George Orwell was deeply hostile to vegetarianism. Vegetarians were of ‘that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking to the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat’. And before the days of South Indian restaurants in London, one had only to go to a vegetarian eating establishment to see that he had a point. It wasn’t only the beards that wilted (to quote Orwell again): it seemed that nut rissoles had an existentially wilting effect on those who subsisted on them. Of course, one might have mistaken cause for effect.
Tristram Stuart’s very, indeed excessively, long and somewhat shapeless history of vegetarian thought in Europe does not entirely dispel this impression. Vegetarianism seems to have attracted resentful cranks and prigs from the beginning of its revival in the 17th century. They were mainly radical political idealists, but, as we now appreciate, such idealism is likely to lead to more brutality and mass murder than mere cynicism. To say that someone is an idealist is not automatically an indication of approval.
However, ad hominem strictures against a doctrine are not sufficient to dispose of the arguments in favour of that doctrine. As the author shows, there are three main arguments in favour of vegetarianism. The first is that mankind has no right to take the lives of sentient animals merely for its own culinary pleasure. The second is that the production of meat is grossly inefficient as a means of sustenance by comparison with the production of grains, pulse, vegetables and fruit. The third is that a vegetarian diet is healthier for man than a carnivorous one. None of these arguments seems to me negligible, or self-evidently bad or false.
The author traces the influence of contact with India upon European attitudes to flesh-eating. As travellers returned from the East in the 17th century, they brought with them accounts of a very different ethical outlook on animals to the one of domination that prevailed in Europe. Instead of the Biblical grant of man’s right to lord it over animals, which included the right to eat them, the Brahminical ethic stressed the inter- dependence of life and the need to avoid all suffering caused by violence. Moreover, since large numbers of people in India led healthy lives on a purely vegetarian diet, there was empirical evidence that such a diet was good for the body as well as the soul. Moreover, the Indian subcontinent supported a much larger population than western Europe. The fact that the travellers’ tales exaggerated both the extent of Indian vegetarianism and the healthiness of the population did not alter their impact.
The British in particular prided themselves on the meatiness of their diet. Even today, particularly in working-class homes, there is sometimes an aversion to fresh vegetables and fruit, as being somehow foreign, prissy, decadent and effeminate. But there has also been a long tradition of medical endorsement of a vegetarian diet as being restorative of the health that meat-eating supposedly destroys.
This book is rich in anecdotes of interesting if not altogether sympathetic characters, for example George Cheyne, the eminent physician who, through overindulgence, himself became so enormously fat that he could hardly propel himself anywhere without assistance. Deciding that enough was enough, he adopted vegetarianism and lost a lot of weight. This was a diet he recommended to all his patients, imperiously demanding that they abjured meat or else. He ensured that they felt better on their new diet by first dosing them up with so much mercurious medication that they suffered the horrors of mercury poisoning. It is hardly surprising that, once they started eating vegetables and stopped taking mercury, they noticed a dramatic improvement in their health.
Although one of the supposed effects of a carnivorous diet was that it made men fierce and aggressive, it is well known that vegetarians are not necessarily mild- mannered. (Once as a youth, a cousin of mine who had turned vegan told me that if I ate meat, I should acquire the mental characteristics of the animal whose flesh I consumed; for example I should turn ovine if I ate lamb, and bovine if I ate beef. Extremely pleased with my own wit, I asked him whether the same principle applied to eating cabbage.)
Perhaps the most startling instance of this was the career of the Scot turned French revolutionary, John Oswald, a vegetarian of the utmost tenderness towards the animal kingdom, but who was also so politically bloodthirsty that he made Robespierre look like a pacifist. Starting from the first principles from which he deduced the ethical necessity of vegetarianism, he argued that whole swathes of humanity must be eliminated if peace, tranquillity and universal benevolence were ever to reign. He saw no irony in this.
The connection between economic and political radicalism on the one hand and vegetarianism on the other was established in the 17th century. The idea that duties were owed to animals struck at the infallibility of the Bible as a guide to life, and therefore at the very fundamentals of a polity founded upon Christianity. The fact also that the upper classes ate more meat than the lower, and that its production on a large scale reduced the demand for agricultural labour, also meant that vegetarians were by nature politically radical (the author does not ask whether the causative relationship might have been the other way round: that a temperamental inclination to radicalism turned people vegetarian).
Like many people who undertake lengthy and painstaking research into arcane subject matter, Stuart tends to exaggerate its importance. He demonstrates that there has been a vegetarian strain in European political thought for the last four centuries, and teases out the intellectual connections between the various, often obscure but sometimes eminent authors whom he cites. (His chapter on Rousseau is particularly interesting.) But he does not really make out a case that this strain was in practice of any great importance, except in the case of Gandhi, or that our world would have been much different without it. His judgment is sometimes suspect, as when he applies the word humane to Napoleon. An occasional descent into the demotic is jarring: ‘Even St Augustine of Canterbury had allowed the Brits to continue sacrificing oxen.’
He finally reveals himself to be a moderate, or modified, vegetarian. He does not hold with the doctrinaire adherents of animal rights, who (in the case of Professor Singer) are also no friends of babies whom they consider defective and therefore unworthy of life. He recognises that there are large areas of the world which are suitable only for grazing, and that therefore some consumption of meat is permissible. He is against the destruction of forests for the production of beef, however. But his conclusions do not require or rest upon his exhaustive, and frankly exhausting, historical research. I value his book mainly as a treasury of literary byways.