My elves are mostly vegetarian. As excellent gardners, they raise diverse vegetables, tend orchards, eat tree nuts (walnuts, pecans, hickory nuts, chesnuts, etc.), and plant and harvest grain much like thier human counterparts. They've had plenty of time to turn thier entire forests into gardens should they want to. They keep bees, and eat alot of honey. They also keep sheep and goats, which they tend for milk, cheese, butter and wool.
It's not so much that they think eating meat is wrong, and they will hunt or eat meat when at war or when impoverished or in the aftermath of natural disasters; it's that they think eating meat shows poor class. They are so in touch with nature, so naturally gifted at communicating with the environment, that eating meat just doesn't give them the pleasure it gives other races. There is little fun in hunting when you can walk up to game and knock it over the back of the head before it realizes you are a threat to it. There is about as much fun killing and eating an animal for an elf, as there is for a human to kill and eat a horse or pet dog. An elf which made a habit of eating meat regularly would be remarked on, in much the same way that someone that abused thier pets would be. Except in the very poor, it would be seen as a sign of pending psychosis and dangerous instablity.
You can imagine how such attitudes goes over with less settled elves (barbarous, wild, and feral in the eyes of the self-titled 'high elves') who do regularly hunt.
