A Hundred Years of Mocking Vegetarians

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. And if an American does choose to do so (especially if that American is a he), he is probably used to, if not Bourdain-level animus, at least some questions, provocations, and strange looks.