Thread by @fleroy1974

In the (urban middle classes of) the post-industrial West, the symbolic value of #meat has been inverted. It always stood for nourishment & vitality, but now represents debauchery & harm.

What happened?

THREAD 🧵: a (very) simplified version of a complex historical trajectory

In the mid-19th C, coming from a Swedenborgian legacy (& building on even earlier meat-avoiding asceticism & mysticism), meat starts to be seen as impure in some Christian sects. Within that same legacy, Theosophy & New Age develop. The first vegetarian societies are founded.

With modernity, scientism develops, & thus an obsession with resource control, monitoring, metrics, top-down interventionism & societal progress & emancipation. Household economies are born, so that diets (now a matter of calories, not tradition) become a target for zealotry.

People like JH Kellogg connect the dots. Virtue, progress, health, & metrics are combined into an idea that eventually develops into "nutritional science". Whatever that science measures, however, seems profoundly distorted. Birth of the healthy user bias - grains good/meat bad.

Meanwhile, the 1970s lead to a revival of technocracy, with computer simulations of resource depletion, futurism & doom vs. eco-utopianism. New Ager & oil business man Maurice Strong, father of UNEP & "sustainable development", enters the scene. So does 'Diet for a Small Planet'.

All this creates golden opportunities. With UN Rio 92, Strong opens a market for the greenwashing of the planet's super polluters. Meanwhile, the leading nutritional paradigm ("meat/fat causing disease") allows multinationals to develop a lucrative business model.

Suddenly, a marginal current within society (vegetarianism) becomes mainstream. It still allows for the virtue signalling of the old days, but is no longer ridiculed. Because the powers that be have decided to give it a thumbs up. Here we are, facing a #GreatFoodTransformation?

Some background info here:
iastatedigitalpress.com/mmb/article/id…

And here:
frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

As remarked by @AECDKB, the graph could be more explicit on the impact of industrialization of livestock (late 19th C) & what that means for disrupted human-animal interactions (& moral crisis coming from that), picked up by Progressive movements back then. Yellow circle added.

And as pointed out by @lpearsemoran, referring to Haidt, there was also a progressive/liberation element at play (animals as the oppressed). The rise of the "vegetarian crusade" can't be seen independently from a broader movement for social reform.
amazon.com/Vegetarian-Cru…

That being said, the "purity" & revolutionary angle of vegetarianism was also popular at the ultra-right side of the spectrum back then (cf. Nazi's & animal rights, fascist Fiume, theories of Savitri Devi, ...) and even today. researchgate.net/publication/32…

More on this here (@aleph2020 website): aleph-2020.blogspot.com/2019/05/introd…

And more on the religious background here (also @aleph2020): aleph-2020.blogspot.com/2019/12/dietar…