Fair-Weather Vegetarians (1856)

AUTHOR: Alcott, William Andrus

KEYWORDS: food and diet, morality

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In this article Alcott accuses many fellow vegetarians of being mere fair-weather vegetarians. For Alcott, vegetarianism is a principled or ethical position. There are “fair-weather church goers” and, even worse, “fair-weather Christians,” some of which, Alcott says, go so far as to attend “a bear dance […] or to witness almost any of the thousand and one performances of Jim Crow.” Similarly, “[t]he world of vegetarianism ... abounds with fair-weather folks.” Alcott likens half-hearted vegetarians by analogy to  people who enjoy as entertainment the torture of animals or racist and demeaning minstrel depictions of African Americans. This type of fair-weather vegetarian, flaunts their vegetarianism in public, particularly “at vegetarian dinners.” But things are different “far from home, among strangers.” Alcott does not accept excuses on account of the difficulty of procuring vegetarian food during travel, for while he acknowledges the difficulty, he does not think it is “insurmountable.” Quite the contrary: “How seldom it happens,” he writes, “that we cannot find at table good bread, or good potatoes, or plain rice, or peas, or beans, or fruit! Bread, at least, of some sort, or potatoes, in the progress of the day, almost always” (30). So the difficulty has nothing to do with finding the right kind of food but everything with fair-weather vegetarianism. Such people “have not made their vegetarianism a matter of principle,” by which Alcott means a “deep religious principle,” because vegetarianism for him is a deeply religious and moral issue. Alcott adds: “He who has not learned to live on plain bread, or plain fruit, or plain anything which he chooses to live on, i. e. which he thinks is right, is not yet more than half a convert to vegetarianism.” Part of the problem is that “[w]e eat for mere gratification far too much, and from principle far too little.” Conversely, “it is easy enough everywhere to eat right, if we have principle” (31).

Last updated on May 17th, 2024

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