More and More Americans Find Food for Thought in Vegetarianism : Diet: Concerns about health and the environment have brought meatless meals into the mainstream, and chefs are making plant-based food tasty.

Fully a quarter of the diners at Charlie Trotter’s elegant restaurant in meat-and-potatoes Chicago order the vegetable “degustation,” at $55. Fifty-five dollars for what amounts to, French name and artful cooking aside, plates of veggies.

Neither Trotter nor his restaurant is vegetarian. Nor is he alone among cooks who are finding professional satisfaction and profit in produce, cashing in on vegetarianism’s cachet as the politically correct, personally healthy diet of the moment.

“I don’t work from the premise that these are vegetable dishes,” Trotter said. “I work from the premise that these are great dishes.” Great dishes such as truffled wild mushroom and root vegetable torte with parsnip puree and red wine butter, or braised French green lentil ravioli with vinaigrette.

At The Source, the Hollywood restaurant where Woody Allen ordered a fictional mashed yeast sandwich in “Annie Hall,” veggie burgers outsell hamburgers 10 to one, owner Winton Winslow said. If that’s to be expected, how about the veggie burgers and Mississippi vegetable stew for sale at Disneyland?

No longer quirky, no longer the province of cranks or commune dwellers, vegetarianism has gone mainstream, and its cheerleaders are thrilled. They feel liberated and vindicated with each new health report praising plant-based diets and rally around the arguments that our meat-centered diet is helping destroy the planet.

Besides, vegetarian food these days can taste pretty great, as chefs tease flavor from herbs and incorporate the tastes of India, Thailand, Italy or Mexico to satisfy even the most entrenched steak lover. Hippie-style lentil loaves and ascetic bowls of boiled greens are dishes of the past.

“We do a lot of things with vegetable stocks, with infused oils,” said chef Emeril Lagasse of Emeril’s in New Orleans. A recent example: vegetable pot stickers simmered in a vegetable broth infused with cilantro, then drizzled with a homemade hot sauce.

An estimated 8 million to 12 million Americans are vegetarians.

They are bankers in gray suits worried about their hearts, college students worried about the Earth, families worried about finding good, cheap meals, and people uneasy about the way many animals are raised in this country.

They can be a feisty lot, divided even among themselves over whether to eat eggs or drink milk, whether vegetarian convenience foods are acceptable, or whether produce must be organic.

When Jenny Collura, 32, who lives near Albany, N.Y., gave up meat as a teen-ager, she found people “mildly hostile” about her decision.

No more.

“Especially in the last five or seven years, people say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m cutting down on meat,’ ” Collura said. “It’s much more identifying with me rather than being threatened by me. Much more trying to assimilate what I do than trying to shoot down what I do.”

For anyone who wants to learn, there’s abundant advice and moral support in Vegetarian Times, paid circulation 200,000. Imaginative meatless meals can be found in dozens of cookbooks. A Vegetarian Times guide in 1978 listed 350 restaurants; in 1990-91, it listed more than 1,000.

In a Gallup Poll commissioned by the National Restaurant Assn. last year, a third of the respondents said they were likely to order vegetarian.

United Airlines serves 500,000 vegetarian meals a year (still a tiny slice of the 70 million meals it serves overall), and Lufthansa ads have bragged about its vegetarian food. Supermarkets sell tofu and meat substitutes. Earth’s Best Baby Food markets six vegetarian dinners.

There are dating services for vegetarians--one is called Two-Fu. Most college cafeterias provide meatless meals. And, as this, after all, is the ‘90s, there are vegetarian support groups.

“It’s a phenomenon. I never dreamed this would happen. I think it’s significant, and I like it. It feels good,” said cookbook writer Mollie Katzen.

“The most recognizable pattern in food consumption behavior the last 20 years has been the shift away from animal products,” researchers Shida R. Henneberry of Oklahoma State University and Barbara Charlet of Iowa State University wrote in a recent issue of the Journal of Food Products Marketing.

“American consumers are eating less red meat and eggs and are consuming more crop products, which include such items as cereals, sweeteners, fruits and vegetables,” they said.

Not only that, it’s cool.

NPD Group, a firm that tracks eating patterns, found that in 1980, 96% of households ate red meat at least once in a two-week period. In 1991, the number fell to 92%. The decline has been gradual but steady, said NPD’s Harry Balzer.

“The driving force behind most eating trends is what baby boomers do,” he said. “As baby boomers get older, there is one thing they know is going to happen. They are going to expire, and they will start changing their behavior to prolong the inevitable.”

This change only trickles through the population, however, with no flood forecast. The United States remains solidly a meat-eating country. We eat, for example, 50 times as much meat as people in India, and five times as much as people in China, said Joan Dye Gussow, a nutrition education professor at Columbia Teachers College.

And while beef consumption is down--from 94.5 pounds per capita in 1976 to 68 pounds in 1990, according to the American Meat Institute--combined consumption of meat, poultry and fish is up, from 210 pounds in 1976 to 226 in 1990.

Baby boomers may take credit for saving vegetarianism from cult status, but it’s hardly their invention. Early vegetarians were called Pythagorians, for Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician who advocated a meatless diet.

In the 1800s, vegetarianism gained currency in the United States through religious and health reformers such as Sylvester Graham of cracker fame, cereal maker John Harvey Kellogg and Ellen White, a founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Nutritional and spiritual concerns often were meshed.

At the same time, most people couldn’t afford to eat much meat. Before 1800, the average European ate about 8 ounces of meat a year--the equivalent of a half-pound hamburger.

For the upper crust, it was another matter. Serving huge roasts signaled affluence, and meat held on as a status symbol in this country until the 1950s, when medical authorities began linking a high-fat diet to disease.

So those with the means turned to a high-class “peasant” food: baby vegetables grilled over applewood fires and flavored with the best virgin olive oil, or risotto with black and white truffles. No stone soup, this.

What heart doctor could complain?

Once, vegetarians’ health was thought to be in jeopardy, for lack of protein and iron in particular. Now, health experts nag meat eaters, too, to watch what they eat.

Preliminary results from a major, continuing study of 6,500 people in China suggest that the risk of heart problems, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases is reduced for people eating a plant-based diet, according to researcher T. Colin Campbell of Cornell University.

Experts say a well-planned vegetarian diet--even one without eggs or dairy products--can provide all necessary nutrients. Even the theory that you had to combine proteins from plant foods at every meal, such as rice and beans or bread and peanut butter, has been discounted. It’s enough, experts say, to make sure a day’s diet contains complementary plant proteins.

Even the very mainstream American Dietetic Assn. supports vegetarianism, although it and most health authorities say diets that include meat can be perfectly healthful, and that vegetarians who turn to chips and cookies for sustenance aren’t doing themselves any favors.

Vegetarians generally are leaner than their meat-eating friends, have lower death rates from several chronic diseases, lower blood pressures and lower cholesterol levels, the ADA says. This, however, may result from healthier living overall--more exercise and fiber, for example.

So forgive vegetarians if they get a little smug. In her cookbook “Simply Vegan,” Reed Mangels writes: “Since meat-eaters are more likely than are vegetarians to die of diet-related disease . . . perhaps meat-eating Americans should spend more time properly planning their diets.”

Cookbook writer Lorna Sass finds in her vegetarian diet a “beautiful symmetry. What is good for our health is also good for the planet.” Ecology has become a common reason people give for going vegetarian.

She struck a chord and sold 3 million books. John Robbins, of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream family, makes similar arguments through his EarthSave Foundation. And Jeremy Rifkin fueled the cattle industry’s scorn with his condemnation of it in “Beyond Beef,” published in March.

Rifkin “wants to get rid of beef. We think beef is a good product,” said Rick McCarty, spokesman for the National Cattlemen’s Assn., which counters just about every allegation the environmentalists make.

But even some environmentalists argue that livestock are compatible with a sustainable agriculture system, and even the Beyond Beef campaign, an offshoot of Rifkin’s book, asks only that people cut their red meat consumption in half, not eliminate it.

The problem, Worldwatch researcher Alan Durning says, is that American meat production overuses grain, water, land and energy, and produces too much air and water pollution.

For example, more than 70% of U.S. grain production is fed to livestock. Pigs need nearly seven pounds of corn and soy to put one pound of pork on the table. Cows, which graze also on grass, need 4.8 pounds of grain and soy for a pound of meat; chickens need 2.8 pounds of food, according to Durning.

To animal lovers, it’s the killing of another creature that provides all the motivation they need.

“We graze cattle on the Western land, and the wolves and predators are killed so they don’t kill cows. Then cows are killed and turned into burgers, and that kills people, and then the medical community kills research animals to figure out what’s killing us,” said Tony White of EarthSave in New York. “What’s wrong with this picture? It’s a cycle of death, you could say.”

Some feminists see it another way: In “The Sexual Politics of Meat” Carol Adams linked oppression of animals with that of women.

“In essence, because meat eating is a measure of a virile culture and individual, our society equates vegetarianism with emasculation or femininity,” she said.

“Beefy” men eat “Manhandlers.” Even in the nursery rhyme, the king ate four-and-20 blackbirds, while the queen was left with bread and honey.

But today, even football players might want some of the queen’s food, as meat eaters become more open-minded about vegetarianism.

Still, there’s little chance most of America ever will go at it whole hog.

“People are going to be moving toward a plant-based diet,” said Reed Mangels, a nutritionist and writer at the Vegetarian Resource Group in Baltimore. “They may still have their turkey on Thanksgiving, but they won’t have their steak every night.”

Perhaps the future holds more people like those who meet for a monthly potluck supper in Arroyo Grande, Calif. They call themselves “Vegetarian Inclined People.”