(USA) It's Easier to Be Green

[Guest guest]

A member of our local vegetarian society mentioned this book at last

Sunday's meeting.

Also, I think that our own Prof. Rynn Berry's professional stature has been

understated.

Note also the references to historical contributions by the Seventh Day

Adventists. msc

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Today's Sunday New York Times

 

April 8, 2001

It's Easier to Be Green

By ERIC ASIMOV

OR too long, vegetarians were regarded as kooks, cranks and moralists by a

nation that found self-definition in hot dogs and hamburgers rather than

carrots and tofu.

 

But now the worm — or rather, the sprout — has turned. Meat eaters are in a

panic over the specter of incurable mad cow disease. They are haunted by

images of infected corpses of cows and sheep, burned in Britain to halt the

spread of foot-and-mouth disease. And " Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of

the All-American Meal, " a muckraking best seller by Eric Schlosser, tells

more than many want to know about all those burgers. Surely it is the

vegetarians' turn to say, " I told you so. "

 

And don't think they won't.

 

" Certainly, among my friends there is a lot of gloating, " said Rynn Berry,

a teacher and historian of vegetarianism, whose books include Famous

Vegetarians and Their Recipes (Pythagorean Press, 1990). " But many are

distressed that more people aren't becoming vegetarian. A friend in England

told me the vegetarian societies aren't capitalizing on the panic as they

should. Vegetarians should be more opportunistic in inducting potential

vegetarians into the movement. "

 

Of course, organized vegetarianism has achieved little among mainstream

carnivores beyond raising their level of resentment. In the popular

imagination, vegetarians historically occupied the middle ground between

the temperance lady and the quack — moralists and crackpots determined to

deprive people of joy. This stereotype evolved in the last 30 years to

include hippies and others whose political, moral or medical consciousness

was formed by the ferment of the 1960's.

 

The image was abetted by the American impulse to equate vegetables with

punishment, or, at least, lack of pleasure — " Eat your vegetables, or no

dessert! " In fact, for generations of children reared on dreary canned

peas, or tasteless heads of iceberg lettuce, eating vegetables was

punishment. But this changed in recent decades as more Americans

experienced the pleasure of eating seasonal, farm-raised vegetables.

Landmark restaurants like Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., focused meals

around gloriously fresh vegetables, and Americans have become more open to

robust cuisines that emphasize vegetables, from Indian to Italian.

 

" We still have a lot of myths about vegetarians that have to be overcome, "

said Joanne Stepaniak, a representative of the North American Vegetarian

Society in Dolgeville, NY " They believe that vegetarians subsist on lettuce

leaves and carrot sticks. But, with more vegetarian cookbooks, restaurants

and TV shows, people are starting to realize that vegetarian meals can not

only be beautiful, but tasty and gourmet. "

 

Still, even if many Americans are feeling new enthusiasm about vegetables,

their attitude toward vegetarians is another matter. For their part, no

matter how secure many vegetarians feel on their moral perch, they are

often skeptical about a bunch of panicky meat eaters who've only recently

pushed away their steaks.

 

" A lot of vegetarians look down their noses at people who give up meat out

of panic or for what they call the wrong reasons, " Mr. Berry said. " But I

say any reason for not eating animals is a good one. "

 

For most vegetarians, the goal is not simply for others to give up red

meat. For some, even giving up all meat isn't enough. They may become

vegans, eating no animal products at all, from milk to honey. " Fruitarians "

and " rawfooders " are yet more strict.

 

Mr. Berry, 46, has been a rawfooder since 1994, after years of veganism.

Eating only raw foods, he says, increased his energy and freed him from

cooking.

 

" I also felt that I was making a small contribution to the planet's

ecological health by not consuming fossil fuels for cooking, " Mr. Berry

explained.

 

Such laudable reasons have done little to win over meat-eaters. Nor have

the examples of famous vegetarians like Paul McCartney and Isaac Bashevis

Singer, to say nothing of Leonardo da Vinci. Even Jesus was a vegetarian,

Mr. Berry says, but not Hitler.

 

Through their history, Americans embraced vegetarianism periodically,

especially in waves of food fears. Many medical professionals in the 19th

century believed meat-eating was unhealthy, said Andrew F. Smith, who

teaches culinary history at the New School for Social Research in New York

City. " There was a medical view of the world that concluded that eating

meats caused disease by transmitting bad humors, " he said. More analogous

to today, he said, was a tuberculosis epidemic in the 1840's in New York

that was linked to milk. It turned out dairy cows, moved to the city to

supply fresh milk, had been fed brewery refuse and other garbage and were

transmitting disease.

 

Regardless of your culinary persuasion, vegetarianism has produced some

undeniable benefits for humanity. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, best known as

the inventor of breakfast cereals, was a vegetarian who insisted all animal

products were bad for the health. But he didn't just scold, he took action.

In answer to those who feared a vegetarian diet would not provide

sufficient protein, he patented a process for making peanut butter. As

generations of parents who pack school lunches for children know, it is the

best fast food of all.

 

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company