Herbivore vs. carnivore

Are vegetarians the moral, peace-loving, cruelty-free enemies of the meat eater? Or a bunch of kooks living in la-la land?

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, History, Reviews, Book reviews

Jan. 25, 2007 | If history teaches us anything, it's that today's habit may be tomorrow's abomination. What people saw as a matter of course in the streets of 17th-century London -- rich men beating their servants, crowds gathered in a festival mood to watch bloody executions -- would horrify the pedestrian of 2007. Morality, too, has a history, but the people of any given period usually don't see it that way. They think that they already have a pretty solid understanding of right and wrong (even if they find it difficult to be virtuous) and rarely imagine that future generations might view them as unenlightened at best and depraved at worst.

Activists, on the other hand, know different. They count on the evolution of morality. Recently, Adam Hochschild's fascinating "Bury the Chains" chronicled the means by which a group of committed 18th-century idealists convinced their fellow citizens in Britain and America that slavery was an intolerable wrong. It wasn't easy, and it didn't happen overnight. Some people of that era thought that slavery was lamentable but intractable; others found it easy to justify an institution that brought them profits and comfort. Still others -- the majority, perhaps -- didn't give it much thought at all, as they sweetened their tea with sugar produced at brutal slave plantations on islands far, far away.

For this reason, even an omnivore should find an intellectual history of vegetarianism interesting. We, like the people of the early 1800s, could be living through a period of slow but profound ideological change. To the people of their own time, men like Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson -- early abolitionists and the founders of the first human rights movement -- seemed as impractical, as demanding, as self-righteous and as obsessed as many animal rights activists seem to us today. In the future, right-thinking people might look back at us meat eaters with the same disapproval we heap on those who considered slavery acceptable 200 years ago.

Tristram Stuart's "The Bloodless Revolution" promises to be the kind of book that could make such a case. There are many things that this self-professed "Cultural History of Vegetarianism From 1600 to Modern Times" might have done. It might have traced the history of arguments for and against meatless diets as they appeared at the dawn of the scientific revolution, and explored the ways those arguments developed in response to the new discoveries Europeans made about the natural world. It might have outlined the various schools of vegetarian thought -- there are several, often with conflicting premises. It might have compared vegetarian activism with other kinds of movements that aimed to get humanity on the right track, not just abolitionism, but universal suffrage campaigns, feminism, anti-industrial protests, socialism and so on. Lastly, it might have examined what average citizens ate, what various vegetarians considered an ideal diet and the cultural meanings the people of the day invested in those diets.

In truth, "The Bloodless Revolution" does a little bit of all of these things, but in a scattered, partial and confusing way that mostly just frustrates the reader looking for a thoughtful history of vegetarianism. Stuart seems to subscribe to the current notion that popular history is best told as the story of colorful characters embarked on grand quests to "save the world" via geography or lexicography or some other scholarly pursuit that used to be viewed as dry and dull. A far better title for this book would be something like (with apologies to Lytton Strachey) "Eminent Vegetarians."

In this instance, however, the Colorful Character school of historiography, meant to humanize and make accessible disciplines that most people find stuffy, goes badly awry. Vegetarianism as a philosophy and practice has much to recommend it. And while many meat-eaters think vegetarian diets are boring, as a topic, vegetarianism is anything but; no subject is more likely to rile people up, to provoke defensiveness, self-doubt, ranting and defiance. But vegetarianism has always suffered from one terrible public relations problem: vegetarians themselves. They have a reputation for being priggish, fanatical, kooky and a nuisance to hostesses, and unfortunately the parade of eccentrics that marches across the pages of "The Bloodless Revolution" only confirms that image.

Western vegetarianism has a venerable past, linked to the mythological bard Orpheus, the first-century Greek poet Plutarch and, above all, Pythagoras, the philosopher best known for his geometrical theorem but also the founder of an ascetic group that swore off meat and private property. (European vegetarians were often referred to as Pythagoreans.) It would have been nice to have the precedents for Western vegetarianism clearly laid out in the early pages of "The Bloodless Revolution," but no such luck. You can gather tidbits here and there along the way, but Stuart apparently presumes that his readers come pre-steeped in vegetarian lore, and therefore already know that Plutarch wrote a powerful indictment of meat eaters and so only mentions it in passing. Plutarch was a canonical writer known to every educated European during the centuries this book covers, but today he is little-read, and this omission leaves all but the specialist reader at a loss.

What Stuart does do well is dig up obscure and sometimes fascinating historical figures and cultural phenomena from deep in the bowels of libraries and other archives, including, in one case, a crumbling French chateau. A particularly choice discovery is the eight-volume "Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy," supposedly the correspondence of "an Ottoman spy called Mahmut operating out of Paris from 1632 to 1682," but actually written by a series of British authors. Speaking through the fictional foreign spy "Mahmut," these writers were able to criticize conventional European mores and religious beliefs, including the West's rejection of the herbivorous "Banquet" offered by the benevolent earth in favor of the "Cruel Massacre" needed to supply our tables with the "Flesh and Blood of Slaughter'd Animals." (Unfortunately for Stuart, this boilerplate condemnation of the West from an imaginary and idealized Eastern perspective is much less intriguing than the revelation that the success of "Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy" set off a string of "copy-cat spy thrillers," all pretending to be caches of letters. It looks like the spy novel may be older than the novel itself!)

Next page: Were early vegetarians healthier -- or just less constipated?