What an evolution! When I came to the United States as a graduate student in 1975, to be vegetarian was a crippling handicap. The only food I could eat at the dorm cafeterias (other than breakfast) was salads. There were the occasional tasteless boiled vegetables, meant to accompany the main dish, but to one accustomed to the flavors and seasonings of richly varied Indian cuisine, these were barely edible. (I mean, how much salt and pepper can you sprinkle on a boiled potato to make it into dinner?) When I fled the campus to seek culinary solace in the wider world, all I could find were pizzas and submarine sandwiches. Greater Boston boasted but one Indian restaurant, and as an impecunious student I couldn’t afford to go more than once a semester. At the rare dinner parties I was invited to, the hostesses heaped carrots and peas on my plate–and, if I was lucky, mashed potatoes.
If that wasn’t bad enough, I discovered that most Americans associated vegetarianism with the counterculture, a fad for pot-addled hippies in beads and sandals chanting “om” between crunching on those leaves they weren’t smoking. Merely confessing I was vegetarian meant being seen, at best, as some earnest, otherworldly fringe figure, probably full of dubiously utopian ideas about world peace and the environment. No one believed I didn’t even like animals. I just did not want to chew on their corpses.
I said that once to an American friend, and his eyes popped. Lowering the burger he had been raising to his mouth, he said in a hollow voice, “I never thought of it that way.” He couldn’t finish his lunch that day, and couldn’t face meat for a week. He got over it, to his wife’s relief. But thereafter, when asked why I was vegetarian, I did not mention corpses. “Oh,” I always replied, “I just don’t want to bite into anything which in its natural living state might have bitten me back.”
How things have changed. A way of life once confined to a few rarefied precincts of L.A. has gone mainstream. According to the Vegetarian Times, 7 percent of Americans consider themselves vegetarian–about 18 million people. A 1999 poll by the Vegetarian Resource Group found that 57 percent of the population “sometimes, often or always orders a vegetarian item when eating out.” And since trends are made by the young, it’s striking that 6 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds never eat fish, fowl or meat.
It’s become chic to shun meat. I recently attended a cocktail reception at a posh New York hotel where all the hors d’oeuvres were vegetarian, in honor of the chief guest, singer Paul McCartney. A celebrity-studded “Say No to Veal” dinner at New York’s Plaza Hotel was a sellout on May 20. Organic vegetarian restaurants are, er, sprouting on both coasts. Supermarket shelves are stacked with cans of soup and beans labeled vegetarian. More and more natural-foods companies are being established, and many are being taken over by major corporations, always quick to spot a future business opportunity. It doesn’t hurt that red meat is losing much of its allure these days, what with mad cow, foot-and-mouth and all the rest. The animal-rights group PETA claims 19,000 Americans are switching to a meat-free diet every week.
It also doesn’t hurt, of course, that Americans have become more health conscious than ever. The American Dietetic Association reports that vegetarians “have lower morbidity and mortality rates from several chronic degenerative diseases than do nonvegetarians.” Soybeans not only give you protein, they’re important sources of isoflavones that may help prevent some cancers. Vegetables have always been thought of as being good for you, but what has changed is that they have also become pleasurable to eat. Immigration in recent years has brought to America a wealth of new cuisines, whose aficionados know what to do with veggies. Menus now offer vegetarian options that don’t involve a single steamed Brussels sprout–something only nonvegetarians can imagine a vegetarian wanting to eat.
One hundred and fifty years ago, that American original, Henry David Thoreau, had no doubt that “the human race, in its gradual improvement,” would stop eating meat. McDonald’s has apologized to vegetarians offended by its beef-flavored fries. Maybe the day is not too far off when it will be offering McSoyburgers, even in Peoria. Hold the fries, anyway.
