The Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of an American Reform Movement, 1817-1921

Chapter Five: Looks Like Meat, Tastes Like Meat, Smells Like Meat

115 chap ter five Looks Like Meat, Tastes Like Meat, Smells Like Meat ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Protose . . . contains the same nutritive properties as meat, is more digestible, and is an absolutely pure product of the vegetable kingdom. —Advertisement for Protose, June 1900 Beginning in the 1880s, vegetarians around the United States eagerly examined their mail, anticipating receiving their new catalog from the Battle Creek Sanitarium Health Food Company. Health reformers were anxious to see what new meat substitutes were available from the country’s center of healthy living. John Harvey (J. H.) Kellogg and his Battle Creek Sanitarium made their products available via mail order, promising foods that preserved “permanent good health” and restored consumers’ “well being.” The right food choices, vegetarians were told, ensured healthy, productive lives. Thanks to the company’s mail-order catalog it was possible to “have in your own home the same foods used in the Battle Creek System.” Consumers were reassured that the foods were the product of extensive scientific experimentation in the San’s kitchen, maximizing both flavor and nutrition. Vegetarians were also promised a variety of products that looked, smelled and tasted like meat. Vegetarian cuisine was changing, and with it came increasing acceptance of the movement in mainstream culture.1 With the introduction of meat substitutes—vegetarian products purported to have similar qualities as meat—movement vegetarianism shifted in the 1880s. Through the later years of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, movement vegetarianism became intertwined with the marketing and proliferation of vegetarian products to both adherents of the movement and outside audiences. As a result, the movement pushed away from its politicized past and toward a more socially acceptable future driven by individual improvement through scientific cookery and product 116 :: Looks Like Meat consumption. The roots of this shift for movement vegetarianism began in the immediate postbellum years. At the start of the Civil War, movement vegetarianism remained primarily a northeastern phenomenon led and followed by New Englanders, New Yorkers, and Philadelphians. During these years vegetarianism aligned itself with a vital, constantly evolving reform spirit that infused itself in the urban centers of Yankee life. But the Civil War period threw vegetarianism into a period of flux, and the movement redefined itself in the face of the more pressing social issues of warfare and abolition. The years following the war were still marked by dramatic economic and social transformation. These same agents of change geographically and ideologically reoriented movement vegetarianism in the United States. After the Civil War, many of the reformist notions that had established themselves in the East spread westward, following the trail of migrants motivated by the postwar industrial and economic boom that encouraged the continued expansion of U. S. territory. These eastern migrants were buoyed by the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, promising land grants of 160 acres in exchange for the cultivation of “unused” land in the western territories . Indian removal policies of the 1840s and 1850s ensured that migrant farmers would meet little resistance in settling their newly granted land possessions. The arrival of the transcontinental railroad created economic boomtowns supported by an interconnected transportation system that linked the region with economic interests on the East Coast.2 As migrants spread into the Upper Midwest following the Civil War, so did the ideas, cultural norms, and practices that had proliferated in the Northeast.3 Reformers had already spread into the Upper Midwest in the era leading to the Civil War; the postbellum years, however, were marked by increased migrations from the East. The population of Illinois grew from just over 850,000 in 1850 to more than 2.5 million in 1870. Indiana’s increased from about 988,000 to more than 1.6 million during the same twenty-year period. In Michigan, where vegetarianism established a strong foothold, the population grew from just over 397,000 in 1850 to more than 1.1 million people in 1870.4 Vegetarianism followed this general western migratory pattern of cultural and ideological infusion. Some vegetarians, of course, already resided in the “old Northwest” and were connected to the activities of the American Vegetarian Society during the 1850s. In addition, the appearance of vegetarians in Kansas in the prewar years further spread vegetarian ideals and practices westward. Nonetheless, vegetarians largely depended on East Coast Looks Like Meat :: 117 activities for a sense of community. In the years following reunion, the Midwest—and the city of...