THEY'VE ALWAYS BEEN INSUFFERABLE.

So it is with the True Believers, whether it's of a religious, pacifist, or nutritionist bent.  "A Hundred Years of Mocking Vegetarians."  They figure prominently in the freak show George Orwell encountered on the way to Wigan, and nothing has much changed since.

For a rare lifestyle choice—one that is selfless, and also fundamentally personal—vegetarianism tends to drive people pretty bonkers. A 2015 paper found that vegetarians (and vegans) are viewed as negatively or more negatively than “several commonly stigmatized groups.” They are, in the popular imagination, abstemious killjoys, enemies of pleasure, unhinged animal fanatics, self-righteous cranks; they are evangelists, sentimentalists, snobs, radicals, naifs.

Yes, and probably common at socialist meetings where they append "vegan" after declaring their pronouns.  If only they'd comport themselves the way Lord Chesterfield once advised smart people to treat their intellect like a pocket watch, pulling it out when someone asks the time.  That's not how the vegans roll.

But neither vegetarianism nor the suspicion of it is a 21st-century, or even 20th-century, phenomenon. Humans have voluntarily avoided meat for hygienic, ethical, religious, or health reasons since at least as early as 500 B.C.E. The diet has fallen in and out of favor at various points since then, but has been stably present—if niche—since the Renaissance.

The American Vegetarian Society was founded in 1850, and vegetarianism was trendy for much of the 1800s and early 1900s among East Coast abolitionists, spiritualists, suffragettes, transcendentalists, cultural reformers, and intellectuals—the types of people, in fact, who founded this magazine in 1857.

I rest my case. The Atlantic is your go-to source for insufferable snobs.

No wonder vegetarians were seen as hair shirts, performatively suffering under what the Atlantic writer Katharine Fullerton Gerould called, in 1912, the “fallacy of ‘plain living and high thinking.’” Vegetarians made—and still make—some people uncomfortable because they encounter abundance and choose something else. They feel like an affront to the status quo, or at least to a very basic impulse: the pursuit of pleasure at any cost.

No, it's not that you own that pocket watch, it's that you're ostentatiously displaying it.