PORTLAND, Maine — Writer Avery Yale Kamila stopped eating meat as a teenager, shortly after discovering a secret “Vegetarian Whopper” while working at a Maine Turnpike Burger King in 1988.
“It wasn’t listed on the menu but it was on the register,” Kamila said. “It was basically just cheese and the buns.”
The uninspiring combo wasn’t tasty but did help her kickstart a now decades-long vegetarian journey. The very existence of the meatless option was proof to Kamila that other Maine vegetarians existed and were out there, somewhere.
Now, Kamila is telling the state’s entire, and surprisingly long, herbaceous human history for the first time in a new exhibit and accompanying 50-page booklet called “Maine’s Untold Vegetarian History” at the Maine Historical Society on Congress Street. In them, Kamila traces Maine vegetarianism back 300 years, then follows it through 19th century health crazes and violent city riots, to the back-to-the-land movement and the present day.
“Vegetarians themselves have been around much longer,” Kamila said, “and they have always been a minority, and they have been a persecuted minority to different degrees.”
The state’s first documented vegetarian, according to Kamila’s research, was Sebastien Rasle, a French-Catholic Jesuit priest who lived with Wabanaki peoples along the Kennebec River in the early 18th century. Rasle was famously killed and scalped in the British massacre at Norridgewock in 1724.
Two years earlier, Rasle wrote to a relative in France, “My nourishment is nothing but Indian corn, which is pounded and of which I make every day a kind of porridge that I cook with water.”
He goes on to say that he sometimes sweetened it with maple sugar. Rasle’s vegetarianism is in line with some other ascetic European religious sects at the time.
“But nobody’s ever called him a vegetarian until now,” Kamila said. “Nobody else has really noticed.”
After Rasle, Maine’s first public vegetarian appears to be a protestant preacher from Chesterville named Jotham Sewall, who died in 1850 at the age of 90. According to an 1851 report in the American Vegetarian and Health Journal, Sewall stopped eating meat in 1810 and “ate principally, bread, fruits and milk; and drank sage tea and water.”
In the years immediately following Maine statehood in 1820, vegetarianism was usually referred to as “Grahamism,” named after pro-meatless celebrity, and temperance lecturer from Philadelphia, Sylvester Graham. He advocated simple meals of whole wheat bread, butter, lots of fruits and vegetables, and plain water.
Prominent Graham-followers in Maine included Reuben Mussey, a nationally-known surgeon who ran Bowdoin College’s medical school from 1830 to 1835. Mussey encouraged his students to try going vegetarian.
At least one student, Dr. Horace A. Barrows, who later practiced in western Maine, took him up on it. Barrows went on to prescribe vegetarianism to his patients and even sold plant-based patent medicines.
“My own existence is prolonged, only (according to human probabilities) by entire abstinence from flesh-meat of every description,” Barrows wrote in a letter to another vegetarian physician. “Numberless other instances have come under my observation within the last three years, in which a strict adherence to a simple vegetable diet has done for the wretched invalids what the best medical treatment had utterly failed to do.”
Kamila’s research also revealed that vegetarian lecturer Mary Gove Nichols of Lynn, Massachusetts gave a series of talks in Bangor in 1839. This prompted several local women to form Maine’s earliest-known vegetarian society.
Graham, a controversial figure, came to Portland and Brunswick for a monthlong series of lectures in June 1834. In them, he urged people to abstain from meat, alcohol, tea and sugar.
The lectures were effective, with business dropping off at several local butcher shops and confectioners. One such sweets baker threatened to shoot Graham in retribution for lost revenues of more than $100.
Graham also delivered three special “Lectures for Mothers” which educated women on their own anatomy and instructed them to have sex less often and only when prepared to raise a child.
Eventually, one of Graham’s lectures touched off a riot with a mob throwing rocks and preventing him from speaking at the Temple Street Chapel in Portland.
Kamila said Maine’s late 19th century pioneering businesses canning vegetables such as corn and green beans had an effect on vegetarians, nationwide.
Before commercial canning (and later refrigeration) fresh fruits and vegetables were only available in season.
“In summer, they had all this produce and meat and stuff,” Kamila said. “But in Maine, even if you didn’t want to be a vegetarian, probably by spring, you were a vegetarian — because you had no other choice.”
Vegetarianism came roaring back to Maine with the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s and the publication of Scott and Helen Nearing’s book “Living the Good Life.” Growing out of that fertile environment, Portland vegetarian co-op the Good Day Market opened in 1970.
The Hollow Reed, likely Maine’s first vegetarian restaurant, opened on Fore Street in 1974.
In 1975, more than 1,500 vegetarians gathered at the University of Maine for the world Vegetarian Congress. The next year, meatless restaurant Fig O My Heart opened in Old Town.
Now, a quick internet search reveals at least a dozen vegetarian, or mostly-vegetarian, restaurants in the Pine Tree State and most others have at least one vegetarian option — even if it’s just two Whopper buns and a slice of cheese.
Maine’s Untold Vegetarian History, curated by Avery Yale Kamila and John Babin, is on display at the Maine Historical Society through May.
