On
September 20, 2001, then President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
that took place on September 11.
In a speech that constituted his declaration of war on terror, the
President designated al Qaeda a terrorist organization distinct in its beliefs
from the rest of the Muslim world and an organization capable of “evil and
destruction.” The rhetoric Bush
employed in the speech established a clear divide between “America,” land of
freedom, and terrorism, an ill-defined, looming menace comprised of anyone who
would dare to attack us. Bush
outlined the cause of the attack as hatred, stating the that terrorists “hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our
freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other,” and he asked the
rest of the world to choose a side: “Every nation in every region now has a
decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”
In creating
what William D. Lutz terms a “rhetoric of permanent war and fear,” the Bush administration established a political and
social environment that lasted throughout his tenure as President and that
continues to impact public discourse up to the present moment. A month after his speech,
the subsequent passage of the Patriot Act, which allowed the government
heretofore unheard of license with regard to surveillance and detention of
suspected terrorists, established a general erosion of privacy and civil
liberties that further placed on lockdown any attempt at dissention. During his September 20 speech, Bush
offered a mandate: “I ask you to uphold the values of America,” and in the wake
of a changed world, we were left to posit continually and forcefully certain
behavior as patriotic and American and to just as vociferously denounce
anything that was not as aligned with terrorism. You were, after all, either with us or with the terrorists. You had to be an American with American
values; you flew a flag, were Christian, and ate like an American. And whatever you did, you did not
question the government.
In the wake of
the attacks, Americans turned to so-called comfort foods to feel better, and
they shied away from expensive restaurants, many of which served ethnic
cuisine. According to Brian Gallagher, in the subsequent decade, “restaurants focusing on
simple, familiar and hearty food – though often rendered in an upscaled and
inventive way – would become the culinary zeitgeist.” Gallagher notes the popularity of such items as fried
chicken, macaroni and cheese, and hamburgers in the decade that followed the
attacks, and he notes that in terms of dining out, people “wanted places that
felt, in terms of scale, much more like home.”
While the
desire for so-called comfort foods makes a kind of psychological sense, other
shifts in terms of our culture’s relationship with food were clearly a product
of the rhetoric of fear espoused by the Bush administration; for example, in an
act of outright xenophobia that remained in tact until 2006, when France refused
to support the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq – a direct result of the September
11 attacks – Republican lawmakers following the lead of North Carolina based
restaurant Cubbies retaliated by renaming French fries “freedom fries” on
cafeteria menus in three House office buildings (Loughlin) in a move that was
followed by other restaurant owners in the private sector. And in an article published as late as
2011, Michele Payn-Knoper discusses the potential dangers associated with the
fact that the U.S. imports 40 percent of its food:
At a time that Americans are so sensitive
about our national security, do we really want to rely on other countries for
the majority of our food? Consider what’s happened to oil and our gas
prices; it makes no sense to have our food “held hostage.” Yet, the increasing
regulations, lack of understanding about today’s modern farm and constant
scrutiny of American agriculture is pushing more food production out of the
U.S. and Canada.
Given such
post-September 11 sentiment with regard to the sanctity and nature of
“American” food, it should not seem odd or even outrageous to consider that our
current understanding of veganism in the U.S. has been hugely impacted and
shaped by the Bush administration’s rhetorical response to the attacks.
How embarrassing for us.
I want to look briefly at the decades
of the 1980s and 1990s, a period during which vegetarianism – and even veganism
to an extent – experienced a kind of mainstream recognition and acceptance that
was significantly diminished in the subsequent decade. To begin, Ingrid Newkirk and Alex
Pacheco founded People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 1980, and
that organization’s dissemination of graphic literature and images shocked the
public and forced it to come face to face with the cruelty inherent in Western
culture’s treatment of animals.
Newkirk believes that decades later, “the popularity of animal rights
revived vegetarianism in America” (Iacobbo and Iacobbo 199), and PETA’s ability
– controversial as it has been – to force people to recognize that their food
once had a face was largely responsible for this shift.
Also during the 1980s, even as
sale of chicken products increased, “sales of beef slumped,” and “ethnic
cuisine, traditionally prepared with vegetables or grains, and a much smaller
portion of meat than Americans were typically accustomed to, or none at all,
started to increase in demand” (Iacobbo and Iacobbo196). This interest in non-Western cuisine
marked a moment of culinary multiculturalism that allowed many Americans, for
the first time, to consider dietary options other than those that were
typically standard American. Sushi
was the rage on the West coast, and Japanese and Chinese food thrived in the
U.S. during this period.
Furthermore, John Robbins published Diet for a New America in
1987, and this work linked meat consumption with environmental destruction in
ways that allowed Americans to consider that meat eating, animal cruelty, and
environmental devastation are inherently connected in ways that jeopardize
human existence.
Yes, I went there.
If the 1980s was in many ways a
good decade for vegetarianism, the 1990s were perhaps even better, ushered in
by “a flood of scientific evidence supporting vegan diets” (Iacobbo and Iacobbo
209) as healthier than their omnivorous or even vegetarian counterparts. The work of Caleb Johnson and Dean
Ornish was influential and its impact long lasting. In 1990, Carol J. Adams published The Sexual Politics of
Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, a work that examined the
linkages between the exploitation of animals and the exploitation of women and
advocated for veganism as a necessary feminist act. In 1991, the basic four food groups, recommended by the
United States Department of Agriculture since 1956, received an overhaul led by
Neal Barnard, M.D., founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine; Barnard’s model relegated both “meat and dairy to optional status”
(211). This recommendation was
made after decades of research by Barnard and other physicians, namely T. Colin
Campbell, Oliver Alabaster, and Denis Burkitt that effectively proved both “the
health benefits of vegan foods” (212) and the detrimental aspects of consuming
meat.
During this same period, veganism
entered mainstream and popular culture in ways that depicted that lifestyle in
a sympathetic light. In 1995, Babe,
directed by Chris Noonan and staring James Cromwell, who became outspokenly vegan
while acting in that film, was released and, in its anthropomorphic depiction
of farm animals, caused viewers across the country to stop eating them. Howard Lyman, author of Mad Cowboy:
Plain Truth from a Cattle Rancher who Won’t Eat Meat, appeared on Oprah
in 1996 and explained to America why and how he, a fourth generation cattle
rancher, became vegan. Lyman and
Winfrey, who declared during the broadcast that she had eaten her last
hamburger, were subsequently sued for libel by the National Cattlemen’s Beef
Association for anti-beef comments made during the broadcast.[i] And in 2000, Rod Lurie’s film The
Contender portrayed a female, vegan political contender for the office of
Vice President of the United States as a heroic champion of American values.
While
awareness of vegetarianism and veganism has continued to rise in the U.S. since
the 1990s, prompting even the most recalcitrant aspects of our culture to make
some concessions and accommodations – even Burger King saw fit to start offering
a veggie burger in 2002 – there has been a pronounced shift in the discourse of
veganism since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Even prior to the 2001 attacks, chef
Anthony Bourdain aligned vegans with anti-American terrorism in his wildly
successful 2000 exposé Kitchen Confidential:
Vegetarians, and their
Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any
chef worth a damn. . . . Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and
decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment
of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be
polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every
vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. (70)
Bourdain is
famous for his disdain of the non-omnivorous in general and of vegans in
particular, and his incendiary claims about them are oft quoted.[ii] Bourdain’s association of veganism with
terrorism, however, constructed veganism (a decidedly pacifist ideology) as
dangerously, violently radical, a behavior that posed a threat to any sane
conceptions of diet. Vegetarians
and vegans, in this construction, are the “enemy” of the very “human spirit.” After the advent of the so-called War
on Terror, terms like “Jihad,” “al-Qaeda,” and the omnipresent and pervasive
“terrorist” entered the mainstream U.S. vernacular, part and parcel of a
political rhetoric that divided the world into the simplistic categories of
good and evil, and Bourdain’s construction of vegans as terrorists held a
different and more powerful sway.
A search for "Anthony Bourdain douche" pulls up this.
And
Bourdain reiterated his point after the terrorist attacks. While in Philadelphia on a book tour
promoting his 2007 release No Reservations, Bourdain said that
vegetarians “are the worst kind of terrorists. And they must be stopped” (qtd. in Valocchi), asserting again – and this time in a post-September 11 world – that not
eating meat constitutes an act of terrorism. In the years since that statement, the supposed connection
between cruelty free diets and terrorism has played out in startling ways. For example, a Village Voice article by Matt Snyders chronicles the FBI’s
solicitation of informants to monitor protest groups during the 2008 Republican
National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. Snyders discusses the case of Paul Carroll,[iii]
a student at the University of Minnesota, who was
approached by the FBI. According
to Synders,
What they
were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant – someone to show up at “vegan
potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to
the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal
agencies and state and local law enforcement.
Snyder quotes attorney Jordan Kushner who notes that “the
Joint Terrorism Task Force is another example of using the buzzword ‘terrorism’
as a basis to clamp down on people’s freedoms and push forward a more
authoritarian government.”
Veganism, as a non-normative dietary choice, represents an ideology at odds
with an increasingly authoritarian regime; in this case, it becomes associated
with protest, dissent, and terrorism and must be covertly monitored.
Ha.
In 2009, police in the U.K.
secretly investigated 47,000 suspicious travelers who booked flights into and
out of Britain. These travelers
were red flagged “as potential terrorists [for such
things as] ordering a vegetarian meal, asking for an over-wing seat and
travelling with a foreign-born husband or wife” (Lewis). Travelers were selected via a terrorist
detector database that was introduced by Britain’s Labor Party, yet the system,
which cost over a billion pounds to implement, “has never led to the arrest of a terrorist” (Lewis). And also in 2009, the FBI for the first time placed an animal rights activist, Daniel Andreas San Diego, on its most wanted list.
San Diego, who is still at large and was the first domestic terrorist to
appear on the list, is accused of bombing two corporate offices in California in
2003 – both of which were associated with animal testing – causing property
damage but no loss of life.
In the slew of media that followed his placement on the
list, San Diego’s status as a “strict vegan” (Frieden) was highlighted. The headline of a 2011 article in Boston
magazine reads “Violent, Vegan Animal Rights Terrorist Suspected in Northampton,” and in a Fox News article, Joseph Abrams says “San Diego's
bespectacled face masks a violent hate that authorities say turned him into an
eco-terrorist, a vicious vegan with an ax to grind.” To be clear, discussing the media’s coverage of San Diego’s
veganism is in no way to advocate for his methods; San Diego’s actions are
reprehensible, violent, and antithetical to the predominant ideology that, I
would argue, influences most people who opt for a vegan lifestyle. But in their coverage of the San Diego
case, the FBI and the media have, like Bourdain, linked veganism to terrorism
in ways that elide veganism with dangerous extremism.
As America has continued to fight
its seemingly never ending War on Terror and as we have shifted from one
administration to another, at least some of the paranoia and fear that gripped
the nation in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks has abated. But the rhetoric that the Bush
administration employed immediately after those attacks established a pervasive
and still extant need to clarify certain behavior as patriotic and American
while denouncing anything that did not comfortably fit that model as not only
un-American but anti-American, as behavior that might underscore and compliment
a terrorist mentality, and as behavior that must be closely monitored, even if
such monitoring violates basic civil liberties.
Veganism, which had enjoyed a
mild and even at times positive reception during the preceding two decades, became
at the dawn of the twenty-first century suspect in its sudden associations with
fundamentalism, radicalism, and anti-government protest; in its deviation from
the Standard American Diet (SAD), it appeared alien and dangerously ethnic,
influenced by the ideologies of the non-Western world. To be vegan was to be un-American, to
be with the terrorists and not, as Bush commanded, with the rest of “us.”
[i] The case was dismissed in 1998.
[ii] Bourdain has tended to focus on vegan
and vegetarian arguments about the health supportive nature of those diets and
on what he views as a kind of cultural elitism that keeps vegans from being
able to travel to other cultures and eat their foods. He has tended to stay away from the ethical arguments for
veganism.
[iii] “Paul Carroll” is the alias of young man
who wished to remain anonymous.
