Vegetarians: An Italian Story

Today the vegetarian choice concerns millions of people, both for ethical reasons and for dietary reasons. It is a food choice that is talked about and debated a lot and that is often narrated as a novelty of the last decades, an option born of new awareness and also of the nutritional well-being that allows all of us to choose what to eat in complete freedom. In reality, vegetarianism has accompanied human history for a long time . Also for economic reasons, given that meat was very expensive, generations of our ancestors found themselves having to make animal proteins by hand. But beyond the habits dictated by necessity, we have evidence of the eating habits of a philosopher like Pythagoras who already in ancient Greece embraced a vegetarian diet in which only raw plant foods were allowed . Pythagoras's personal diet, as reported by some of his disciples, included fresh fruit in the morning, bread and honey, raw vegetables and millet for lunch, and seasonal fruit during the day, dried fruit. Finally, roots and vegetables for dinner. It is likely that Pythagoras had eliminated foods that could, in his opinion, induce intolerances and break the internal balance of the body that he so much sought. This is enough to make us understand how vegetarianism has a long history and tradition behind it.

Confirming this for us, with his usual popular style, but very rigorous from a documentary point of view, is the expert in the history of food Alberto Capatti in his Vegetarians. The Italian story (Slow Food Editore, 2025, €16.90, pp. 144, also e-book). It is an intriguing historical essay, in which Capati returns to the roots of a nutritional approach that appeared in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century .

The first vegetarian association in Italy was born, in fact, in 1905 in Florence, followed in 1907 by Milan. These two associations were the symptoms of an individual feeling that began to become collective: the movement came to life from the criticism of the toxicity of an industrial society that was already consuming human beings at the time. It was a movement, the vegetarian one of the origins, that caressed spiritualism and naturism and that naturally concerned a restricted elite.

The parable of vegetarians was however marked by initial decades of difficulty and inexperience. The supporters of the movement struggled to find meeting places and even more restaurants that could accommodate their particular diet. Later, curiously and fatally, the vegetarian verb found a hearing from the nascent authoritarian regimes, with their myth of physical strength and, unfortunately, race. It was not, according to Capatti, a real connivance, but a dangerous crossroads that was washed away by the war and that will leave the refoundation of vegetarianism in the hands of pacifists. In 1952, in fact, the Italian Vegetarian Association was born, which still exists, yet another chapter in a continuous revolution that tends to erase what has come before. Vegetarians, like all avant-garde movements, tend to lose their collective memory. A collective memory that Capatti's book aims to reconstruct with expertise, with a wealth of anecdotes and explanations on how vegetarianism is innate in popular eating styles once dictated by necessity, such as the Mediterranean diet.

To complete the research, an appendix reconstructs the path of the vegetarian choice from the Seventies to today, to close the circle of a story never told, in its entirety.