Book Review
Vegetarian Times
A chronicle of the vegetarian movement and why we go meatless.
By Charles R. Meyer, M.D.
When she was 14, our daughter announced that she was a vegetarian. Figuring that this was a temporary, harmless flight of adolescent fancy, my wife and I didn’t ask many questions and tried to accommodate her menu choices at meal time. Adolescent fancy became adult conviction, and when our youngest son followed her dietary lead, we began to explore why. Initially, they said that meat just started seeming “gross,” my son frequently referring to “bloody steak” and my daughter pointing out that meat was once “alive and furry.” They contended that they didn’t feel well when they ate meat. Later, primed by college educations, they invoked economic, environmental, and health reasons for their dietary choices. But they didn’t begin to enumerate the rationales for vegetarianism that are chronicled in Tristram Stuart’s encyclopedic cultural history of vegetarianism The Bloodless Revolution.
The debate about man eating beast has raged for millennia, and pro-meat and anti-meat advocates alike have found Biblical support for their cause. Genesis 1:29 has God telling Adam and Eve, “Behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed … and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat,” apparently securing vegetarians a place in paradise. Yet theologian John Calvin pointed out that God gave Adam and Eve animal skins to wear when they left Eden. According to Stuart, Calvin believed that “anyone who thought mankind should be vegetarian was being blasphemously ungrateful for God’s generosity.” Other Biblical interpretations have pointed to passages in Genesis in which God seemed to have changed his mandate to mankind after the Flood, giving humans a dominion over other animals that could be interpreted as permission to eat them.
Those questioning whether it was moral to eat meat did not always rely on Biblical answers. Stuart describes how in the 17th and 18th centuries, interest in all things natural and a fascination with India and Hinduism with its mantra of equality between creatures and doctrine of ahimsa—nonviolence to all living things—provided non-Biblical rationales for vegetarians from Rene Descartes to Francis Bacon. Drawing on Marco Polo’s description of Indian Brahmins who would not “kill any creature or any living thing in the world, neither fly nor flea nor louse nor any other vermin because they say that they have souls,” Europeans viewed Brahmins as “virtuous pagans.” At times, the European interpretation of Hindu beliefs bordered on the comical when they ascribed an Indian’s rejection of meat to a fear of eating their reincarnated ancestor. Many proponents of vegetarianism contended that eating meat provoked aggressive, even criminal behavior and suggested that a vegetarian world would be a more peaceful place. In his novels, 18th century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau pictured a contented world in which man is in harmony with nature, where animals were hosts and humans guests, and where children should not be exposed to “unnatural” meat so that they could develop their “virtue.”
Perhaps the most common rationale for a vegetarian diet over the centuries was health. In the 17th and 18th centuries, controversy raged over whether man’s physiognomy was built for eating meat or vegetables as investigators examined the structure of human teeth, jaws, stomach, and intestines and compared them with those of known herbivores and carnivores. This exercise in comparative anatomy was followed by a succession of vegetarian gurus who preached the health benefits of a meat-free existence. The most colorful of these was the 18th century physician George Cheyne, dubbed “society’s greatest diet doctor,” who grew to well over 400 pounds before he got the vegetarian faith, started on his milk and vegetable diet, reportedly lost more than 224 pounds, and began evangelizing for the health and moral benefits of vegetables. One of his followers, English writer Samuel Richardson, incorporated Cheyne’s ideas in his novel Clarissa, portraying villains as carnivorous beasts.
The Bloodless Revolution is story after story after story of such vegetarians and their quest to stop the slaughter of animals. No easy read, Stuart’s journey from 1600 to modern times can hardly be called a pleasant collation of tales. His prose is sometimes convoluted, his detail is almost obsessive, and his summarizing comments are few. His “modern times” barely grazes the 20th century with brief discussions of Gandhi’s and Hitler’s vegetarian views. Yet his tales are informative and do provide cultural and historical grist for where we are today with the flourishing of meat-free restaurants, vegetarian groceries, and kids who tell their parents they are going “bloodless.” MM
Charles Meyer is editor in chief of Minnesota Medicine.