Thirty years ago, in August of 1996, I gave up eating anything that came from an animal and ceased using products using materials from animals. For this entire month I’ll be celebrating this thirtieth anniversary by blogging about my experiences being vegan for three decades.
Today I’ll talk about what the perception of being/going vegetarian or vegan was like in the late 90s.
We can start by going back to the 1980s, long before I considered this dramatic lifestyle change. The popular stereotype of the vegetarian diet was that it was nothing but bland salads or barren plates consisting of a single unseasoned vegetable. Pop culture largely viewed the vegetarian diet as the most boring thing imaginable.
And the “proper, exciting” thing to eat was a big juicy steak, or a glistening platter of ribs slathered in barbecue sauce, or a hamburger piled high with cheese, or anything else carnivorous. Pop culture did, and still largely does, celebrate the omnivorous diet at the expense of the plant-based one.
I fell victim to that kind of advertising as a kid. I remember making jokes about vegetarians myself, much to my chagrin later in life.
It also didn’t help that no member of my family, from my parents to my grandparents, really knew how to prepare vegetables the way they knew how to prepare meats. So my perception was not only skewed by the stereotypes and jokes of pop culture, it was reinforced at the dinner table by excitingly cooked and spiced meats accompanied by comparatively bland vegetables.
For the first seventeen years of my life, vegetarianism was a joke and the punchline was the bland food of the diet.
Thankfully plant-based cookbooks are available in abundance now, and vegan/vegetarian diets are far more accepted in pop culture (though there’s still a surplus of jokes). Unseasoned vegetables are unheard of in my household, and my son will hopefully tell tales of his dad’s ability to liven up a plate of formerly-ridiculed plants.