Bell the vegetarian

A friend has drawn my attention to a letter from Kerson Huang about my husband John Stewart Bell (Physics Today, December 2015, page 8).

The writer claims that John was a vegetarian because of me. That is quite untrue. I believe that, influenced by George Bernard Shaw, he became a vegetarian in his teens. When I first met him he had been a vegetarian for many years. When we married it was, of course, convenient that I had been vegetarian all my life—my parents were vegetarian. As to the story about a hamburger, I can only presume that Kerson Huang misunderstood. My husband would never have eaten one.