In the nineteenth century, there was much debate about the question of which way of living could be regarded as “natural.” Caricatures on vegetarianism mock ideas of the “natural” relationship between animal and man, and draft utopian as well as dystopian visions of a vegetarian future.
Since vegetarian societies began to spread and organize events in Germany, their missionary attitude and their supposed moral superiority have been ridiculed. Caricatures mocked the rigid rules of the vegetarians and their societies, accusing them of hypocrisy or of reinterpreting the self-imposed prohibitions according to their own needs and weaknesses.
In the early phase of the vegetarian movement, satirists playfully imagined how this diet and worldview affected different aspects of culture. Other cartoons make fun of the fact that vegetarianism quickly became a trend that was seen as sign of the Zeitgeist of the 1880s. Surprisingly, they overlooked the fact that vegetarianism was indeed intended as a sociocultural reform that could contribute to social and gender equality.
