Vegetarianism: Modern American Vegetarianism

Although Dr. Kellogg carried his vegetarian crusade into the 1940s, during the early decades of the twentieth century a triumvirate of self-appointed food authorities were helping to change the way Americans viewed the meat on their plates. The first of these was Upton Sinclair. A novelist and social reformer, Sinclair became a food reformer quite by accident. His novel The Jungle (1906), which he had intended to be a diatribe against capitalism, was so vivid in its portrayal of the horrors of the meatpacking industry that it gave the country a case of national dyspepsia. It was influential in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), and one year after its publication, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was formed (1907). Sinclair himself became a vegetarian, albeit for only three years; however, there is no doubt that many Americans were stirred by his book to swear off meat eating altogether.