NEW YORK, January 15, 2007: Tackling the history of vegetarianism, Tristram Stuart’s book called “The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times,” has been highlighted in this highly informative news report called “Vegetable Love.” Tracing vegetarianism back to the 1600’s when Sir Isaac Newton was criticized for refusing to eat a type of “blood pudding” (a dark sausage containing pork, dried pig’s blood and suet), it was pointed out that diet was closely tied to Christian Theology in Europe during this period. The news report said, “Broadly speaking, though, for many centuries the debate centered on three questions, each of which was reflected in Newton’s dietary choices and the objections raised to them: there was the religious question, concerning the implications of Scripture for human alimentation; there were medical questions about the effect of eating meat on human health and character; and there was a philosophical debate about the proper relationship between man and other animals. There was no distinct category you could call moral, because all of them were, as they remain, intensely moral. Vegetarianism has always been less about why you should eat plants than about why you shouldn’t eat animals.”
Even before this period in history in the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras founded what was known as “a mystical mathematician community who observed a general prohibition against eating animals as having a right to live in common with mankind.”
Of particular interest to HPI readers is the analysis of the meeting of Indian and European traditions in India. “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,” Shapin explained.
Modern day vegetarians such as Paul McCartney have continued the moral debate. McCartney said, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” Unique to modern day vegetarianism are the environmental concerns of not eating meat. Shapin explained Stuart’s views in the news report, “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 percent 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.”
In conclusion, Stuart stated that vegetarians have long had the best intellectual arguments against eating meat but nevertheless the consumption of meat per-capita world-wide has kept increasing. The arguments about what it means to be human have continued alongside the vegetarian – anti-vegetarian debate.
HPI adds: The following URL is a recorded interview of the author, Tristam Stuart and more about the East meets West connection with vegetarianism,
here