the issue of animal welfare. Though the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had been founded in 1866, the humane movement and vegetarian movement remained almost entirely separate.)

Before long, the Vegetarian Society’s magazine,
The Vegetarian
, caught on to
Physical Culture
’s success in linking diet with an athletic, prosperous lifestyle. Together, the two publications celebrated the physical prowess of vegetarian boxers, swimmers, and baseball players, including legendary pitcher Cy Young. Of particular interest to
The Vegetarian
was the success of the 1907 University of Chicago football team, which trained on a meatless diet. Even the mainstream
Chicago Daily Tribune
reported that the diet made the players strong, agile, and quick thinking, and also made them better sportsmen, who played with a powerful and gentlemanly discipline, far superior to the “leg breaking and ear twisting savagery” of their “beef-fed” opponents.

As the twentieth century progressed, broader societal trends continued to shape the meanings of American vegetarianism. Growing concern for animal welfare and the continued development of ideas about animal rights brought the living sources of meat into sharper focus. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book
Silent Spring
heralded an emergent ecological awareness and set the stage for the publication, nine years later, of Frances Moore Lappé’s landmark
Diet for a Small Planet
, in which Lappé encouraged Americans to reduce their meat consumption, argued for a different nutritional paradigm, and challenged the economic policies underpinning the protein inefficiencies of U.S. agriculture. Vegetarianism was further influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, with its ecological concerns, its rejection of convention, and its interest in Eastern philosophies and religions, including Buddhism.

Though unfamiliar with this history at the age of twenty-five, I had woven my convictions from many of the same threads. Abstaining from meat was part of a natural, healthy lifestyle. It would make me whole, both physically and morally, cultivating compassion in my heart and alleviating the suffering of animals. It would put grain into the bellies of the hungry and rescue the rainforests from destruction.

Vegetarianism—and, soon thereafter, veganism—became more than a mere diet. Though secular, it became a way of life, a statement of values and identity, a coat of arms for the struggle to right all that was wrong with the world. It started out being about food, but soon the beliefs themselves began to sustain me. I felt sure that everyone should be vegetarian.

My zealous certainty should have set off warning bells, but it didn’t. I hadn’t yet figured out that religious fundamentalism isn’t the only dangerous kind.

The best food in the world would, logically, be organic vegetables, as fresh and local as possible. As it happened, I was in luck. Cath had been gardening since she was a girl.

She told me about growing up in the farm country south of Syracuse, New York, about an hour’s drive from the place we had rented near Ithaca. Her father’s father, who’d lived just across the yard in a second farmhouse, had been the family’s head gardener. She spoke of him with such affection: his passion for flowers—the rose bushes by his front door and the mock orange nearby; the bridal veil spireas that hugged the house with their clusters of white, five-petaled blossoms; the big, round bed of phlox, lavender and pink with white eyes, salmon with a dark-pink center—and his strong, steady, limping gait, wooden cane compensating for the old leg injury; as a younger man, he had been dragged by a team of horses.

From the stories she told me, it was easy to picture her as a little girl, sitting on her beloved grandfather’s knee, taking the occasionally proffered cigar. It was easy to picture him, chuckling kindly and patting her head as she coughed and sputtered at the sweet, thick smoke. It was easy to picture them together in the garden, the girl tagging along, her big, brown, earnest eyes taking in all the beauty this man had cultivated, seeing the tenderness with which he handled all the living things in his care.

At the corner of his house, beyond the rose bushes, Grandpa set aside a patch of soil a few feet square as Cath’s first flower garden, all her own. And beyond that, alongside the woodshed attached to Grandpa’s kitchen, towered the six-foot golden glows, topped with the double-daisy bursts she liked to pick and bring home by the fistful to put in vases.

“Why do you pick those weeds?” her mother would ask, disdaining unruliness. Roses were nice to have in the house, but weeds were weeds. Except for her once-an-evening inspection of the beds around the house, picking off a dead leaf or bloom here and there, she steered clear of gardening.

At planting time each spring, Cath and her brothers had been at Grandpa’s beck and call. In the big vegetable plot out back, they would unfurl the bundles that had been stored away over the winter—two sticks in each, with a length of string in between. Cath would go to one side of the garden with a stick in hand, while one of her brothers went to the other side. When everything was lined up the way he wanted it, Grandpa would say so and the sticks would be driven in. Following the string, he would carefully mark out the arrow-straight row, hoe in his right hand, wooden cane in his left. Then he’d point to his thumb to indicate how deep each kind of seed should go:
Here, to this knuckle
.