UNITED STATES, July 11, 2024 (The Atlantic): 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.

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, bumper stickers and t-shirts. 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.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/07/america-has-never-really-known-what-to-make-of-vegetarians/678969/?utm_source=msn

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