Heart Health

I- A history of America- Agrarian (Hard Physical Labor) to Vegetarian (Inactivity)

Background

An agrarian society is one that is based on agriculture as its prime means for support and sustenance. The society acknowledges other means of livelihood and work habits but stresses on agriculture and farming, and was the main form of socio-economic organization for most of recorded human history. This was the common way for Medieval European countries to gain wealth.

The nation's agriculturalists had worried and grumbled about “the new rules of commerce” ever since the prosperity that accompanied the Civil War had turned into widespread distress soon after the war ended. During the 1870's they did the kinds of things that concerned people generally do in an effort to cope with “hard times.” In an occupation noted for hard work they worked even harder. When this failed to change things millions of families migrated westward in an effort to enlist nature's help.

History

So in the 1870's, the farmers increasingly talked to each other about their troubles and read books on economics in an effort to discover what had gone wrong. Some of them formed organizations of economic self-help like the Grange and others assisted in pioneering new institutions of political self-help like the Greenback Party. But as the hard times of the 1870's turned into the even harder times of the 1880's, it was clear that these efforts were not really going anywhere. Indeed, by 1888 it was evident that things were worse than they had been in 1878 or 1868. More and more people saw their farm mortgages foreclosed. As everyone in rural America knew, this statistic inexorably yielded another, more ominous one: the number of landless tenant farmers in America rose steadily year after year. Meanwhile, millions of small landowners hung on grimly, their unpaid debts thrusting them dangerously close to the brink of tenantry and peonage. Hard work availed nothing. Everywhere the explanation of events was the same: “Times were hard.” (Berry, Pp 110)

For a number of reasons, all of them rather fundamental to historical analysis, the Populist moment has proved very difficult for Americans to understand. Under the circumstances, it is probably just as well to take these reasons up one at a time at the very outset in an effort to clear away as much underbrush as possible before turning our attention to the protesting farmers of the 1890's.

Vegetarianism was not very common in the U.S. until 1971, when Frances Moore Lappé's bestseller Diet for a Small Planet was published. The early human as plant-eater view is also supported by the fact that humans on meat-based diets contract major ailments such as heart disease and cancer much more frequently than people eating vegetarian diets. While the 60's are associated with hippies, and hippies with vegetarianism, in fact vegetarianism was not all that common in the 60's. It was really Diet for a Small Planet in 1971 that was the big starting point.

But 1971 America saw vegetarianism much differently than it does ...