Avery Yale Kamila in the King Gallery at the Maine Historical Society Museum in Portland, where she has co-curated an exhibit about the state’s history of vegetarianism. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

While you may be seeing more and more vegetarian and vegan restaurants or dishes on menus around the state these days, Portland-based journalist and community organizer Avery Yale Kamila wants you to realize that plant-based diets are nothing new here. In fact, vegetarians have been in Maine for centuries, even predating the word “vegetarian.”

Kamila knows a thing or two about plant-based eating. A vegan since 1991, she writes the Vegan Kitchen column for the Maine Sunday Telegram and has been the Press Herald’s plant-based food columnist for 15 years. In 2020, she created the Maine Vegetarian History Project.

This month, the Maine Historical Society Museum debuted “Maine’s Untold Vegetarian History,” an exhibit that Kamila co-curated with John Babin, author and visitor services manager at the Maine Historical Society.

Through historic and contemporary canned and packaged foods, manuscripts, books, menus, maps and photos, the exhibit exposes the deep roots of vegetarianism in Maine. It also spotlights the groundbreaking ideas and work of vegetarian Mainers throughout history, from Father Sébastian Rale in the early 18th century, to 19th-century proponents like Seventh-day Adventist prophet Ellen G. White and Portland journalist Jeremiah Hacker, to the back-to-the-land teachings of Helen and Scott Nearing in the later 20th century.

We sat down with Kamila recently to talk about how she launched her research into Maine’s vegetarian history, why the state’s early vegetarians came to adopt the diet, what they ate and how they were treated (and often mistreated) by their contemporaries, and what the future of vegetarianism might look like in Maine.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How far back does vegetarianism go in Maine? And did the early adopters come to it for health or animal welfare reasons?

We don’t really know how far back it goes, because this is a buried history. It hasn’t been included in conventional history books or exhibitions or any kind of cultural sharing of information until now.

The earliest person that I’ve identified as a Maine vegetarian is Father Sébastian Rale (1657-1724), who was a Jesuit priest who came from France and moved to Maine. That was 300 years ago. He announced his vegetarianism in a letter to his nephew.

But were there earlier people here practicing vegetarianism? I don’t know. One of the interesting things to me is that you think about vegetarians today, you’d think they’re going to be women, right? There are men, but it tilts that way (toward women), that’s what demographics say. But all the early vegetarians I found that are documented are men – white, prominent Christian men. And that’s why their vegetarianism has been preserved: because they were a prominent person for another reason, and as a result, (their vegetarianism) got saved too, in an archive somewhere.

In terms of motivations, up until 100 years ago, it was all religious motivations. The people who were vegetarians in Maine that I found, they were all Christians. There’s always been this ascetic tradition running through Christianity. When Rale was alive, that was a time in France when there was an upwelling of interest in vegetarianism. The Jesuits have always been into asceticism. It was about living a simple life, but it was also a health motivation. Benjamin Franklin adopted vegetarianism in 1722, and he did it because he read Thomas Tryon’s famous book, “Way to Health.” So did Rale read that book? We don’t know.

In terms of animal rights as a movement, you really don’t see that until the late 20th century.

This exhibit is titled “Maine’s Untold Vegetarian History.” Why has this information been largely excluded from the conventional record? 

I don’t think traditional historians have been vegetarians. The 19th- and 20th-century scholars who examined Rale and his diet and lifestyle realized he was an ascetic, but they didn’t understand the vegetarianism thing. In Rale’s time the word ‘vegetarianism’ didn’t even exist, so you had to use code words. It’s kind of like trying to ferret out LGBTQ history from conventional history, because people didn’t talk about it.

The bigger answer is that vegetarians have historically faced prejudice and probably always will. Sometimes, it’s extreme and they’re being massacred like they were in the Crusades, and other times, it’s jokes about tofu. A couple of years ago, there was a study in one of the psychology journals; they did a survey and found that most people held a stronger prejudice against vegetarians than hard drug users.

Ellen Gould Harmon White, born in Gorham in 1827 and a co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, was a strong advocate for vegetarianism. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

Maine’s early vegetarians seemed also to limit their sugar and salt intake, and abstain from caffeine and alcohol. Was that part of the vegetarian ethos at the time, or the influence of Christian temperance?

In the early 19th century, the temperance movement was already active in Maine. At that time, the word ‘vegetarian’ doesn’t exist. The word ‘temperance’ does exist. Vegetarianism was considered part of temperance. There were all these names for vegetarianism: the light diet, the vegetable diet, the temperance diet, Grahamism. The early temperance movement held every tenet that Sylvester Graham and Ellen G. White prescribed and the Adventists still believe today: Don’t eat or limit animal products, get fresh air, bathe, get exercise and good sleep, drink water. Some of these things seem obvious today, but in the early 19th century, there were no showers; you didn’t even have a bathtub or city water.

Also, the temperance movement said, ‘Don’t drink, don’t do any drugs, caffeine, tobacco or any kind of stimulant.’ And they included spices in stimulants, because (spices) were from foreign countries, and God knows what that cinnamon is going to do to you. I would say that’s a pretty good reason why (historically) we’ve had such bland food in New England.

What were Maine’s early vegetarian diets like?

If you were a vegetarian in the 1820s or 1830s, your food was super limited. You would eat whole-grain bread. If you could get some oatmeal or cornmeal, you might have a porridge. You’d eat vegetables and fruit if you could get some – in summer you have some, in winter you have none, because canning hasn’t been invented yet. People in general ate much more simply than we do now. Bread and butter, that was a meal right there. You add a glass of water, you’re done.

Water Lily Three Minute Oat Flakes made exclusively for H.S. Melcher Co., a wholesale produce company that operated on Fore Street in Portland in the 1800s. Robinson’s Patent Barley, sold by the William S. Davis grocery store in 1828, could be mixed with water or milk to create a simple porridge. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

Once we get Ellen G. White coming on the scene and she gets (Dr. John Harvey Kellogg) inventing all this stuff, all of a sudden there were vegetarian food products you could buy, and your food became interesting. You had canned food, and the canning process was perfected here in Portland. Now vegetarians could have fruits and vegetables all year round. When peanut butter becomes fashionable at the end of the 1800s and early 1900s, there are all these fascinating newspaper cooking columns in Maine about how to use peanut butter, like for making a sandwich.

How were early Maine vegetarians viewed by their omnivore contemporaries?

Once we get to Jeremiah Hacker, who was the editor and writer of the Portland Pleasure Boat from 1845 into the 1860s, he talks about prejudice against vegetarians. By the time he’s writing, the word vegetarian gets coined, I think in 1849. He starts using the word in his newspaper. He was writing all these radical vegetarian things back in the 19th century.

However, in some of the best examples I’ve seen, he attributes (the prejudice) to his religious views, or anti-religious views. He was a radical in every direction. He was a Christian, but he thought all the priests and preachers in town weren’t living their true Christian ideals.

What historical period was the heyday of vegetarianism in Maine, or is it now?

I would say it’s probably now. One of the interesting things that’s not explored in this show is, what’s the role of technology in the spread of vegetarianism? The iPhone was invented in 2007, and things really started to kick up here in Maine and nationally around that time. So is that connected? And what about social media? I don’t know if anybody has examined that, but I think those have a role to play. Because with the phones, all of a sudden you get podcasts and different ways to spread messages.

Vegetarianism goes through cycles of interest. We’re in one right now. The early 1700s was probably also one. You get another upwelling in the early 1800s that goes until about the Civil War, then you get another that comes in the late 1800s until the early 20th century. That dies out with World Wars I and II and comes back again the ’60s and ’70s. Now we’re still kind of riding that one, and when that dies down, I don’t know.

We don’t know how many vegetarians are in Portland right now, because there are no surveys that are state-based. There’s national polling on how many vegetarians are in the U.S. The surveys vary, depending how they’re done, but in general, it’s assumed that 6% of Americans are vegetarian, 3% are vegan.

You get a higher percentage if you’re in a real Democratic, liberal stronghold like Portland. Or Portland, Oregon, or San Francisco. It could be up to 12% of the population are vegetarians in a liberal hot spot like this, but nobody’s ever done a survey, so we don’t know.

You started the Maine Vegetarian History Project in 2020. Was it a pandemic project for you?

Yes, it was. But it started in March, just before the pandemic. I was moving a box of books in my office at home, and I came across this book, a reprint of the 1838 book by Dr. William Alcott called ‘Vegetable Diet.’ It’s a medical book, with medical opinions about vegetarianism.

I was looking through it, and I came to this page with a letter from a doctor in Maine. I’m like, ‘Who’s this dude? Why has nobody told me about him before?’ So all of a sudden I’m fascinated, and I Google him and find he’s got a diary over here (at the Maine Historical Society’s Brown Research Library). So I went to the library that morning and looked at the diaries, and I realized there were vegetarian references in there. Then the pandemic happens, and everything closes, so I was like, ‘That’s the end of that.’

But it wasn’t, because there’s all this archival material online. So then I just leaned into that and started looking. Just because of the power of technology, I was able to continue. And it was the pandemic, what else did I have to do? I was reading all these history books and doing archival research. That’s how it all started.

Your parents were omnivores. You became vegetarian in high school and vegan a few years later. What led you to those dietary shifts?

Looking back at my childhood, I’m a person who should’ve been a vegetarian since birth, because I was always having problems with meat being fed to me. I’ve got this horrifying memory of being fed lobster, and hating it, and being told to just suck the meat out of the legs. And I’m getting so grossed out. It looks like a bug to me.

What really tipped me was in my sophomore year at Oak Hill High School in Wales, every student had to write a speech for a competition. The teacher handed out a list of topics, and one was animal rights. I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know what that is, but I like animals.’ So in my research for the speech, I found out about vegetarianism. I gave the speech, won a prize and became a vegetarian.

Then I became a vegan in college at Syracuse. I joined a group called Syracuse University for Animal Rights. My first meeting, somebody turned to me and asked, ‘Are you a vegan?’ I think I’d read that word before, but nobody’d ever spoken that word in Maine. He said, ‘Well then you need to read this book,’ and he handed me John Robbins’ ‘Diet for a New America.’ I went back to my dorm room and read it, and I’m like, ‘OK, well, now I’m a vegan.’

Where do you see the future of vegetarianism in Maine headed from here?

What I’m seeing that’s interesting – that when I first started writing my column 15 years ago wasn’t the case – is that a lot of chefs today are much more open to plant-based dishes as a normal thing you’d have, not like, ‘I’m putting this one dish on there for the vegetarians.’ When I talk to these chefs, they say they’re not vegetarian, but they don’t like to eat steak all the time themselves. They say they like to have something lighter some nights and mix it up.

But unless there’s a major cultural shift, I don’t see everybody becoming a vegetarian. And I don’t think everybody needs to. What the science around climate change says is that people in affluent countries like the U.S. have to eat way less (meat). So I think people will be eating more of a flexitarian diet, and that’ll become more of a normal thing.

In 1845, radical newspaperman Jeremiah Hacker first published the Pleasure Boat, an alternative weekly newspaper and Maine’s earliest known vegetarian publication. Courtesy of the Collections of Maine Historical Society, Coll. 3124

Which historical figure from your exhibit would you most want to invite for dinner, and what would you serve them?

It would have to be Ellen G. White. I would have to serve something really basic. We could have some plant-based meat like seitan, maybe a casserole, definitely some vegetables, definitely some fresh fruit that I understand she always had on the table. And we could have some whole-wheat bread. Oh, my God, it would be so amazing to talk with her and find out her thoughts.

But imagine having dinner with Jeremiah Hacker and the things he might say? Because Ellen G. White would probably say things in a very moderate kind of way. But Hacker, I don’t know what he would say. He’d be an interesting dinner guest. If Hacker walked down the street today, nobody would notice. They’d be like, ‘There’s another hipster.’ He’d fit right in.