THE BLOODLESS REVOLUTION: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF VEGETARIANISM FROM 1600 TO MODERN TIMES | Tristram Stuart (W.W. Norton)
The young British scholar Tristram Stuart, on the other hand, gets more than halfway through The Bloodless Revolution, his study of the moral ascendancy of vegetarianism in the West, before any of the vegetarians under discussion bother to think about the lives of animals. Starting in the 17th century and ending with Hitler, he takes readers from a time when vegetarian sympathies were suspicious and closeted to our age, when people have been known to apologize for not being vegetarian (“I know, I know, but I just love bacon”).
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The earliest European vegetarians were blood-soaked refugees from the English Civil War. As Stuart thoroughly documents, all shared a single trait: they were deeply, deeply weird. The radical Robert Crab, for instance, who “inaugurated the English school of vegetarian Bible exegesis,” wielded his vegetarianism as a political weapon and claimed to have had an epiphany when a squirrel brought him bread in prison. Then there’s John Evelyn, a paragon of the Enlightenment whose book on salad enumerated 18 types of “lust-calming” lettuce.
The River Cottage Meat Book is perhaps the only cookbook ever to begin by discussing whether making its recipes would be a morally acceptable act. In the remarkable opening chapter, “Meat and Right,” Fearnley-Whittingstall, whose River Cottage farm, the set for his popular BBC series, may be the best-known small farm in England, argues that since we’re responsible for the lives and deaths of what we eat, the only coherent rationale for carnivorousness has to justify both. It’s ultimately a utilitarian argument, which is somewhat surprising, since the most significant contemporary animal-rights philosopher, Peter Singer of Princeton, is a utilitarian too. But where Singer sees more net suffering, Fearnley-Whittingstall sees more net happy beings–until they’re killed. That’s why Fearnley-Whittingstall is a near-hysterical advocate for humane husbandry. “It’s an excellent word because it also acknowledges the contractual nature of the arrangement,” he writes. After rejecting vegetarianism for minimizing and misrepresenting the importance of death in nature and for disregarding the mutual benefits of domestication (the pigs got something out of it, too), he concludes, with rhetorical brio that makes you want to flip forward and start prep work on the “Bacon, Sausage and Blood Sausage Pilaf,” that “meat eating is, on balance, morally acceptable human behavior.”
