Vegetarian?

Everybody tells me that vegetarianism is a happening thing. Last year, VEGETARIAN TIMES magazine commissioned a study by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. About 6.7 percent of the adults they telephoned told the pollsters that they are vegetarians, way up from 3.7 percent in 1985. This works out to 12.4 million vegetarians nationwide, an apparent jump of 80 percent. Two-thirds of vegetarians are women. At this rate, I calculate, everybody will be a vegetarian by the year 2024, or at least everyone will say they're a vegetarian by 2024. But then how can over half of them possibly be women? Maybe something is wrong with my calculations.

The problem with the Yankelovich survey is that many people who say they're vegetarian have an extremely eccentric idea of what a vegetarian is. Forty percent of them report that they eat fish or poultry or both every week. Maybe I'm using the wrong dictionary, but it seems to me that somebody that eats chicken at least once a week and claims to be a vegetarian is the very definition of an imposter, a charlatan, a pretender, or a mountebank. The survey also discovered a hitherto-unrecognized category -- the 10 percent of vegetarians who eat red meat at least once a week. I cannot decide whether to call them bovo-vegetarians or psycho-vegetarians.

The survey's results are broadly consistent with recent trends in food consumption. From 1976 to 1990, the average American's consumption of beef dropped from 94.5 pounds a year to 68, but an increase in the consumption of poultry and fish more than made up for it. So the real trend is the rise of chicken, turkey, and cod, and of people who would like to think of themselves as vegetarians. Because vegetarianism is a happening thing.

Amazingly, only 4 percent of today's vegetarians avoid animal products entirely, an inconsequential quarter of a percent of the total American adult population, or a mere five hundred thousand people from coast to coast.

Most Americans go vegetarian for their health, giving "not sure" as their runner-up reason, distantly followed by the environment and animal rights. Vegetarians do have fewer heart attacks, lower blood pressure, and trimmer figures than meat eaters. But as vegetarians tend to lead healthier lives in general, and exercise more than average, a vegetarian diet in itself may not have much advantage over an omnivorous diet low in saturated fat, full of fruits and vegetables, and moderate though not phobic when it comes to meat.

The food press has recently been full of statements like "Eating low on the food chain has tended to be pretty disastrous from the gastronomic point of view -- but not any longer!". The evidence presented is always a photo of an exquisite and sumptuous vegetable feast created by one of the country's top young chefs. They may be lovely to look at, artfully cooked, and sometimes delicious, but you would not survive very long on meals like these, because they rarely contain any protein. For that, you must consume large platefuls of unglamorous legumes and grains.

Strict vegetarians need to be careful in making their nutritional ends meet. Most would suffer deficiencies of vitamin B12, vitamin D, and iron if they did not take vitamin pills or eat fortified foods like Total and Special K cereals. These three common deficiencies are the subject of intense controversy, but pregnant or lactating women, children, and the elderly should be particularly watchful. Early signs that your body is starved for B12 can be dangerously masked (even until irreversible nerve damage occurs) by the plentiful folic acid in vegan diets.

Most vegetarian, whole-food, health-food, and organic restaurants pay much greater attention to their ideology than to their cooking. Their dishes are typically artless, often drawing (promiscuously and sloppily) on real or imagined foreign dishes. American vegetarians eat vegetables because they hate meat. Europeans eat vegetables because they love vegetables. Nearly all the voluntary vegetarians in the world (not those vegetarians from poverty or religious belief) live in America and England. Neither group is known for their skills in the kitchen.

The first thing you notice about a restaurant's menu is how high up the food chain the chef has dared to climb and which foods on the lower rungs he or she has chosen to exclude. All pollo-vegetarian restaurants seem to allow fish (though some pesco-vegetarians avoid shellfish on the grounds that these are scavengers and bottom-dwellers), but some oddly eliminate the ovos from which the pollos came, not to mention the milk that flows like kindness from the pollos' barnyard neighbors. It is common to find ovos where lactos are excluded and vice versa.

Not even every plant food is welcome. Many restaurants do not offer alcohol, whether fermented from barley and hops or grapes. Some do not even let you bring your own. Others eschew the dark, aromatic liquor of the roasted coffee bean, and most banish the purest, whitest forms of sugar and flour. Restaurants following strict Buddhist rules also eliminate onions, scallions, and garlic, which are thought to inflame the passions, while most macrobiotic restaurants flee from members of the nightshade family, such as eggplants and tomatoes. One man's poison is another man's essential amino acid.

And then suddenly I thought, in a flash of blinding insight: Wait a minute! Is this what I have been reduced to? What in the world am I doing, standing in my own kitchen, mixing up packets of microwavable, artificial Tex-Mex convenience food? Is this what being a strict vegetarian boils down to? And in large part, I'm afraid the answer is yes. Only as a vegan would I have been able to stomach more than 30 percent of what I have eaten in the past month.

I have come to the conclusion that Mother Nature never wanted us to become strict and unyielding vegetarians. There is nothing natural about it at all. Visit any vegan, and you will find his cabinet of vitamin supplements at least as well-stocked as his larder. The truth is that humans were designed to be omnivores, complete with all-purpose dentition and digestive systems. Vegetarianism is not our national diet. Anthropologists know that for most of the past million years of our evolution, humans have eaten meat, especially fish and low-fat wild game. The only source of plant protein that does not require cooking to become digestible is, I think, nuts. But cooking was invented only fifty thousand years ago, long after most of our physiology and genetic structure had evolved. I cannot think of a traditional, nonindustrial culture (we used to call them primitive cultures) that practices vegetarianism if it can help it. Vegetarianism is always the product of scarcity, of religion, or of ideology, including nutritional fads and fashions.

The environmental arguments against meat are strong, but they apply mainly to factory farming -- vast numbers of animals kept in close confinement, fed with grain and water hauled from long distances and producing more waste than we can possibly use as fertilizer or fuel. But unless you insist that we must all eat in the most economical manner possible -- though few of us dress in the cheapest way or live in the smallest possible space -- these are arguments not for avoiding all meat but for eating less meat and raising it in a sustainable way. Universal vegetarianism would not be an unmixed blessing for the environment. Ecological nutritionist Joan Gussow explained that for millennia livestock has been indispensable for its magical ability to convert agricultural waste, failed crops, and the vegetation on unfarmable land into high-quality protein. And without grazing animals, it would be difficult to practice environmentally sound crop rotation. Cutting your meat consumption by 50 or 75 percent makes more environmental sense than becoming a vegan.