It's true. Even Newton realized it. (which means that you all, meat-eating friends, should abandon your carnivorous ways in favor of something much better... vegetables!) The stink and flatulence, the bad breath and sweating, all byproducts of a diet rich in meat. We certainly are what we eat. Ain't it grand?
But I'm not going to preach (too much), I'm just going to share a brand new book for vegetarians and carnivores alike: The Bloodless Revolution:A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times by Tristram Stuart. At 656 pages, this looks to be the first comprehensive tome on the history of vegetarians, and from what I've read of it so far, it sounds fantastic (and it's in your bookstore today, release date January 8th).
There's a nice synopsis of the book in the New Yorker, which doesn't comment too heavily on the book positively or negatively, but provides an excellent rundown of just what Stuart covers in Bloodless Revolution:
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.
So it sounds like we are in pretty good company. Not only can we vegetarians count among our ranks the RZA and Andre 3000, but now we have an "incalculably large" number of Enlightenment thinkers standing behind us, too.
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?”
I'm not sure I can get behind this completely, but I do tend to agree with the idea that our food choices influence not only the composition of our bodies, but of our minds as well. Wouldn't it follow that the things we put into our body--the things that affect our livers, hearts and tissues--would also affect our brains and behaviors? Maybe. The "living graves of murdered beasts" indeed.
And I know this has been said a thousand times, but I can never end a post about the merits of a vegetable-based diet without tossing around some of the hard facts that meat-eaters tend to ignore when evaluating the ethical and moral questions raised by their food choices:
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.
It's somewhat crazy to think that I've been a vegetarian for more than a half of a decade, that Zach and Melissa are vegans because of me, and that they've influenced countless others. Of course, my choice wasn't made independently, I have Megan to thank for my conversion to sanity, health and compassion.
brett at 09:51 AM on January 17, 2007 | Permalink
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