제1차대전기 미국의 채식주의운동과 국가의 역할

Abstract

Even suffering a national crisis, vegetarianism in the U.S. could have been turned itself into a voluntary social movement. At the center of the change, there was the U.S. government. The government put efforts to lead vegetarianism into a social movement. According to directives and requirements of it, mass media and scientists should provide information related to vegetarianism. Finally, a triad could solve the social problem, with the vegetarian-social movement. The U.S. government agencies preferred to actively and diversely enlighten the public being to their tastes. Therefore, Vegetarian-social movement also lost their original look by government, who exploited vegetarianism with modification, deformation, distortion, and indirect manner without comprehension. Even though vegetarianism could establish sovereignty through the change, practical vegetarianism did not relate with a social movement carrying out a revolution against stereotype and science. In other words, they never intended to deconstruct mainstream culture or discourse with a strategy or tactic. Vegetarian-social movement originally purposed to resolve the current social problems, and in that point it was a true strategy or tactic as the very practical way. In addition, vegetarians carefully tested possibility of meat-free diet considering meatatarians` view until then, and suggested that the frugal and simple diet bases from a vegetarian meal than meat. This point provided new diet knowledge and information completely different from the existing one. Although established diet culture was not conquered entirely, vegetarian-social movement has a signification in the way that led different points of view. For example, they discovered that vegetables could have a sufficient quantity of vitamins or protein by comparison with meat. However, vegetarian-social movement remained as a subculture not as a leading rebel against strong meat-eating culture because of intended work by the government and a passive attitude of themselves. Unfortunately, vegetarianism was others just belonging to the mainstream culture - at least in the historic process. In this respect, vegetarian-social movement had limit in that it failed to lead a paradigm shift. It was beyond vegetarians` power to destroy the meat-eating habit. Thus, meat hegemony continued. People still preferred meat at their dinner table.