Are Elves vegatarian?

[Alfirin]

Originally Posted by mhagain

Amid all the seriousness it's good to see someone who's a fun guy.

Me too, so long is it doesn't breach the forum's morels.

[Tuor in Gondolin]

Legolas seems to have had no trouble eating meat. From LoTR "Flotsam And Jetsom":

"And you need not turn up your nose at the provender, Master Gimli," said Merry. "This is not orc-stuff, but man-food, as Treebeard calls it.Will you have wine or beer? There's a barrel inside there - very passable.And this is first-rate salted pork. Or I can cut you some rashers of bacon and broil them, if you like. I am sorry there is no green stuff: the deliveries have been rather interrupted in the last few days!"...
The three [Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli] were soon busy with their meal [no hint that legolas didn't munch on the pork or bacon

[Tuor in Gondolin]

And (from his website) Michael Martinez' opinion is:

Are the Elves Vegetarians?
February 12, 2013
By Michael Martinez
Q: Are the Elves Vegetarians?
ANSWER: This question often arises, and since the release of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” many people have been asking if the Elves are vegetarian or if Elves eat meat. When Thorin and Company are fed by the Elves of Rivendell, the dialog implies that the Elves do not serve meat to the Dwarves. However, at one point Fili tosses a sausage to Bombur, who is seated on a table. The extra weight of the sausage is enough to cause the table to collapse.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth most Elves eat meat. The only Elves specifically said to be vegetarians were the Green-elves of Ossiriand. In Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth, it’s hard to find an Elf willing to eat meat. Still, you have to wonder where Fili’s Rivendell sausage came from.

]

[mhagain]

you have to wonder where Fili’s Rivendell sausage came from

Jesus! There's a mental image I could have done without!

To say nothing of "Kili's Elvenking-Halls sausage".

[Alfirin]

The way I try and reconcile the line and the sausage is by assuming that the elves of Rivendell are not WHOLLY vegetarian, but they have a diet more along the lines of a Mediterrenean/southern Peasant line, where meat is often a flavoring/accent in a dish, not the main feature. And that this might be in contrast to the normal dwarven diet, which is much more along the "meat and potatoes/starch" line (since the dwarves tend to trade for a lot of thier food, they may be used to mostly eating things that keep and travel well. Merry does apologize to Gimli for their being no "green stuff" in the quote Tuor found, but it is unclear if he is aplogizing for something that he actually thinks Gimli would want to eat, or he is making a slightly humorous comment based on the difference between what would be normal fare for a dwarf and hobbit diets (which probably DO have a fair amount of vegetables, given that gardening is a viable profession and the love the hobbits have for gardens.)
Speaking of alternate foods (now that we are occasionally expanding into other things elves may or may not eat. Doe you think, if elves are not big meat eaters, they eat a lot of dairy, or is their diet more along the lines of veganisim? I'm sort of two minds here. On one hand, since dairy tends to require a fair amount of pastureland (for whatever animals you are milking to graze on) a part of me want to think not, at least not for Lothlorien )which seems to be mostly surrounded by trees and Mirkwood which is more or less the same (Rivindell's valley may be bigger so they may have room for pastureland.) On the other hand, something in me keeps thinking they do (it may be that when I feast heard lembas called waybread, I though they meant wheybread i.e. bread made with milk whey instead of water.) There is also the question of if the elves really are vegan I'm not sure how much veggie protein is around. ME seems to have such New World crops as potatoes and tobacco (and tomatoes too, in one of the early drafts of the hobbit) so they might have common beans. But if they don't your veggie protein choices seem a little limited (you'd have lentils, starchy peas (like the Carlin pea) Broad (fava) beans, chickpeas (probably only in southern places like Gondor and the Harads and so not in third age elf zones really) grasspea (maybe) edible lupines (again, a big maybe) and after that I (who am a botanist) run dry of guesses.

[mhagain]

Originally Posted by Alfirin

when I feast heard lembas called waybread, I though they meant wheybread i.e. bread made with milk whey instead of water

Even without the misreading they still need fields (or at least "guarded lands and sunlit glades") for growing wheat (which Letter 210 states to be the primary ingredient; I know JRRT said "corn" in the Lembas essay, but in the UK "corn" is just a generic term for any cereal; "maize" is the New World cereal). It's certainly the case that JRRT didn't write much about Middle-earth agriculture, but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist.

[Alfirin]

I agree that they'd need land to grow the grain. Given that the recipie was supposedly given to them by Yavanna herself, it's tempting to think that wild wheat could be used for maximum connection to nature (and since lembas is unleavened, gluten contents don't really apply here.) But the problem is the same as the one with the chickpeas; assuming most wild plants are roughly where they are latitude wise in our world (someone once correct my question about finding bay laurels in Ithillien by pointing out that, latitude wise, Ithillien would be roughly where Tuscany is in our world) The third age elves are mostly too far north to have it. Wild einkorn and emmer (which are basically the wild ancestors of wheat, give or take some goat grass genes) are really only found in places like Turkey and Macedonia, which I keep thinking would actually put them somewhere in Mordor in ME.