Review of Tristram Stuart's The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times

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VEGETABLE LOVE

by STEVEN SHAPIN

The history of vegetarianism.

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 hi 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 an also rabbits (whose meat

remained bloody because they were killed by

strangulation), but his reasons were quit

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Testament had never rescinded this law, despite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 unnatural. " 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 Grace:

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. I the

sixth century B.C., Pythagoras of Samos-he of the

theorem relating the hypotenuse and the

perpendicular sides of 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;

the 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 physical 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 believe 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 an 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 man

other arguments in the vegetarian debate, though,

the news from India could be used by both sides.

Were the Brahmin 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 change

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. "

 

 

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