A few weeks ago, Vienna Beef opened a history museum in Chicago as part of the company’s 125th anniversary celebration. Among the artifacts on display are hand-painted advertisements of mid-century vintage, a meat grinder dating from 1859, a gold-plated cocktail weenie, and a photo of the stand at the city’s world’s fair in 1893, where the Vienna Beef hot dog made its debut. Visitors who work up an appetite during a tour can head over to the factory store cafe and tuck into a Chicago-style dog.

On a recent afternoon, a mile east of the Vienna Beef museum, Kay Stepkin swung open the front door of the Lincoln Park library, where a very different Chicago food story was on view. The sprightly 75-year-old made a beeline to a small, carpeted room at the building’s rear that was the temporary home of the National Vegetarian Museum, which she founded in 2016 and debuted last year. The first vegetarian museum in the country, its name nods at grand ambition—but its present is rather humble. The nascent institution’s first travelling exhibit, “What Does It Mean to Be Vegetarian?,” has been on a tour of libraries across Chicago. It’s a modest display, made up of a dozen seven-foot-by-three-foot panels littered with archival materials (a reproduction of the 1974 debut issue of Vegetarian Times, featuring a recipe for mushroom loaf), persuasive factoids (“Up to 51% of greenhouse gases come from livestock”), and quotes from notable vegetarians (quoth Einstein: “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet”). There’s also a small video installation that traces plant-based eating through the ages, from Pythagoreanism in the 6th century B.C. to the present day.

Having spotted Stepkin passing through the foyer, a librarian stepped out from behind a mountain of books on the front desk and sheepishly approached. “I’m so sorry, Kay,” she said in a whisper. “I turned off the video. Honestly, no one was watching it.”

The report didn’t seem to trouble Stepkin. “Oh, that’s okay,” she said, smiling. “Would you mind turning it back on?” The librarian fired up the monitor and the chirpy voice of the video’s narrator, vegan author and podcaster Victoria Moran, filled the otherwise empty room.

A longtime vegan raised in Chicago whose father made his living as a wholesale meat dealer and delivery man, Stepkin always knew a vegetarian museum would be a tough sell here. The city’s most well-known culinary identity is deeply anchored in flesh—in slaughterhouses and steakhouses, in Polish sausage and Italian beef, in hot dogs and deadly serious hot dog condiment orthodoxy. But there’s another, long-neglected, chapter of Chicago food history: Around the turn of the 20th century, even as the city’s South Side was the capital of the U.S. meatpacking industry, Chicago emerged as the center of the American vegetarian movement. During that period, the city saw a then-unparalleled surge of new vegetarian restaurants, vegetarian grocery stores, vegetarian social clubs, and vegetarian publishing houses. To Stepkin, these facts add up to a kind of counterhistory, and a response to the prevailing narrative of Chicago as “Hog Butcher for the World”—poet Carl Sandburg’s enduring description of the city circa 1914.

Stepkin was first acquainted with vegetarianism in the mid-1960s, during a two-year stint living in Berkeley, California. Upon returning to Chicago, she secured a loan from her father, and in 1971 opened the Bread Shop, a bakery and natural food store in the Lakeview neighborhood on the city’s North Side. “Until I opened the Bread Shop, I had never met another vegetarian in Chicago,” she says. “But as soon as I opened the doors, they started coming in.” Stepkin soon spun off an adjacent vegetarian restaurant, the Bread Shop Kitchen, which she shuttered in 1982. For more than 40 years, Stepkin had believed that the Bread Shop, which she closed in 1996, had been Chicago’s first business catering to vegetarians. To her knowledge, no one disputed the claim.