The vegetarian restaurant

Me too. I also love how the whole meal plus the sauerkraut cocktail cost only about $1.20

I liked that scene too, it was quite funny. Of course they laid it on a bit thick for comedic purposes which is alright. But soy-eating vegetarians, nudist health freaks, tip-refusing pacifists would indeed have seemed to be almost the same thing to a lot of people at the time.

The stereotype is a lot older (pre-WWII) and certainly distinct from hippiedom of the sixties. Hippies would become the hedonistic anything-goes types with their drugs and free love, but straight-edge "vegetarians" of the fifties were not like that. They would be seen by many as weirdly principled, well-meaning but rigid, somewhat humourless and preachy. Like the waitress in the restaurant.

I liked how they worked this into the movie. The character Richard Sherman ends up in the vegetarian restaurant because he believed it would help him stay healthy while his wife and son are away. Like the other guests in the restaurant, all of them eating alone. So there was at least an understanding that the weird vegetarians were unto something, healthwise.

Two things struck me about that scene.

One, the fact that there is nothing really new under the sun - a health food restaurant in the 50's!

Two, the very interesting point the waitress makes about wastefulness of war and the fact that nudity would make war nigh impossible since, absent uniforms, you couldn't distinguish friend from foe!



Democracy is the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. H.L. Mencken

That was a pretty funny scene. Everything was made of soybeans!

Jean Arthur made a movie called ‘More Than A Secretary’ in 1936 in which her character worked for a health food magazine. I always loved that.

http://AManAndAMouse.blogspot.com/2011/03/jean-arthur-is-more-than-secretary.html

Oh, there have been vegetarians around for a lot longer than that. There have been religious communities that followed meatless diets since the middle ages, there were plenty of 19th century vegetarians, like George Bernard Shaw, and health advocates in the early 20th century were keen on it.

Of course, until the late 20th century, vegetarian cuisine tended to be a bit... penitential, rather than tasty. Although things have greatly improved for vegetarians since then, penitential cuisine is still big with the vegans.

Hippies were around in the 40s, Google "nature boys". Those cults all came from Germany.

Update: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensreform

Lebensreform ("life reform") was a social movement in late 19th-century and early 20th-century Germany and Switzerland that propagated a back-to-nature lifestyle, emphasizing among others health food/raw food/organic food, nudism, sexual liberation, alternative medicine, and religious reform and at the same time abstention from alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and vaccines.[1][2]

There have always been mental cases. In the fifties, we laughed at them. Today, they rule over us.