Laura Shapiro’s “What She Ate” and What it Means that Hitler was a Vegetarian

After trawling the library offerings for the works of Barbara Pym, I came across a wonderful book of food history: Laura Shapiro’s “What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food that Tells Their Stories.” Shapiro’s detailed look at a wide range of women over many years of history offers much insight into different people and places.

The section on Barbara Pym is an engaging look at how Pym defended the art of British cookery against an international assumption that British food was bland and unappealing.

And how could we not devote space to the vapidity of mainstream feminism encapsulated in the person of Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan. The section detailing her lifetime of eating reveals just how disordered was the sex-crazed woman who defined a generation of women’s culture (one simply must be disordered to claim enjoyment in super-sized, concentrated portions of diet Jell-O. Truly vile! “Heaven!” according to Gurley Brown). Beyond criticism of her food choices, we can enjoy Shapiro’s inclusion of this summation of Gurley Brown’s life and work:

Gloria Steinem, who was always Helen’s favorite feminist, begged her once to say something strong and positive about herself—not coy, not flirtatious, but something that reflected the serious, complicated person who was in there, under the wig and makeup. Gloria had glimpsed that person and wanted her to speak out. Helen tried her best, she really did. “I’m skinny!” she exclaimed. “I’m skinny!”

Feminist icon. Culture maker. No wonder women are so miserable a few decades downstream of such nonsense.

But one of the most arresting revelations in the book comes in the discussion of the daily food rituals and weight management of Eva Braun, mistress of Adolf Hitler. As is so often a cause for fury for feminists, it so happens that one of the most memorable factoids in the book is about a man. Confound it! Even a book about six women ends up being a book about a man!

Here, we can reflect on Camille Paglia’s observation that men occupy both the extremes of genius and depravity throughout history. While there is no female Mozart, there is also no female Hitler (or Pol Pot, or Joseph Stalin, or Mao Zedong, or Ted Bundy). There are plenty of women who have committed grave evils, but none noticeably on the scale of men like these. Much as we may wish to ignore sex differences, they have not been (and likely cannot be) erased.

In the end, Hitler is the person of greatest historical consequence in the book, and the discussion of Braun’s diet is largely an examination of Hitler’s. It turns out Hitler was a committed vegetarian. That is not something I had ever heard before, and it is fascinating. Some may assume it was posturing—like so much of Hitler’s persona—but accounts of his personal chef and documented evidence suggest that he was, in fact, in the main vegetarian. Additionally, there are accounts of Hitler lecturing his dinner guests about the cruelty to animals involved in raising and butchering meat. Surely, they did not even have factory farming on the scale we now expect.

What do Hitler’s food choices have to do with the rest of us? A lot, unfortunately. That a man could simultaneously care and express heartfelt sentiment for dumb animals while planning the mass internment, starvation, brutal execution, and experimentation upon innocent men, women, and children reveals a possibility for self-delusion that should give us pause. Just as we like to assume that we would be smuggling Jews out of Nazi-occupied Europe when it’s more than likely we would have remained silent and complicit, we are capable of caring deeply for a just cause, committing ourselves to it, and still also committing evil at the same time.

This is perhaps how Sam Bankman-Fried managed to commit fraud and crime on an absurd scale while keeping his parents (Stanford law professors specializing, unbelievably, in legal ethics and financial regulation) convinced of his legitimacy and moral rectitude.

He gave to animal welfare causes. The money wasn’t for him. He was good. Sure, swindling billions of dollars from investors is not the same as overseeing the murder of millions of innocent civilians and a world war, but it’s less than what any of us would desire for our children.

If ever we are convinced of our own unassailable moral uprightness, we can be sure we are falling prey to the purity cult. This is a condition that eccentric academic turned politician Cornel West describes as “childish and addicted to innocence.” The inability to face our faults and failings is a recipe for grand delusion and significant harm to ourselves and others.

West memorably proclaimed, “You’re not a spectator; you’re a participant in this formation of your soul, you’re a participant in this attempt to be a certain kind of human being before the worms get you.”

What we eat says a lot about who we are. It’s not about finding food that is perfectly cruelty free. Yes, we should seek ethical means of food production, but there are no solutions, only trade-offs. What matters more is the purpose of our eating, whom we eat with and how we eat. The goal is not to be perfectly skinny or perfectly kind to animals. The goal is to be a flawed but striving person who puts people before the desire for false purity and affirmation of our own rightness.