Herbivore vs. carnivore

In his roundabout, disjointed way, Stuart also divides ethical vegetarians into the "anthropocentric" and the "biocentric" strains. The first believes that abstaining from meat is in the enlightened self-interest of humanity. In his chapter on the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (the most intellectually coherent and rigorous part of "The Bloodless Revolution"), Stuart explains that Shelley thought that eating flesh "animalized" mankind, and corrupted not only human relationships but the entire planet. Carnivorousness had introduced savagery into a natural world that was essentially peaceful and gentle. Although an atheist, Shelley believed in a lost, Edenic age and was convinced that if human beings gave up eating meat, the rest of creation would follow suit and return to that paradisiacal condition in which "the lion now forgets to thirst for blood." Biocentric vegetarianism, on the other hand, "values non-human ecosystems for their own sake," and considers animals to have a right to their own lives, a right that we human beings aren't entitled to violate for the paltry reason that we like the way they taste.

Many other factors enter into this great debate: the cruelty with which domesticated animals are often treated vs. the fact that they owe their existence to human patronage; the need to control animal populations for the benefit of entire ecosystems; the fact that raising meat is a much less efficient use of farmland than growing vegetable foods, and more. All of these issues are important, but until the end of "The Bloodless Revolution" -- some 400 pages in -- Stuart addresses them in a haphazard fashion, as his narrative bounces from oddball savant to historical curio to crackpot. The problem with treating the history of vegetarianism as a history of vegetarians is that the crusading "Pythagoreans" of the past were overwhelmingly cranks, and their examples only taint a legitimate philosophy with an aura of kookiness.

The eccentric behaviors displayed by the vegetarians Stuart profiles include: claiming to be Adam, "hosting crazed spiritual revelries," advocating the veiling of women over the age of 7, performing nude jumping jacks every morning in front of an open window (in Scotland, no less), swanning around in a white linen gown in supposed imitation of Pythagoras, renting out an "electro-magnetic" bed purported to increase sexual vigor, stripping naked in the street and giving one's clothes to beggars while high on ether, professing to be "the universal self, or man-god" while roaming the streets of London in "full Armenian costume" and running a "druid temple" out of Cavendish Square.

Other vegetarians, like the Marquis de Valady, an active participant in the French Revolution, were merely annoying in the usual countercultural fashion. The hero-worshipping, freeloading Valady would throw himself at the feet of various vegetarian leaders and finagle his way into their households where he would aggravate their wives by "always asking for vegetable foods that one did not have in the house" and expressing astonishment "if one did not have milk at all times of the day." These visits usually concluded with Valady being kicked out after suggesting that "a community of possessions in every thing" ought to be extended to the sexual favors of his host's wife.

Small wonder, then, that vegetarianism became associated with crankery. One of Stuart's particular causes in this book is to give due credit to the inspiration that India's vegetarian Hindus provided to their Western counterparts. But most of these European enthusiasts never met a real Hindu, let alone traveled to India, and those who did often returned with an inaccurate and starry-eyed view of life there. (India's millions of vegetarians did, at least, provide solid evidence against the common belief that most people couldn't survive on a meatless diet.) This hardly seems a sturdy enough hook to hang a 600-page book on, and the more incessantly Stuart returns to the theme, the more he risks coming across as a bit of a crank himself.

Finally, given that "The Bloodless Revolution" calls itself a "cultural history," it could do with a bit more cultural literacy. Stuart has a pretty feeble grasp of literary matters: Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" was not a satire of the 18th-century obsession with hypersensitive "nerves," and describing a cough as "consumptive" is not a figurative allusion to the cougher's eating habits but a reference to tuberculosis. But perhaps the most baffling omission -- or near-omission, since Stuart does mention it in passing -- is a thorough examination of how conceptions of gender affected the vegetarian cause.

Even the most hardheaded, skeptical thinkers Stuart quotes accepted the idea that eating meat, especially red meat, makes people more aggressive. Meat eating has long been associated with virility -- both lustfulness and a propensity toward violence. Women were thought to prefer "mild" foods like dairy products, pastries and sweets, and so for them to abstain from eating flesh seemed only fitting, especially as the Victorian era ushered in a more fragile, gentle and timorous notion of femininity. But as long as European society wanted its men to be brave in battle and robust in bed, convincing them to give up meat was a nonstarter. Even vegetarianism's advocates subscribed to this notion, claiming that herbivorous men would be less bellicose and lascivious, the ideal citizens for a new peaceable kingdom in a world without war.

The powerful metaphorical connection between meat eating and manliness lives on: Real men don't eat quiche. It persists in the face of common sense and concrete evidence. History, after all, has given us bloodthirsty, genocidal vegetarians. They include not only Adolf Hitler, but another British oddball whom Stuart has unearthed, John Oswald, who claimed to be a "Hindoo," and "was intimately involved in the process that transformed the French Revolution from a mainly peaceful process into a bloodbath." Oswald introduced the revolutionaries to the up-close and gory method of pike fighting (saves on ammo!) and once suggested simply massacring every Frenchman whose loyalty to the cause wasn't absolutely secure.

We're so used to linking masculinity with carnivorousness that we seldom stop to recognize how illogical it is. Just because vegetarianism is correlated with pacifism -- people who draw the line at killing animals are probably loath to kill human beings, too -- it doesn't follow that eating flesh, and especially the flesh of mammals, causes the battery of aggressive behaviors we choose to call manly. Yet even today, insulting vegetarians is presented as a display of bold, defiant machismo, a way of saying, "I understand and embrace the bloody truths of life with lusty vigor, unlike you salad-noshing pansies!"

It's hard to believe that vegetarianism will make any serious inroads into Western society as long as this curious superstition remains in place. For, despite Stuart's efforts to portray vegetarianism as a thriving force in European culture for the past 400 years, the bloodless revolution has not yet taken place. It turns out that even this author, who labored to produce 600 pages on the topic, can't conclude his book with a wholehearted endorsement of the vegetable diet. He's not sure that universal human vegetarianism entirely jibes with his own notions of what's "ecologically sensible." And so, "The Bloodless Revolution" ends with the surprisingly mild statement that "there are compelling reasons, at the very least, to reduce our consumption of meat."

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