{"id":21128,"date":"2024-07-16T03:25:45","date_gmt":"2024-07-16T03:25:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/?p=21128"},"modified":"2024-07-16T03:25:45","modified_gmt":"2024-07-16T03:25:45","slug":"the-western-legacy-a-hundred-years-of-mocking-vegetarians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2024\/07\/16\/the-western-legacy-a-hundred-years-of-mocking-vegetarians\/","title":{"rendered":"The Western Legacy: A Hundred Years of Mocking Vegetarians"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

UNITED STATES, July 11, 2024 (The Atlantic): Anthony Bourdain was beloved for his openness to new experiences, for his willingness to eat anything\u2014brains; shark; cobra heart, still beating\u2014with anyone. But he did reserve one bias: The man hated vegetarians. \u201cSerious cooks regard these members of the dining public\u2014and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans\u2014as enemies of everything that\u2019s good and decent in the human spirit,\u201d he wrote in The New Yorker <\/em>in 1999. \u201cTo live life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2014one that is selfless, and also fundamentally personal\u2014vegetarianism tends to drive people pretty bonkers. A 2015 paper found that vegetarians (and vegans) are viewed as negatively or more negatively than \u201cseveral commonly stigmatized groups.\u201d 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\u2014if niche\u2014since the Renaissance.

More of this entertaining article at source.
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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