The Netherlands has about 800,000 vegetarians, meat substitutes are on the rise and even gourmets like Johannes van Dam call themselves 'demi-veg'. However, it took a long time for vegetarianism to become an accepted phenomenon. At the end of the 19th century, the idea of not wanting to eat meat was still downright bizarre:'Just imagine, no bass, no steak, no chickens.'
At the beginning of 1880, the magazine De Amsterdammer a remarkable phenomenon:people who voluntarily did not eat meat. The magazine thought that these vegetarians or, as they were often called then, 'vegetarians', were merely a strange foreign phenomenon, and could not believe it anyway:
"Imagine, no soup, no bass, no steak, no chickens; that as to the more ordinary; but to the gourmet who needs truffled pheasants, pike à la Chambord, oysters, the life of the vegetarian must seem no life. What else will one eat? Flour, semolina, cornstarch, rice, macaroni, and when all this is done, the same flour and puddings begin again. Vegetables don't feed, they say, and without meat they won't do so much work. Cauliflower without sausages, spinach without ham, carrots without beef, pears without veal fricandeau must have served soon.”
The reaction is exemplary for the reception of vegetarianism in the Netherlands in the last quarter of the 19th century. Vegetarianism was unimaginable, ridiculous, and simply thought impossible. 'Vegetables do not feed' was indeed the nutritionist communis opinio . In fact, fruit was no longer considered part of the food domain, but that of stimulants. As late as 1911, the government equated smoking and eating fruit by defending the levy of import duties on 'tobacco, oranges, mandarins, lemons, figs, raisins, currants, etc.', arguing that these were 'stimulants of which the use is not strictly necessary'.
While this ran counter to the vegetarian ideal of a diet consisting of vegetables and fruits, so too did the 19th-century scientific belief that meat was the preeminent human food. Meat would give strength and was therefore not only personally beneficial, but also of national significance. A people that ate a lot of meat was resilient, as the English domination of the rice-eating Hindus proved. Flesh was not only strength, but also civilization and progress.
The remarkable thing about such views was, of course, that large parts of the Dutch population hardly ate meat as a result of their precarious economic position. Moreover, it was those parts of the population that usually performed the heaviest physical labour. According to the prevailing scientific ideas, this was in fact not possible at all, but instead of adjusting it, this usually only led to concerns about the strength of people and state and pleas for more meat. It was only in the 20th century that the medical establishment reluctantly recognized that people could also perform without meat.
The Dutch Vegetarian Association
Anyone who decided to become a vegetarian in the 19th century therefore ran into all sorts of problems. It meant a frontal attack on scientific authority. Choosing vegetarianism was seen as a form of suicide and indecent neglect of civic duties. However, it was especially difficult for all kinds of social and practical reasons. Because The Amsterdammer Of course there was a point:no meat, but what to eat? And then:how to get there? And where? The history of the vegetarian movement therefore consists largely of seeking and organizing solutions for this.
Important for this was the foundation in 1894 of the Nederlandsche Vegetarierenbond, after the English example, where the Vegetarian Society had seen life in 1847 (on which occasion the term 'vegetarianism' was coined). Although of very modest size, at the start he counted less than fifty members, after ten years more than five hundred the union fulfilled a number of crucial functions. First of all, of course, he offered a home to people who occupied a completely isolated position with their eating habits. Bearing in mind the sensitivity of people to peer pressure, known from social psychology, this importance is probably hard to underestimate, not only in the process of becoming a vegetarian, but above all in remaining one.
Secondly, the Vegetarian Union formed a forum for the exchange and dissemination of information. Soon after its founding, the union published a cookbook that would go through many reprints and revisions, from 1897 its own magazine was published and the union also published numerous brochures, it had an intelligence bureau and federation members traveled through the country to give lectures and demonstrations. to give. Furthermore, a vegetarian association offered the opportunity to influence policy that private individuals were unable to do. For example, the union sent requests to prisons to allow inmates to choose a vegetarian meal. This was no superfluous measure, not because so many vegetarians went on the road, but because conscientious objectors were often vegetarians and ended up in jail for their refusal.
More importantly, however, the union encouraged regular restaurants to serve vegetarian dishes. In 1915, for example, cooperation with the ANWB was sought. A year later, 60 restaurants had declared their willingness to serve vegetarians. Since then, that number has steadily increased. In 1932 the counter stood at 462.
Finally, the union was a place where initiatives were taken that could take place outside the union, but which could continue to call on the union in times of need. The most appealing example of this is the rise of vegetarian restaurants. In 1897 board member Marie Jungius suggested that it might be a good idea to have a vegetarian restaurant at the 1898 Exhibition of Women's Labor which she organized. This became the first vegetarian restaurant in the Netherlands, and was established by the association. It then made a new start in 1899 and eventually grew into the hotel-restaurant Pomona, which is renowned in the vegetarian world. In the first decades of the 20th century it stimulated the establishment of a whole series of restaurants, often also called Pomona. Eating vegetarian food outdoors was no longer an insurmountable problem, at least in the big cities.
Raw vegetables and vegetable smoked sausage
In the eating practice, designed by vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants, an emphasis on grains, potatoes, legumes and, most strikingly, on vegetables, fruit and nuts, all of this often supplemented with a little dairy and the occasional egg. They tried to develop other meal forms with different recipes. New types of bread, for example, such as the Allinson bread, which has been for sale in the supermarket for many years now. Or peanut butter and breakfast cereals such as cornflakes and rice crispies:both from one of the most influential American vegetarians of the 1900s, John Harvey Kellogg. Also very widespread is muesli, the brainchild of Kellogg's European counterpart Bircher Benner.
Cooking techniques were also adapted. The introduction of raw vegetables was nothing short of revolutionary. Or else cooking times of vegetables were greatly reduced. In order to be assured of fruit and vegetables all year round, new preservation methods were also useful, such as the invention of "wecken" made popular by the German vegetarian Johann Carl Weck:http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wecken '. And for those who found it difficult mentally to say goodbye to a meal centered around meat, a substitute was sought:fake meat. The best known of these was the 'mock mince', a meat substitute based on legumes, but in the Amsterdam of the 1920s, the Eerste Nederlandsche Fabriek van Plante Delicatessen also developed a 'plant smoked sausage', for example.
The pre-war vegetarian infrastructure was largely wiped out by the Second World War, and idealism was badly damaged. All Pomonas died and after the war, meat became one of the first and most appealing signs of the new prosperity. It would take until the 1970s for a new vegetarian wave to emerge, spurred by the rise of the counterculture of provos, gnomes and hippies, fueled by concerns about the environment, food safety, the world food issue and revelations about the fate of the animals in the world. bio industry. From the alternative subculture, this vegetarianism increasingly became part of the mainstream as a niche market from the 1980s.
'Related creatures'
Viewed in this way, the history of vegetarianism is a history of a fringe movement that has taken its place over time. It's a fun story, because those vegetarians are a colorful group of original, often eccentric figures with often visionary and outlandish ideas and exotic faits et gestes. But you can also look at that history in a different way, which is actually more interesting and challenging. Literature physician Frederik van Eeden is a good starting point to explain this.
In a discussion that arises in 1890 in the literary magazine De Nieuwe Gids in response to In the year 2000, In the renowned utopian novel in which the American writer Edward Bellamy describes the (vegetarian) society of the future, Van Eeden explains:'Around me I see misery suffering from animals and people, beings related to me.' , an emerging sense of 'solidarity of the individual with other beings'. Van Eeden had recently become a vegetarian and animal suffering was an important reason.
In his eating practice, Van Eeden appears to be able to define animals as non-food, as 'related beings' moreover, as beings that are intrinsically important. Van Eeden is not the only one who sees animals with new eyes. At the end of 1884, socialist foreman Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis was asked the pressing question why he only stands up for human interests, while the magazine he publishes is called Recht voor allen. "If you want justice for all, you must also want justice for the most unjustly treated animals," writes freethinker Marie Anderson. Domela finds it difficult to defend herself against this. He broke away from Christianity, which for centuries legitimized the relationship between humans and animals and agitates against the 'anthropocentric megalomania' that the world was created for humans. But with that he has also lost the trusted foundation on the basis of which the interests of humans can automatically be placed above those of other animals.
The animal as a thing
What happened to Domela happened to society as a whole. Christianity lost its self-evidence as the basis of the social structure, making the traditional legitimization of existing human-animal relations problematic. But unlike Domela, who continued to opt for vegetarianism, society replaced the pre-modern Christian story with the modern story of a separation between culture and nature. In this, animals stand outside (human) society, and become things, natural resources that can be exploited at will. And thus, paradoxically, they are an increasingly massive part of human society. So massive that at a certain point their presence can no longer be denied and the separation of culture and nature can no longer be sustained. It is a development that shows itself most dramatically in the rise of industrial livestock farming and the animal disease crises of around the year 2000.
The above-mentioned separation of culture and nature also forms the basis of modern historiography. Historiography is by definition about people, not about animals. At most, they figure as a source of food, clothing or traction, in performances that are never questioned. As independent beings they are written out of history by historians. What makes the history of vegetarianism so interesting is the invitation to take these animals seriously, just like Van Eeden, Anderson and Domela Nieuwenhuis. A history of vegetarianism, of a food pattern, thus becomes above all a history of human-animal relations. Moreover, a history that shows that current historiography is no longer self-evident and has perhaps become downright unbelievable.
Why? Because it is also based on a historical representation of 'man' versus 'the animal' that is increasingly difficult to sustain. In historiography, too, both the great story of religion in which animals are made available to man by God and the modern story in which animals become things have lost their power. If historiography wants to do justice to reality, it will have to take into account the countless beings that inhabit this world together with people.
Dirk-Jan Verdonk obtained his PhD from Utrecht University on The animal-free dish. A vegetarian history of the Netherlands (Amsterdam 2009). He published about animals and vegetarianism in, among others, Trouw, the collection Decent Entertainment and Tijdschrift voor History.