Spencer - Vegetarianism: a history

Colin Spencer

GRUB STREET LONDON

This new edition published by Grub Street

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Copyright Grub Street 2016

Text Copyright Colin Spencer 2016

The moral right of the author has been asserted

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-910690-21-5

eISBN 978-1-911621-50-8

Mobi ISBN 978-1-911621-50-8

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The nature of our diet in the last decade of the twentieth century became headline news. For many months at a time mad cow disease, and later in the decade frankenstein foods, were issues of enormous dramatic power which involved the consumer in a debate on the nature of the food upon our plates. Parents began to enquire anxiously what was it they were feeding their infants and in an age when these same children were struck down suddenly with allergies or made terminally ill by a farm visit, parents were made vividly aware that the national diet could no longer be trusted. Consumers began to ask questions demanding information and when they received answers they often found them inadequate and failed to be reassured.

In this uncertain climate there was an upsurge of interest in vegetarianism, or what it is increasingly called in nutritional and scientific circles the plant diet, allied with a knowledge that even this diet was only safe if it was wholly organic. Yet government trials of GE crops which officially began in the year 2000, but some of which began at least four years earlier, have even threatened the future existence of organic agriculture in the British Isles.

In the light of this new public awareness in the problems which beset our food supply this history was revised. Not only have I needed to update the last chapter, but I have also totally rewritten the first chapter which deals with our evolution. This is partly because new discoveries are made every year about our distant past which spawn new theories, but also because many epidemiologists now consider that our metabolism born from 7 million years evolution on the plant diet of vast bio-diversity (see ) is hugely significant and should be recognised and followed as best we can in our nutritional practice.

Also, within this last decade the meaning of the term vegetarianism has changed. It means a diet less pure and rigid than it did when it was coined in 1848. It means an emphasis on plants while a small amount of protein from fish and perhaps poultry could possibly be in the background. This new definition is distressing to vegetarian purists who have a natural hatred of the slaughter of sentient creatures for the human diet. Nevertheless, this shift in meaning has occurred and the result is that the diet is now far more mainstream socially than it ever was before. People who choose to eat this way in public do not hide the fact or apologise, as they once did; in fact, such people are now commonplace and every banqueting function that is held automatically caters for a percentage who require the vegetarian option.

In the light of all this a detailed history of the diet seemed even more timely now than it was eight years ago. In these years almost every month we have had the results of more research which goes to prove that a low fat vegetable diet is by far the healthiest one for human survival. In addition the effects of industrial agriculture have polluted our environment to such a degree that there is a perceptible rise in diseases of the nervous system as well as a decline in male potency.

This new edition has also given me the opportunity to correct some minor errors and to add more detail about the actual foods that were eaten.

Colin Spencer

Winchelsea, 2000

I have to confess that before I began work on this book I was only vaguely aware of vegetarian history. I knew that there were people in the past, like Pythagoras and Leonardo da Vinci, who rejected meat-eating and espoused a vegetarian ideal but exactly why they should have done so remained obscure. I knew also that Tolstoy was committed to such a cause in his latter years. I knew that Hinduism in India made the cow sacred and had created probably the most delicious vegetarian cuisine in the world; that Buddhism had, as its first precept, not to kill or injure any human, animal, bird, fish or insect, yet Buddhist priests would accept the gift of a morsel of meat in their begging bowls, as the spirit of the giving counted more than the object itself. Of course, I could not help but know also that George Bernard Shaw was a vegetarian and often mildly amused about it. He wrote to Ellen Terry: The odd thing about being a vegetarian is not that the things that happen to other people dont happen to me they all do but that they happen differently: pain is different, pleasure different, fever different, cold different, even love different. This book explores that difference.

Like many others I thought that the vegetarian movement was a very contemporary phenomenon. I had no idea that the issues which agitate so many today a hatred of unnecessary slaughter, the concept of animal welfare, our own physical health, the earths balance and hence its ecology would have been perfectly understood in the ancient world, certainly as early as 600 BC .

So much in the pages that follow was as new to me as it will be to most readers. Much I found at first astonishing, but then as I read on I began to see a strong pattern which distinguished the movement of Pythagoreanism as much as it did the historical figures that came after. What people eat is a symbol of what they believe. It is in fact much more than a symbol, because food is life and people cannot survive without it. Hence the living food which supplies energy becomes invested with all manner of hidden meanings.

At a certain point in prehistory it obviously became clear to some people, and these would have most likely been priests, that the living food which sustains the body and spirit logically could not come from dead flesh. We know now that meat is nutritionally a perfectly acceptable food, but to the ancients it was very obviously something that contains blood, and blood very early on had a powerful mystical significance. So inevitably this book became a history of the ideas behind the decision to adopt a meat-free diet. It is the psychology of abstention from flesh which I hope it explores, and why this decision so often seems outrageous to the rest of society

Ideas do not spring to the forefront of public awareness without having evolved in the shadows for great lengths of time. Though I suspect a vegetable diet is as old as humankind even older, for it comprised the central nutrients in that hominid interval before apes and human beings diverged into the various species that we are still unearthing today it took many thousands of years after domestication of livestock and early agriculture for ideas on abstention from food to become part of the metaphysical language of religious devotion. This book, then, is an attempt to explore the reasons why omnivorous humans should at times voluntarily have abstained from an available food that was often acceptable to their companions, and why this abstention was always an integral part of an ideology. For diet, from the earliest times, was but one factor in a structure of concepts that interpreted the world.