by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance
I still had my old tackle box, too. Figuring it might be useful for some other purpose, I kept the box, and also the retractable tape I had used to measure trout before jotting their lengths in my logbook. Most of the rest I tossed out, including a few bedraggled lures and a handful of rusty Eagle Claw hooks in paper-and-plastic sleeves. They smelled of salmon eggs.
My fillet knife I sent to Willie.
Half a decade into being a vegan, I couldn’t have fathomed eating flesh again. And I certainly couldn’t have pictured myself eight years later, plunking my first freshly eviscerated mammal down onto the kitchen counter.
2
Man the Gardener
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.
—Isaiah 65:25
Vegetarians take a lot of ribbing from meat eaters.
Bumper sticker: “Eat low on the food chain. Barbecue a vegetarian.”
Wisecrack: “If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?”
Personally, I didn’t get much flak. My newfound love, Cath, had been a vegetarian longer than I had—ah, domestic harmony. She had never gone as far as veganism, but once we got together she acquiesced to my dietary zeal. Mostly. She never quite gave up the occasional cup of coffee with half-and-half, or cocoa with whipped cream. Nor did I ever quite manage to say no when she offered me a sip. (A sip, I found, is a highly ambiguous measure of volume, especially when the coffee or cocoa is good.)
With only the rare gibe, our families accepted our diets and refrained from subjecting us to nutritional tirades or exasperating questions about protein. And our friends were vegetarians, or meat eaters who understood. They got it.
By and large, though, American meat eaters do not seem to get it.
Once, during a cross-country trip, Cath and I stopped to eat at a truck-stop diner in rural Louisiana. The vegan options were, shall we say, limited. French fries, perhaps, or a little bowl of iceberg lettuce. I asked the waitress if we could get the spaghetti without the meatballs. She looked up from pad and pen, regarding me as though she had just realized I was a green-skinned, three-fingered, bug-eyed alien.
“You don’t want the meat?!?” Her holler was generous, inviting the other patrons to share her incredulity and turn to stare. They obliged.
There’s the constant suggestion—whether made in jest or in earnest, with good humor or with malice—that vegetarians aren’t quite right in the head. That a diet composed of rice, veggies, and tofu must be a notion that was hatched a few decades ago in California, the Land of Fruits and Nuts, inspired by the inhalation of something that filled Flower Children with warm, fuzzy feelings for all beings in the cosmos and also gave them the munchies.
Vegetarianism, however, isn’t some recent, wacky dietary fad. You can find its roots in the ancient East, in the Indian religious traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. All three emphasize teachings on compassion and nonviolence. In varying degrees, major schools of thought within each hold up vegetarianism as an ideal. Eating flesh, these traditions suggest, not only causes unnecessary suffering for animals, but also has a negative karmic impact on us, stunting our spiritual growth.
Mahatma Gandhi, for instance—though he experimented with meat in his youth—spent most of his life as a strict vegetarian in keeping with the ideals of Hinduism. “To my mind,” he wrote in his autobiography, “the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.” I don’t doubt the man for an instant. My powers of imagination fall short in the attempt to picture the past century’s greatest proponent of nonviolence tearing into a lamb shank for lunch.
As British humanitarian Howard Williams documented in his 1883 history of Western vegetarianism, The Ethics of Diet, you can also find its early tendrils in ancient Greece. Today the name Pythagoras is most widely recognized in connection with the geometry of triangles. But in the decades and centuries immediately following his death—about half a millennium before Christ’s birth—he was primarily remembered for his philosophical and religious teachings, including his advocacy of a meat-free diet.
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.
