The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

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posted the link, but here is the complete item:

 

http://www.buddhistfood.org/references/bloodless_revolution.htm

The Bloodless Revolution by Tristram Stuart

 

The Bloodless Revolution reached every corner of

European civilisation. It was a crucial factor in

the evolving definition of animals, and a

stimulant to movements as important as animal

rights and environmentalism. No European country

was free from its influence, and in its story

every modern European can find the origins of

their current practices and perceptions.

 

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth

centuries, a new sensibility towards animals and

the environment emerged in the West, one that

often seemed to go hand-in-hand with broader

radical politics and ideologies. One of the

concrete manifestations of this new ethical

perspective was abstinence from eating meat.

Minds as great as Francis Bacon, René Descartes

and Isaac Newton turned to the question -

realising that it was the key to understanding

how Mankind ought to treat Nature. The writers of

the Enlightenment weren't the first to espouse

what we now think of as vegetarianism however -

they were preceded by centuries of mystics,

philosophers, and religious thinkers from many

different continents and traditions, for some of

whom vegetarianism was not only a beneficial

dietary regime but also a means of expressing

dissent from the norms of a metaphorically

rapacious, carnivorous consumer society.

 

The Bloodless Revolution surveys the history of

vegetarianism, offering the first historical

account of how Eastern philosophy merged with

indigenous traditions of Christian ascetism and

medical science to spawn the movement of Western

vegetarianism. Stuart explores the figures and

proponents of vegetarianism of the modern age,

from Rousseau and Voltaire to Goethe and

Lamartine. Interest in vegetarianism is at a peak

in contemporary Western society for a variety of

reasons, and this is a timely examination of the

provenance and meaning of modern vegetarianism.

 

Published May 2006 by HarperCollins

 

About the author

Tristram Stuart graduated from Cambridge

University in 1999 and has since been a freelance

writer for newspapers and magazines including

India Express and The Hindu and Down to Earth.

The Bloodless Revolution is his first book.

 

 

 

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article1222967.ece

HARPERCOLLINS £25 (628pp) £22.50 (free p & p) from

0870 079 8897

The Bloodless Revolution, by Tristram Stuart

How meat became murder

By Chandak Sengoopta

Published: 01 September 2006

 

Even passionate carnivores like myself happily

turn vegetarian in India. Indian vegetable

recipes are so exquisite and endlessly varied

that they make meat seem boring and vulgar. Even

a humble item like dal (lentils) comes in

numerous recipes, which change radically as one

moves across the country. Unfortunately, the menu

of the average British curry house does not

reflect this variety, and vegetarians who have

never been to India can have no idea of what they

are missing.

 

This ignorance, Tristram Stuart's massive and

magnificently detailed history of radical

vegetarianism suggests, is paradoxical, for

vegetarianism took hold in the West only after

European travellers discovered that most Indians

lived happily on vegetarian diets. Like all

travellers' tales, European reports of Indian

vegetarianism were partial - they did not

appreciate that only Hindus were vegetarian, but

not all of them and not under all circumstances.

 

For all their flaws, these accounts led to some

serious soul-searching in the land of roast beef.

The 17th-century dissenter Thomas Tryon hailed

the Hindu reverence for life, declaring that the

Brahmins of India represented " the purest

remnants of the paradisal tradition left on

earth " . Tryon's vegetarian philosophy found many

followers, including Benjamin Franklin and Percy

Bysshe Shelley. The Indian connection was

respectfully noted. Even Isaac Newton, who may

not have been exclusively vegetarian, declared

that reports about the sages of India had

convinced him that " Mercy to Beasts " was a divine

commandment " from which Europeans had long since

apostatised " .

 

Not every emerging rationale for vegetarianism

had much to do with India. Some Christians

claimed that Adam and Eve, before their Fall,

never ate meat. Philosophers like Rousseau

endorsed vegetarianism because they wanted humans

to live in tune with nature. Many anatomists

argued that flesh-eating creatures had sharp,

pointed teeth whereas humans' were more like the

broad and blunt teeth of herbivores: God had not

designed humans to eat meat.

 

Medical men recommended meatless diets for less

lofty reasons. George Cheyne, a celebrated

18th-century physician, was perhaps the earliest

" diet doctor " . Grossly obese in younger days,

Cheyne learnt of the virtues of an abstemious

life from mystical texts. Resorting to milk,

seeds and roots, he quickly lost some of his

surplus pounds and became an enthusiastic

advocate of " low diets " . A prolific writer and

busy practitioner, Cheyne claimed that meat

damaged the nervous system and forced his

wealthy, overweight patients to switch to

vegetables.

 

One of those patients was his publisher, the

novelist Samuel Richardson. His famous heroines

Pamela and Clarissa were dedicated vegetarians

and lived very well on modest quantities of

" bread, butter, water, tea, milk, salad, toast

and chocolate " .

 

Jane Austen derided Cheynesque diets in Emma but

even she admitted that " composition seems to me

Impossible, with a head full of Joints of

Mutton " . Shelley went much further and in his

1813 Vindication of a Natural Diet blamed meat

for turning humans into brutes. " It is

impossible, had Buonaparte descended from a race

of vegetable feeders, that he could have had

either the inclination or the power to ascend the

throne of the Bourbons, " he asserted. Greatly

attracted to India, Shelley, in his 1817 poem The

Revolt of Islam, imagined a Hindu revolution

whose leader proclaims, " Never again may blood of

bird or beast/ Stain with its venomous stream a

human feast. "

 

 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,,1854051,00.html

The origins of veggie might

Jonathan Beckman is left more than satisfied by

Tristram Stuart's scintillating study of

vegetarianism, The Bloodless Revolution

Sunday August 20, 2006

The Observer

The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

by Tristram Stuart

HarperCollins, £25, pp628

 

For inveterate carnivores such as myself, the

prospect of vegetarianism is dry, cold and

inhabited solely by lentils. Yet after completing

Tristram Stuart's fascinating history, I prodded

my roast chicken around my plate with a little

unease. Stuart illuminates the vibrant plurality

of pro-vegetarian arguments: some cranky, some

bonkers and others forcefully compelling.

 

He wisely focuses his attention on a densely

packed era, roughly bordered by the English Civil

War and the French Revolution. Vegetarianism was

central to radical political thought during both

struggles as disgust at unremitting bloodshed was

transformed into a desire for a better, more

harmonious world. The slaughter of animals seemed

to perpetuate the barbarism of war. For theorists

such as 17th-century dissenter Thomas Tryon,

eating meat was a cause of violence as 'those

fierce, revengeful spirits that proceed from the

Creature, when the painful agonies of death are

upon it ... fail not to accompany the flesh, and

especially the blood, and have their internal

operation, and have their impression on those

that eat it'.

 

Western vegetarianism has a long history

stretching back to Pythagoras ('Pythagorean' was

both a term of abuse and a badge of honour for

vegetarians). Pythagoras's doctrine of

metempsychosis, or transmigration of the soul,

meant that it was unwise to kill animals because

who knows who could be trapped inside. Though St

Clement of Alexandria favoured abstinence from

meat, vegetarianism was quelled by the early

church fathers, and many Renaissance clerics on

both sides of the Reformation divide viewed it as

heresy.

 

Stuart makes clear that the Western encounter with India provided crucial

 

weight to pro-vegetarian arguments. Here was a

civil, peaceful, enlightened society successfully

fuelled by vegetables, pulses and grains. Such a

diet seemed an escape from the corruption,

debauchery, pollution and strife in the West.

Many conservative Christians mocked the Hindus'

quaint belief in transmigration, but the doctrine

of non-violence is a guiding ethical principle

that manifests itself through abstention from

meat.

 

The story of the reverence and awe in which India

was held in certain streams of Western thought is

a notable corrective to those who see the history

of imperialism as solely the high-handed and

brutal imposition of Occidental values on

indigenous populations. John Zephaniah Holwell, a

survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta, governor

of Bengal and a passionate vegetarian,

effectively converted to Hinduism.

 

The brilliance of Stuart's book is to demonstrate

that the study of attitudes towards food is the

gateway to appreciating how people understood

their place in society, their relationship to

their environment and the significance of being

human.

 

There were, broadly, three phases of

vegetarianism in the period he scrutinises. In

17th-century England, eschewing meat was a means

of religious dissent by those who saw the church

as corrupt. It was an attempt to purify religion.

Isaac Newton, who tried to prove the unity of all

religions, viewed 'being merciful to all animals'

as one of the cross-cultural ethical imperatives.

 

The second phase, which began in France, was

scientific. Was man naturally carnivorous or

herbivorous? The penitent Dr George Cheyne, whose

weight rose to 34 stone due to indulgence,

transformed his life by eating only vegetables

and milk. He become an assiduous evangelist of

such a diet among the metropolitan classes in

London.

 

The final phase is revolutionary and climaxes

with the French Revolution. Meat signified social

inequality - only the rich could afford it - as

more and more land was enclosed for pasture so

the privileged could indulge themselves.

Seditious circles in Paris and London were

crammed with vegetarians. Underlying it all,

philosophers and scientists, savants and

rabble-rousers searched for the perfect religion,

health and society.

 

Stuart navigates many fascinating bywaters and

eddies in the history of ideas and provides so

many acute analyses that it's impossible to do

complete justice to the breadth and depth of his

study in a single review. This is intellectual

history at its most scintillating, as passionate

and vibrant as any swashbuckling romp or perilous

adventure. And though I'm still eager to tuck

into my next steak, I've no beef at all with this

immensely satisfying book.

 

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7854134

Vegetarianism

Indian tonic

Aug 31st 2006

From The Economist print edition

 

THE esteem in which mankind holds its furrier

friends may be an indicator of the conception it

has nurtured of itself. In the dualistic universe

mapped out by Descartes in the late 17th century,

for example, animals were regarded as cogs in the

vast machinery of nature. Man, by virtue of the

reflective soul that set him apart from the rest

of Creation, was cast in the role of master of

the natural world. By contrast, the acceptance a

century later of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's portrait

of mankind as just another, more adaptive kind of

animal had proved so widespread that man was as

likely to consider himself nature's student as

its (perhaps incompetent) master.

 

This evolution and the light it sheds on a

certain strand of cultural and intellectual

history, lies at the heart of " The Bloodless

Revolution " . Despite his serious approach, Mr

Stuart has a relaxed, semi-anecdotal style which

repays both careful engagement and lighter

dipping. Beginning, for example, with a quotation

from " Withnail and I " , a British film in which

the heroes are prevented from killing a chicken

by its " dreadful, beady eyes " , he moves on to the

issue of man's sympathy-or otherwise-for animals,

a thorn in many a non-vegetarian side.

 

Europe's use of India as an anthropological

mirror has attracted much attention over the past

30 years. But the book's strength lies not in

uncovering substantial new ground-although the

motley assemblage of characters and creeds

provides plenty of this too-but in its exposé of

vegetarianism as a way of offering refreshing

perspectives on these and other areas.

 

Some readers will be aware that Pythagoras'

vegetarianism was predicated on the immortality

and reincarnation of souls and the consequent

worry in killing a beast " lest " , as Shakespeare

wrote, " thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam " .

Fewer perhaps will know that Pythagoras may have

learned this doctrine-part of which establishes

the foundations for a continuous strand of

Western metaphysics-from the ancient Hindu

Brahmins. Fewer still will know of the

17th-century Christian Kabbalists exploring the

same ideas. One even spotted a flaw in the

Pythagorean system by which if reincarnation is

the soul's journey through a progression of

corporeal states to eventual perfection, then the

ending of an animal's life only expedites its

upward journey and can hardly be condemned on

these grounds.

 

Mr Stuart's fluent pen occasionally makes minor

errors, and his animosity to Descartes obscures

some of the issues at stake. But with the balance

of an easy style and comprehensive, if discreet,

research, he avoids most of the pitfalls of

popular histories in which seeming ephemera take

centre stage. Thankfully too, those other

singularly vegetarian dangers-preachiness and a

copious flow of hot air-could not be less in

evidence.

 

--

Kim Bartlett, Publisher of ANIMAL PEOPLE Newspaper

Postal mailing address: P.O. Box 960, Clinton WA 98236 U.S.A.

CORRECT EMAIL ADDRESS IS: <ANPEOPLE

Website: http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/ with

French and Spanish language subsections.