Mocking Vegetarians?

Cafe Society
1

Here is an Atlantic article (limited gift link) showing how the magazine “mocked vegetarians” for a “hundred years”. The article claims more modern luminaries like Bourdain felt it was treasonous not to eat flesh.

Meat is nutritious and delicious, but the diet you choose is your business. Maybe in the 80s eating a salad was a cause for make mockery. Maybe Seinfeld eschewing mutton made him less of a (meat) lover. There is no doubt eating adequate daily vegetables and fibre is healthy, but most still do not.

But Bourdain’s best buddy was Buddhist. And a better chef than Bourdain. Not every comment is meant to be taken seriously. The 4% of people who are vegetarian are sometimes eager to let you know this fact. But this is often true of other specialty diets, CrossFit or those who no longer subscribe to TV.

But if you are vegetarian, as my sister has been for over thirty years, you may be more likely to agree with the criticisms and it may only be recently that better alternatives were easy to access.

So I’d be interested in your thoughts on the topic, or if you wish, the article.

2

So he mocked people for… eating healthy? (Or making an effort to eat healthy?) Or just not being open enough to “new experiences”?

It’s a lot more than that in most regions, though there are places where it is significantly less. You might have to let people know that fact if you eat at restaurants or other places, same as any other special diet. Once upon a time, requesting a vegetarian soup might have gotten you something “without that much pork in it”, but I like to imagine more people these days are familiar with the concept.

3

I feel like I just opened the 2008 version of the SDMB…
I do remember some mocking back then.

And I heard stories from exchange students who went to live with Eastern European families, and dealt with attitudes like “Since you’re a vegetable-arian, we made your bográcsgulyá with less beef.”

But we just got back from Hungary and Slovenia, where we traveled with a vegetarian couple, and others with allergies.

I was amazed: every restaurant had vegetarian/vegan options, and there were menus with numbers after each dish.
The back of the menu had a key ( 1 = Gluten, 2 = Tree Nuts, 3 = Shellfish… up to 20 ingredients called out!).

4

I think a lot of the mockery, at least in the US, is descended from the public’s disdain for the rather strident efforts of reformers of previous eras to forcefully improve society. Vegetarian diets were linked with folks like Sylvester Graham and John Kellogg who were associated with religious movements and made specious claims about sex and masturbation, and controlling our animal desires. In those days, vegetarian dishes were intentionally made to be insipid and unappealing, because you know, doing things we like is wrong and sinful.

The reformers of those days weren’t always wrong. They were a driving force in ending slavery and also improved sanitation and advanced universal education.

Of course, they also gave us Prohibition, and to be honest, I can see well intentioned people eventually supporting a ban on meat eating. I’m glad I’m likely to be dead by the time it becomes a serious issue.

5

The really weird part is that the stridently religious types today are far more likely to be meat eaters and doing the mocking of vegetarians.

6

Never really heard that about vegetarians – heard it more about vegans. (Unless you’re counting when they have to tell you so they know what they can eat.) However, where I’m at, I don’t find it to be true at all. The vegans I know are respectful about it.

7

I don’t give people a hard time about what they eat. Vegan or vegetarian, what you eat is your business. Except when it isn’t. Food is very often a communal experience and when you have a minority who won’t participate it can cause some social problems. When little Timmy decides he’s a vegetarian, it can complicate things for whomever is making dinner. What do we feed him on meatloaf night? Do we make a spaghetti sauce just for him? It can be difficult finding a place to go out to eat with your friends. Especially in years gone by, not every restaurant had good vegetarian options. For a lot of years, vegetarians had to resign themselves to salads.

8

I have a lot more scorn for the folks who say “Well, chicken is vegetarian, right?” than for the actual vegetarians.

9

If the person saying it is 50+, I kind of get where they are coming from, because “vegetarian” was a pretty murky term back in the 1970s/80s. I knew people who said they were vegetarian when what they meant was “I don’t eat beef or pork.” Those “vegetarians” ate fish and sometimes chicken.

These days I think a definition has been more or less agreed to, but there is still probably some wiggle room. To me, a vegetarian is someone who doesn’t eat animal flesh at all, but will eat eggs, dairy and cheese.

The hazy definitions have moved over to vegans now, I think. Obviously a vegan won’t eat meat, eggs, or cheese. But some avoid gelatin, honey, and even yeast.

10

No, that’s what “vegetarian” meant in the 70s and 80s, too. Some people were just idiots. Which includes some of those folks who called themselves vegetarian while eating chicken.

11

I dated a vegetarian for about 3 months around 1989 or so. When we were together (2-3 nights a week) I ate vegetarian too, and he knew all the good places to go in and around Berkeley, or he cooked at his place. I don’t remember any mocking going on in our vicinity, but then we were hanging out in a lot of vegetarian places and not much of anyplace else. That the relationship didn’t last had nothing to do with the vegetarianism, it had to do with him being a passive-aggressive control freak.

Maybe I’m over-sharing.

12

Gelatin is made from, let’s call them what they are, dead animals.

There are vegetable jellies, agar-agar being the best known, and they are NOT the same.

13

The idea that all vegetarians and vegans are outspoken and in your face about it is obviously absurd. After all, if they weren’t, and they never mentioned their diet to you, how would you know they were vegetarian or vegan? It’s the toupee fallacy. You’ve probably met hundreds of vegetarians or vegans and you don’t even know it, so they don’t count for your representativeness heuristic, but the ones who are outspoken about it get noticed and do fit it. So you conclude that all vegetarians and vegans are in your face and preachy about it.

The vast majority of the reason people attack vegetarians and vegans is simple: they know that the vegetarian or vegan is doing something better for the world than they are, and that makes them uncomfortable. They know on some level what they’re doing is problematic, but they’re in denial about it, and other people who are actually living up to those ideals remind them of their personal moral failure. So they attack them to discredit them in some way.

I’m not going to debate why meat eating is a moral failing. It’s obvious. You’re causing suffering because you like meat. Sure, you’re going to come up with some bullshit hypothetical that has absolutely nothing to do with anything you actually do (but what if an animal lived a perfect life and died painlessly!), the reality of factory farmed meat is torture. We are condemning billions of animals a year to a life of nothing but suffering so we can have a $3 chicken sandwich. Watch a documentary on a CAFO. We would be mortified if someone was torturing our pets, so we understand that animal suffering is bad and we can even empathize with it when we choose to. Those animals absolutely suffer and we do it for our own pleasure. But acknowledging that is hard to swallow. So most people are in denial about it, avoid thinking about it, and attack anyone who makes us think about it.

So when we see someone making the choice that we should be making, it makes us feel bad about ourselves. We get cognitive dissonance. We attempt to resolve this dissonance by discrediting the other person - calling them a hypocrite or saying they’re just getting a thrill for being high and mighty and criticizing meat eaters, whatever. Something that takes them down a moral peg or two so they’re no longer superior to us.

You see the same sort of attacks when, for example, someone tries to live their lives in a more environmentally friendly way. Then suddenly everyone is watching them like a hawk for any sort of tiny wasteful thing they do (like Greta Thurnberg eating something that came in a wrapper). We don’t like that they’re actually doing something that we should all be doing and we aren’t, so we look for reasons to take them down a peg to alleviate our own negative self-evaluation.

And yes, I know there are non-ethical reasons for being a vegetarian/vegan, but you’ll notice that for example if someone is vegetarian for religious reasons they are far less likely to be attacked than someone who is for moral reasons.

And no, I’m not a preachy vegetarian/vegan. I eat more meat than the average person. It’s a moral failing. I’m not in denial about it. And because of that, I would never attack someone for doing the thing that I should be doing.

14

I know that. But vegans who haven’t done their research eat Jello and marshmallows. (So do a lot of Muslims, until informed that pork might have been involved in the manufacturing process.)

ETA: more to the point of the thread, I have no doubt that there are people who mock vegetarians mercilessly and that lifelong vegetarians not infrequently encounter unfair ridicule. But I’ve known tons of vegetarians (not as many vegans) and no one in the circles I travel in gives it a second thought. When I go to potlucks, people usually automatically indicate if the dish they brought is vegetarian/vegan friendly, if it’s not obvious that it isn’t.

15

How is that relevant? Buddhists are not all vegetarian.

16

Eric Ripert, his Buddhist friend eats meat.
According to the internet.

17

No, I for one most definitely do not “know that the vegetarian or vegan is doing something better for the world” than I am. Sure, I know they think otherwise, but they’re wrong. I reject their claims of moral superiority and moral authority, I’m aware that they’ll claim just about anything to try to coerce their dietary choices on me and on the world at large, and that such guilt-tripping is one of the most insidious of their arguments. Well, it’s all bullshit. They have no moral authority over anyone except for what they’re given, there’s no “moral failure” in eating meat except in their minds, and nobody should pay their agenda driven arguments any mind. The underlying mentality of the militantly food-righteous isn’t concern for animals or the environment, it is to control the diets and behavior of other humans, and to make those other humans comply with their will.

Authoritarianism and moralism–being bossy and self-righteous, in plain words–are the worst qualities that humans can embody, and there’s nowhere else that they’re so glaringly evident as in the arguments of diet zealots. Don’t let them manipulate you with their guilt trips and bogus judgments.

18

You are exactly right. I eat meat because I accept my predatory nature, and have a right to be omnivorous according to law, regardless of the morality of the act.

If there were a meat prohibition handed down today, people would be shooting each other in the streets over T-bones. But they shoot each other in the streets over drugs anyway, so maybe that’s a moot point.

Don’t worry fellow predators, no one’s banning meat until they work the bugs out of the lab grown stuff. Afterwards though…

19

I’m totally comfortable laughing at the vegan who refused to drink sangria because there was a bit of honey in it. Honey! For shame!

Eat whatever you want, more fig newtons for me!!

20

What’s their problem with yeast?