Are Jews to Blame for Vegetarianism?

For about two years now, I've been beating the drum that the modern nutrition paradigm, which stigmatizes (red) meat and champions vegetarianism and plant food, is a furtive aspect of post-60s leftism. The outright false and pseudoscientific justification for the now wholly entrenched low-fat, low-protein, heart-healthy whole grain diet is ultimately based upon anti-male, anti-white, and anti-traditionalist liberalism. For those unfamiliar with my writings on these issues, here's just about the most succinct bit of evidence for this argument. In The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, anti-male feminist Carol Adams makes the following argument:

The Sexual Politics of Meat argues that what, or more precisely who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture, and that the meanings attached to meat eating are often clustered around virility. Further, she argues that vegetarianism and fighting for animal rights fit perfectly alongside working to improve the lives of disenfranchised and suffering people, under the wide umbrella of compassionate activism.

As for anti-white/anti-European, take a look at what these "trendy" foods all have in common. As for anti-traditionalist, picture white Christian American families around the dinner table enjoying a Christmas ham or Thanksgiving turkey. And of course, vegetarianism is extremely popular amongst the rarefied SWPL class.

Yet with all the discussion of our frightening obesity rates, rarely do we hear talking heads muse on the social meaning of food. In particular, we rarely food's correspondence with social class or how food choices are an often inexorable aspect of culture, i.e. blacks eating fried chicken. And even if we get some shallow discourse on these issues, not even nutritional iconoclasts like Taubes and Mercola explain the social biases of nutritional research.

I'm currently listening to Taubes' Why We Get Fat. He spends countless pages going over studies and biology and basically, a scientific answer for why we get fat. But he essentially ignores one of the first questions most people have, "How can so many doctors and scientists be completely wrong?" So when I started reading chapter 10 of his book, I found his discussion somewhat surprising. I'll relay his point, hidden in rather polite language: Jews are to blame for the false nutritional paradigm. Yes, Taubes essentially blames Jews for the post-WWII nutritional calamity that has manifested in our astronomical obesity rates.

Here's some background. German scientists and researchers like Gustav von Bergmann and Hilde Bruch had pioneered early 20th century work in obesity, then a relatively piddling issue. von Bergmann had come up with the "lipophilia" hypothesis in which he posited that obesity was a consequence of fat tissue regulation, not necessarily slothfulness or gluttony. Without going into detail, Taubes argues that early 20th century German and Austrian physicians had a much better understanding than we currently have of why the obese get obese. Primarily, they understood that "calories in, calories out" was wrong and none of them even considered the notion that saturated fat and red meat were a problem. So how do Jews come into this? Taubes explains:

By the late 1930's, von Bergmann's and Bauer's lipophilia hypothesis had become "more of less fully accepted" in Europe. It was catching on in the United States as well, where Russell Wilder of the Mayo Clinic wrote in 1938, "The conception deserves attentive consideration."

Within a decade, though, it had vanished. The European physicians and researchers who hadn't died in the Second World War or fled the continent had far more pressing issues to deal with than obesity. In the United States, a new generation of physicians and nutritionists came along after the war [OneSTDV: presumably many of them were Jewish immigrants] and they were enamored with Newburgh's "perverted appetite" logic, perhaps because it played to their preconceptions about penalties of gluttony and sloth [OneSTDV: looking down on the lower-class "goyim"].

Anti-German sentiment in the postwar medical community, understable as it may have been, assuredly didn't help matters. The authorities writing about obesity in the United States after the war treeated the German medical literature as though it didn't exist, even though it was the Germans and Austrians who had founded and done most of the meaningful research in the fields of nutrition, metabolism, endocrinology, and genetic, which means all the fields relevant to obesity.

In other words, the early and mid-20th century intellectual class, increasingly comprised of Jews, were wholly biased against the correct observations of German and Austrian researchers in nutrition. We see then that the postwar overhauling of the nutritional paradigm did not come from actual science, but from a social phenomenon that motivated a large group of the relevant academics.

We can further consider traditional European meats, such as bacon, ham, and pork, as well as shellfish like shrimp and scallops, that Jewish law forbids. As with most social movements bent on normalizing in-group behavior by devaluing out-group behavior, e.g. fatties who talk about "having curves", Jewish nutrition researchers sought to stigmatize (non-kosher) red meat because they could not partake, thereby making their group outsiders. The Jews who pioneered the vegetarian paradigm, and those like Dr. Andrew Weil and Dean Ornish who continue to champion it, likely did not feel comfortable with their gentile peers munching on bacon and pork while they ate matzo ball soup - not exactly the most American dish. By stigmatizing non-kosher meat and convincing the public that only the stupid and careless eat this way, Jews were able to nullify one aspect of their "other" status.

Further, Jews do not hunt. According to the Jewish Ethicist:

[I]t is necessary to acknowledge that Jewish tradition has a very poor regard for this pastime...The heroes of the Bible are generally herders, people who cultivate and nurture animals rather than merely pursue them.

The ultimate cosmopolitan class, Jews not only do not hunt, but they frown upon such a seemingly barbaric custom, preferring to get their meat at the neighborhood Jewish deli. Of course, someone's got to cut the chicken's head off, but I suppose only bucolic hicks would actually to do that themselves. Hunting is an integral part of (white) midwestern life and at the end of the hunt comes enjoying a meal of fresh meat. Adding to their outsider status, Jews have a justifiable, from their perspective, opposition to hunting and the attendant meat-eating. By characterizing meat-eating as bad, another aspect of traditional gentile America that Jews do not participate loses its corresponding social capital. And thus Jews do not suffer socially from their cultural abstinence.

I'll admit that I'm engaging in a little bit of hand-waving here. There are a few logical leaps necessary for this argument to hold, though my overall point is strongly supported by Taubes' mentioning of anti-German sentiment in the postwar medical community. One could classify the following simultaneous social phenomenon as coincidental: rise of 20th century Jewish intellectual class in America, large number of Jewish researchers flee to America, indiscriminate postwar bias against anything German, Jewish disdain for non-kosher meat and hunting, and the post 60s stigmatization of red meat and saturated fat. Yea, you could consider all those individually undeniable social movements and facts to be mere coincidence, but I wouldn't. (Required disclaimers for all Jewish posts - yes, it wasn't all Jews and please be civil in the comments.)