Vegetarian Times founder, who later ‘liked a good steak,’ has died at age 66

‘Man, after 20 years of tofu, this is good.’

That’s Paul Obis, founder of Vegetarian Times magazine, a cultural touchstone started in 1974 that helped popularize meatless diets and gin up early advocacy for organic farming. He had just eaten a French dip sandwich.

The same Paul Obis, who has died at age 66, according to an obituary in the Chicago Sun Times, mostly stuck with a vegetarian diet throughout his life, but would treat himself to the occasional steak, his family recalled for the newspaper.

Obis reportedly died of Lewy body dementia, a disease associated with abnormal deposits of a protein called alpha-synuclein in the brain. It is usually fatal within a few years of the onset of symptoms.

Obis oversaw growth at the Vegetarian Times from a few pages that he delivered on his bicycle to an influential magazine with hundreds of thousands of readers. The magazine’s home, in Oak Park, Ill., was just a few miles from the onetime home of Chicago slaughterhouses, made infamous in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” and from the futures exchange pits of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where contracts in live cattle and pork bellies were created.

The magazine featured interviews and cover stories about famous practitioners of vegetarianism, including Fred “Mister” Rogers, who was at one point a major investor in the publication, as well as Michael Jackson, Annie Lennox, Linda McCartney, River Phoenix and Dr. Henry Heimlich, inventor of the Heimlich maneuver, according to the Sun Times. Obis sold the magazine in 1992.

After about 20 years of devout vegetarianism, Obis reportedly had a change of heart at Chicago’s lakefront annual food festival, which decades ago was pretty skimpy on vegetarian offerings. Of course, the behavior modification for Obis was in part created out of food advocacy: shunning waste.

“He took his kids to the Taste of Chicago, and one of them was full and put his French beef au jus sandwich in the trash,” Obis’s second wife, Janeen, told the Sun Times. Obis told his kids it wasn’t good to waste food. “He took it out of the trash and took a bite, and that was it,” she said. “He said, ‘Man, after 20 years of tofu, this is good.’”

Obis never did eat a lot of meat, his wife said: “He just liked a good steak now and then.”

A “Vegetarianism in America” study published by Vegetarian Times, now about 10 years old, showed that 3.2% of U.S. adults, or 7.3 million people, follow a vegetarian-based diet. The New York Post, citing more recent data, put that number at about 5% of the adult population. An additional 22.8 million follow a vegetarian-inclined diet, says the Vegetarian Times. This category eats meat only occasionally, known as “flexitarians.”