Maine’s Untold Vegetarian History, an exhibit at the Maine Historical Society documents 300 years of research into the vegetarian movement by Portland Press Herald vegan columnist Avery Yale Kamila. With Thanksgiving around the corner, Kamila reveals the dark side of the holiday and the prejudice against those promoting a vegetarian lifestyle.
Thanksgiving became an official holiday in 1863. Kamila said vegetarian turkeys made their debut around the same time.
“I trace the first glimmers of this to the 1860s when I can find newspapers that are making fun of vegetables that have a turkey-ish shape. They’re calling them vegetable turkeys. And they’re doing it in a joking way,” she said.
Kamila said her research also uncovered a more sinister early Thanksgiving in Maine.
She tells the story of Father Sebastian Rale, a Jesuit priest and Frenchman who was assigned to the Abenaki agricultural town of what is now Norridgewock, on the Kennebec River in 1722. Rawl was an ascetic Christian, who practiced self denial for religious reasons.
Kamila said he ate a simple vegan diet of cornmeal porridge, roots and nuts, and railed against the encroachment of English settlers who let their livestock eat Abenaki crops. Rale’s complaints to Boston officials were ignored and over time he was suspected of encouraging the Abenaki resistance.
“He was murdered, massacred in 1724 when English militia came up the river and murdered all kinds of people, women and children, and then that massacre was celebrated with a Thanksgiving feast declared by the governor and celebrated by the settlers,” Kamila said.
Kamila said this account documents the genocide of Native Americans. Add to that the slaughter of millions of turkeys each year and she said many vegetarians condemn the holiday outright.
Vegetarians were often prominent male figures, Kamila said, and not only promoted a plant-based diet but also took on other more controversial issues.
Sylvester Graham, for example, was a national celebrity who arrived in Maine in 1834. He was a Presbyterian minister who marketed Graham flour and bread and lectured on vegetarianism, as well as sexual equality and chastity.
“If you were a woman in 1834, you have no legal rights, no rights to your own body. And Graham says hey, not good to have sex. Not good for you or the man. This is a freeing message for women. This was all very offensive to men, who were benefitting from this situation socially so hence there was a riot,” she said.
Graham was forced to flee Portland during the riot. The story was carried in newspapers nationwide. But his message endured and excitement over vegetarianism and Graham bread that would eventually become Graham crackers solidified his position in the vegetarian movement.
Three decades later Ellen G. White, a native Mainer, was helping to establish the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Battle Creek, Michigan.
“In 1863, Ellen G. White has a vision. She’s a prophet. God showed her what humans should be eating, and it was vegetarian, plant-based food,” Kamila said. “Then, being a practical Mainer she realizes that if people are going to eat vegetarian food, it has to be accessible, affordable and taste good.”
Kamila said White enlisted Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his wife, Ella, to help her and they developed peanut butter, breakfast cereal and plant-based meat.
“They decide they’re going to have a separate company to sell breakfast cereal and they’re going to add sugar to it. If you want to sell a lot of something you add sugar to it. Kellogg’s is still a major company today,” she said.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kamila said commercial development of vegetarian products took off, including a huge canning industry in Maine.
Beans, blueberries, peas and corn were all canned in Maine which gave vegetarians access to good food year round.
Vegetarians Helen and Scott Nearing of Harborside, Maine, were part of the back to the land movement in the 1960s and ‘70s. They grew their own food and were celebrated for their recipes and practices. Helen’s cookbook, “Simple Food for the Good Life,” was published in 1980.
“It’s a humorous book because she was well known as somebody who didn’t like to cook and most of her recipes had just a couple of ingredients. One or two steps, super simple,” she said.
Kamila said Nearing’s infamous carrot croakers, made from the pulp of juiced carrots, served with soup and a salad from her garden won praise from thousands of visitors.
In the ‘70s came the first vegetarian market and restaurant in Portland, according to Kamila.
What also came was prejudice against vegetarians and vegans. Kamila said one survey ranked them last, below drug addicts.
“When you tell someone you’re a vegetarian you don’t have to say anything else,” Kamila said. “If they’re like most Americans they were fed meat by their mother. There’s a psychological reaction that’s completely subconscious. I’ve insulted someone’s mother because I’ve called into question the food she served.”
Kamila estimates that just 3 percent to 10 percent of the population in Maine is vegetarian. What she hopes visitors take away from the exhibit is to question what they know or have been told about the lifestyle.
“One of the most effective ways to erase the significance of something is to never mention it. As we strive to become critical thinkers, we need to realize that there are stories that have been deliberately omitted and we need to seek those out to have a fuller understanding of the world,” Kamila said.
Maine’s Untold Vegetarian History exhibit runs to May 17, 2025, at the Maine Historical Society.
This article appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
