Apologies for thenot working, but here it is copied and pasted

[Guest guest]

VEGETABLE LOVE

The history of vegetarianism.

by STEVEN SHAPIN

Issue of 2007-01-22

Posted 2007-01-15

 

 

During the great black-pudding controversies of the late seventeenth

and early eighteenth centuries, it was put about that Sir Isaac

Newton abstained from this dish because of the Old Testament

prohibition against eating blood. After his death, Newton's niece

defended his reputation, insisting that he had followed St. Paul's

injunction not to make a fuss about food prohibitions—don't be like

the bloody Jews—and to " take & eat what comes from the shambles

without asking questions for conscience sake. " It was true, she

explained, that Newton refrained from eating black pudding and also

rabbits (whose meat remained bloody because they were killed by

strangulation), but his reasons were quite different from those

alleged: " He said meats strangled were forbid because that was a

painfull death & the letting out the blood the easiest & that animals

should be put to as little pain as possible, that the reason why

eating blood was forbid was because it was thought the eating

blood inclined men to be cruel. "

By the time of Newton's death, in 1727, the English black-pudding

debate had been running for most of a century. In the " Triall of a

Black-Pudding " (1652), Thomas Barlow, a future bishop of Lincoln,

noted that God had specifically proscribed blood eating among the

Hebrews, whose laws of kashruth mandated the slaughtering and

handling of food animals so as to drain them, as far as possible, of

residual blood. Genesis 9:4 said, " Flesh with the life thereof, which

is the Blood thereof, shall ye not eat, " and Leviticus 17:10

underlined the prohibition:

" Whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers

that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even

set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off

from among his people. " Barlow pointed out that the New Testament had

never rescinded this law, despite the relief from various other

Jewish dietary prohibitions offered by both Jesus and Paul;

furthermore, the ban on eating blood and the flesh of strangled

animals was repeated in the Acts of the Apostles. God, Barlow

asserted, " would not have Men eat the life and the soul of Beasts, a

thing barbarous and unnaturall. " No meat was unclean in itself, but

that bit of black pudding in the Great British Breakfast was a

violation of both Jewish law and the Christian dispensation.

In Newton's time and beyond, you couldn't discuss meat eating or

its rejection without biting into some tough theology, and Tristram

Stuart's sprawling " The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of

Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times " (Norton; $29.95) shows just

how hard it was to decipher God's dietary will and how many other

considerations—both sacred and secular—were wrapped up in decisions

about whether or not it was right to eat animals. The book is a

magnificently detailed and wide-ranging collection of scholarship on

what has been said to justify either refraining from meat or

consuming it. Of course, a history of justifications is not the same

thing as a history of what people actually ate, or didn't. For many

people, through most of history, not eating meat was a given: it was

just too scarce or expensive.

But, among the few who had the resources, meat's richness, fatty

satisfaction, and nourishment were much appreciated, as in the

wonderful Scottish Selkirk G

race:

Some hae meat and canna eat,

And some wad eat that want it;

But we hae meat and we can eat,

And sae the Lord be thankit.

 

With few exceptions, European proponents of vegetarianism emerged

from those who had meat. You can define vegetarianism in any number

of ways, but the simple absence of meat from the diet isn't an

interesting way to do it. To be culturally significant, you need some

sort of principled justification, and there has been no shortage of

that. The arguments that Stuart assembles are part of an immensely

tangled and resonant debate. There's no demonstration of the

wrongness of eating flesh that hasn't been countered by equally

powerful arguments for its rightness, and different justifications

have a way of both supporting and interfering with one another.

Broadly speaking, though, for many centuries the debate centered on

three questions, each of which was reflected in Newton's dietary

choices and the objections raised to them: there was the religious

question, concerning the implications of Scripture for human

alimentation; there were medical questions about the effect of eating

meat on human health and character; and there was a philosophical

debate about the proper relationship between man and other animals.

There was no distinct category you could call moral, because all of

them were, as they remain, intensely moral. Vegetarianism has always

been less about why you should eat plants than about why you

shouldn't eat animals.

And so arguments about vegetarianism, by drawing attention to rights

that we claim for ourselves but deny to other animals, inevitably

involve basic questions about what it is to be human.

When Newton's friends and biographers tried to clarify his views on

black pudding and rabbit meat, they weren't afraid that he'd be

thought a closet Jew; they were concerned that he'd be taken for

something called a Pythagorean. In the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras

of Samos—he of the theorem relating the hypotenuse and the

perpendicular sides of a right triangle—founded a community of

mystical mathematicians who, it was said, observed a general

prohibition against eating animals, " as having a right to live in

common with mankind. " Interest in the Pythagorean ban was renewed in

the third and fourth centuries A.D. by pagan Neoplatonist

philosophers seeking purification of the soul in advance of the

afterlife, and it persisted until at least the early nineteenth

century. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the resonance

of the term " Pythagorean " was more dietary than mathematical. One

explanation of Pythagoreans' vegetarianism was their adherence to a

doctrine known as metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls. If

your soul, after death, could pass into the body of another animal

species, vegetarianism was the only sure way to avoid cannibalism.

For Christians, however, metempsychosis was heresy. Immortal souls

did not migrate between species; they shuttled between earth, Heaven,

and Hell—sometimes disembodied from their human frame but never

entering into that of another species.

During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, anyone advocating

vegetarianism might be suspected of belief in pagan metempsychosis.

Even among the devout, there was ample room for disagreement.

Original sin—eating fruit from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of

Good and Evil instead of from the permitted Tree of Life—was clearly

a bad food choice, but there was controversy about Adam and Eve's

dietary punishment. Some said that it was the labor of agriculture or

cooking:

" Thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt

thou eat bread. " Others, however, said that the punishment was the

eating of meat. After the Fall, plants had become less nutritious, or

the human body had become less able to extract nutriment from plants,

and we were now metabolically obliged to kill animals and eat their

flesh.

Meat eating, then, was a permanent reminder of our sinfulness. Some

commentators went further, saying that our fallen nature had given us

a taste for blood, and that we could gauge the extent of our

wickedness by our relish for the flesh of dead animals and by our

willingness to make them suffer. Other Christians rejected all

potentially vegetarian interpretations, pointing out that God, from

the outset, had given Adam and Eve " dominion over the fish of the

sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all

the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the

earth, " and that when, some verses later, God mentioned the edibility

of plants, he referred to them as " meat. " Some even argued that the

suffering of animals killed for food was proof of their sinful

nature. Flesh eating was not only part of God's plan; it might even

be a divine duty.

When you cited and interpreted Genesis, you were, at the same time,

taking a view on what was natural for human beings to eat—what their

original diet was and how both that diet and the human constitution

had been affected by the fall from grace. For this reason, religious

arguments about food have shaded into concerns about what is good for

your hysical and mental health. The medical framework handed down

from the first-century physician Galen sought to explain how

different diets worked on your emotions and your personality.

Evaluations and prescriptions might differ, but a causal link between

diet and character was generally accepted. Meat made you brave;

bloody meat made you bloody-minded.

Late-seventeenth-century English vegetarian writers blamed meat

eating for making people " sordid, surly, and Soldiers " ; it was

something people did to have their " bestial Nature fortify'd. "

But similar reasoning could be enlisted on behalf of the carnivore.

The roast beef of Olde England was character-building food, stout

fare for stouthearted men, while it was widely presumed that a

vegetable diet made men weak, timorous, and effeminate. In

Shakespeare's " Henry V, " on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, the

French observe that the " island of England breeds very valiant

creatures, " feeding on " great meals of beef, " so that they " eat like

wolves and fight like devils. " Conversely, it was common for

physicians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to proscribe

meat for patients who had weak constitutions or led sedentary lives.

In Galenic medical traditions, roast beef was forbidden to scholars

and philosophers, either because it stimulated their

natural " melancholic " humor or because the difficulty of digesting it

drained the vital spirits away from higher contemplation.

In " Twelfth Night, " Sir Andrew Aguecheek confesses, " I am a great

eater of beef and I be lieve that does harm to my wit. " Belief in the

causal connection between meat and the masculine virtues persisted

even after the decline of the Galenic medical tradition: Mahatma

Gandhi, before reconverting to his original vegetarianism, briefly

thought " that meat eating was good, that it would make me strong and

daring, and that, if the whole country took to meat eating, the

English could be overcome. "

The encounter between Indian and European traditions provides

Stuart's book with one of its most striking and contentious

assertions.

Europeans, having long believed that animal flesh was necessary to

sustain vigorous life, were astonished at the existence of the pagan

yet pious Brahmins, who ate no meat but evidently thrived. Stuart, a

British historian who lived for some years in India, endeavors to

show that the spread of vegetarian doctrines in the West during the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a result of growing

familiarity with the customs of colonized India. Evidently on the

side of history's herbivores, he " outs " as vegetarians canonical

thinkers who occasionally reduced their meat intake or advised others

to do so; he judges the number of Enlightenment vegetarians to have

been " incalculably large " ; and he celebrates vegetarianism as the

leading edge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought. Like so

many other arguments in the vegetarian debate, though, the news from

India could be used by both sides. Were the Brahmins moral exemplars,

or did they prove the association between vegetarianism and religious

error?

There is also a big difference between those who refrained from

eating meat as part of an abstemious medical regimen and those who

took a principled stand against the killing of animals for food, and

Stuart tends to underplay the ambiguity of their dietary choices. The

great eighteenth-century Scottish diet doctor George Cheyne, who at

one point weighed four hundred and forty-eight pounds, was famous for

having shed much of his fat by adopting a diet of vegetables and

milk, and Stuart notes with approval that Cheyne urged a plant-based

diet on many of his patients, including the novelist Samuel

Richardson. But Stuart omits to say that Cheyne did not prescribe

vegetarianism universally: he reckoned that someone following an

ordinary course of life might healthily consume half a pound

of " Flesh Meat " a day. Cheyne was outraged by rumors that he forbade

meat eating as a general rule. Vegetarianism was reserved for the

most desperate medical circumstances.

Cheyne's prescriptions were based on the new matter theory of the

scientific revolution. He thought that the smallest particles of meat

were so grossly sized and shaped that they eventually occluded the

vessels and obstructed the flow of vital fluids. The fine corpuscles

of plant matter had none of these inconveniences, and so were much

better for you.

But the medical commendation of plant eating retained a strong

theological dimension, as when Cheyne wrote, " The infinitely wise

Author of Nature has so contrived Things, that the most remarkable

Rules of preserving Life and Health are moral Duties commanded us. "

The medical idiom for talking about proper diet linked as easily to

social and political concerns as it did to religious ones. The

connection between eating carne and a carnal character made

abstinence from flesh eating attractive to radical thinkers who

disapproved of violence, war, and the brutish oppression of man by

man. And some drew an analogy between the treatment of lower animals

and of the lower orders. The seventeenth-century English vegetarian

polemicist Thomas Tryon thought that people ate meat so " that they

might act like Lions, and Devils, over their own kind as well as over

all other Creatures. " Many of the radical political and religious

sects that erupted onto the English scene in the mid-seventeenth

century used diet to criticize the established social order. If, as

the sectaries maintained, God was present in all animate creatures,

then animals were our brothers and eating them was a sin.

The eighteenth century saw the emergence of an argument for

vegetarianism from the perspective of animal rights. George Cheyne

and other commentators argued that the habit of killing, like that of

meat eating itself, hardened the heart and the nerves, both

figuratively and literally.

The squeamish human response to animal suffering was the authentic

one; the callous reaction induced by familiarity was accounted

artificial or false. " To see the Convulsions, Agonies and Tortures of

a Poor Fellow-Creature . . . dying to gratify Luxury . . . must

require a rocky Heart, and a great Degree of Cruelty and Ferocity, "

Cheyne wrote. In the early eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville,

in " The Fable of the Bees, " judged, " There is of all the Multitude

not one Man in ten but what will own, (if he was not brought up in a

Slaughter-house) that of all Trades he could never have been a

Butcher; and I question whether ever any body so much as killed a

Chicken without Reluctancy the first time. " Previous eras had seen

meat eating as constitutionally conducive to violence, but by the

time Jeremy Bentham published " An Introduction to the Principles of

Morals and Legislation, " in 1789, the ground had shifted: meat eating

was violence.

These philosophical and psychological arguments became central to

debates about meat eating and remain so. In the seventeenth century,

Descartes was at one extreme in insisting that animals were mere

machines, no more capable of experiencing pain than a clock, yet even

his followers had to come to terms with solid evidence that many

people nonetheless felt moved by signs of animal pain. The Cartesians

had a response: any such human reaction was itself just a mechanical

reflex. There were no moral obstacles to keep you from enjoying the

fruits of the slaughterhouse. For others, however, our capacity to be

moved by animal pain was powerful proof of fellowship, proof that we

share a moral order with the beasts. Those who framed such arguments

didn't doubt that this sympathy was a natural human reaction,

evidence to be set against scriptural permission to eat meat.

Compassion-based vegetarianism soon assumed the tone of a moral

crusade. The poet Shelley, a sometime vegetarian, was certain that

Robespierre's Terror would never have happened had the Paris

population " satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of

vegetable nature " and that Napoleon would never have made himself

emperor had he " descended from a race of vegetable feeders. " George

Bernard Shaw is said to have asked, " While we ourselves are the

living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal

conditions on this earth? " Yet there is no straight path from the

renunciation of meat to a politics of virtue. Nazi vegetarianism

raises obvious problems in this regard. Stuart asserts that Hitler's

strict adherence to a vegetarian diet was largely

medical: " Throughout his life, Hitler continued to believe that

abstaining from meat alleviated his chronic flatulence, constipation,

sweating, nervous tension, trembling of muscles, and the stomach

cramps that convinced him he was dying of cancer. " The Nazi

leadership, however, sought to extrapolate ideologies of wider

application from the Führer's dietary choices. Himmler praised the

constitutional virtues of vegetable consumption; he wanted the Waffen

S.S. to go vegetarian and thought that once the Germans had

dietetically cleansed themselves they would undoubtedly rule the

world. Göring arrived at a twisted version of the humanitarian

argument, threatening " those who still think they can treat animals

as inanimate property " with the concentration camp.

What about us? Theological arguments still flourish: witness such

best-sellers as Don Colbert's " What Would Jesus Eat? " (2002) and

Jordan S. Rubin's " The Maker's Diet " (2004). So do medical concerns,

though they have changed their idiom—from the Galenic " breeding of

ill humors " to modern worries about, say, the accumulation of

cholesterol plaques. Recent epidemiological studies suggest that

adult vegetarians tend to have lower blood pressure, lower

cholesterol levels, lower rates of obesity, and, more

controversially, higher childhood I.Q.s—though vegans tend to have

lower I.Q.s than their carnivorous peers, and the nature of the links

between vegetarianism, health, and I.Q. is unclear.

Moral arguments about animal suffering are still central to the

popular debate. Paul McCartney once said, " If slaughterhouses had

glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian, " and it's true that many

of those who have little experience of what goes on in an abattoir

are repulsed by any kind of firsthand knowledge, or even by reading

vivid accounts.

But things are different on the other side of the slaughterhouse

wall. Those who kill animals in the course of their working day may

quickly become habituated to it, and to dismiss this effect as mere

desensitization effectively discounts great knowledge of animal death

in favor of slight knowledge. Similarly, those who like to

romanticize country people are frequently discomfited by their

uncuddly ways with livestock. A major source of the sympathy with

animal suffering that developed so strongly from the Enlightenment

may well be the pattern of urbanization that removed so many of us

from daily experience of how our food is produced. Why is

it " natural " not to know very much about " nature " ?

We also hear a lot, these days, about environmental justifications

for vegetarianism, although revulsion at factory farming may point

not to vegetarianism but to eating sustainably produced—and probably

tastier—meat. Environmentally driven vegetarianism is newly

prominent, but it has a convoluted history that goes back at least to

the late eighteenth century. The English divine William Paley

believed that statecraft should aim at maximizing a nation's

population, reckoning that an acre of potentially arable land given

over to " grain, roots, and milk " could support twice the number of

people as the same land devoted to grazing animals to be killed for

food. Adam Smith recommended potatoes over pasturage for much the

same reason. Utilitarian political economy was closely related to

patriotism, and continued to be, in some quarters, into the twentieth

century: during the extreme food shortages at the beginning of the

Third Reich, Göring inveighed against farmers who gave grain to

animals which should have been used to feed Germans. These days, the

environmental argument is not about maximizing the number of people

that the environment can sustain but about sustaining the

environment.

Does producing a pound of lentils involve burning less fossil fuel

than producing a pound of hamburger meat, or more? How many square

miles of forest are cleared to graze cattle? How much biodiversity is

lost both in grazing livestock and in raising the corn and soybeans

to fatten them?

A recent report by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization

reckons that at least eighteen per cent of the global-warming effect

comes from livestock, more than is caused by all the world's

transportation systems. It has been estimated that forty per cent of

global grain output is used to feed animals rather than people, and

that half of this grain would be sufficient to eliminate world hunger

if—and it's not a small if—the political will could be found to

insure equitable distribution.

Yet the energy-cost argument is formidably complicated and cannot by

itself support refusing all forms of meat in favor of all forms of

plant matter: shooting and eating the deer chewing up the tulips in

your garden may turn out to be more environmentally virtuous than

dining on tofu manufactured from Chinese soybeans, and walking to the

local supermarket for a nice hanger steak cut from a grass-fed New

Zealand steer may be kinder to the planet than getting into your

Toyota Prius to drive five miles for some organic Zambian green

beans. (Stuart takes his ecological convictions seriously: he

identifies himself in interviews as a " freegan, " diving into

Dumpsters to retrieve discarded food, disturbed that " the food thrown

away in [britain] alone is enough to feed millions of people. " )

Stuart is of the opinion that vegetarians have long had the best of

the intellectual arguments. If so, that just shows how little

intellectual arguments matter to populations' eating decisions. The

number of vegetarians in developed countries is evidently on the

increase, but the world's per-capita consumption of meat rises

relentlessly: in 1981, it was 62 pounds per year; in 2002, the figure

stood at 87.5 pounds. In carnivorous America, it increased from 238.1

to 275.1 pounds, and the practice is spreading in traditionally

herbivorous Asia. Indians' meat consumption has risen from 8.4 to

11.5 pounds since 1981; in China, it has increased from 33.1 to an

astonishing 115.5 pounds. This result has nothing to do with

principle and everything to do with prosperity. Stuart's " bloodless

revolution " has been much less a conversion than a conversation.

The history of vegetarian (and anti-vegetarian) thought neither adds

up nor goes anywhere, except in the sense that it goes everywhere

that people disposed to reflection have explored when asking what it

means to be human and to be good. It's a history of human morality,

but it's no less a history of human ingenuity in moral argumentation.

When the sixteen-year-old Ben Franklin converted to vegetarianism, he

seemed to have been struck both by its health benefits and by moral

sensitivity to animal suffering. But Franklin soon fell off the

wagon. On his first sea voyage from Boston, his ship was becalmed off

Block Island: Our People set about catching Cod, & haul'd up a great

many. Hitherto I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal

Food; and on this Occasion, I consider'd . . . the taking every Fish

as a kind of unprovok'd Murder, since none of them had or ever could

do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter. All this seem'd

very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, &

when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smeled admirably well. I

balanc'd some time between Principle & Inclination: till I

recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken

out of their Stomachs: Then thought I, if you eat one another, I

don't see why we mayn't eat you. So I din'd upon Cod very heartily

and continu'd to eat with other People, returning only now & then

occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a

reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason

for everything one has a mind to do.