Carnivores' dilemma

The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism From 1600 to Modern Times
By Tristram Stuart
Norton, 628 pp., illustrated, $29.95

The American Vegetarian Society was founded in 1850 by William Metcalfe , who had immigrated to the United States in 1817 and became an ally of Bronson Alcott, the eccentric Transcendentalist in Boston and Concord , as well as Sylvester Graham, the diet reformer who believed that spicy foods encouraged an excessive thirst for alcohol and hunger for sex. The society became an Anglo-American phenomenon, and its early meetings prompted mocking words from the magazine Punch: "We see by the papers that there is a Society in Manchester that devotes its entire energies to the eating of vegetables, and the members meet occasionally for the purpose of masticating mashed potatoes and munching cabbage leaves."

We learn from Tristram Stuart's long and learned book, which for ecological reasons turns out to be quite sympathetic to this reform impulse, that Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher (active around 530 BC), became a major source of inspiration for early modern vegetarians because he believed in the transmigration of souls from one individual body to another, even of a different species. Therefore, kill no living thing. That notion, reinforced by European knowledge (acquired in the 16th and 17th centuries) of Hindu dietary practices, would provide a persuasive rationale for famous figures as diverse as Carolus Linnaeus, the influential Swedish botanist and classifier; Sir Isaac Newton; Rousseau; Voltaire; the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; and many others.

For those who adopted vegetarianism for scriptural reasons there was the widely shared belief that before the great flood humans ate only fruits and vegetables. For those with a more secular and scientific bent, like the abbot Pierre Gassendi, compelling evidence was found in human teeth because they resembled those of herbivores rather than being teeth for tearing flesh, like those of carnivores. Among the many who argued for a diet limited to fruit, vegetables, and milk, especially doctors like George Cheyne (the most influential vegetarian in 18th-century England), the primary rationale was health related, especially weight reduction. For others, moralistic empathy for animal rights supplied the main stimulus , and many argued for both causes in impassioned attacks on the majority's eating habits. Advocates of the latter blamed vegetarian fanaticism on sheer madness. Erasmus Darwin and Comte de Buffon, the French naturalist, insisted that "living inextricably within the great chain of life also meant submitting to the great chain of death." Many, like philosopher René Descartes, insisted that it was morally acceptable to eat meat, yet acknowledged it was healthier not to.

Stuart, a recent graduate of Cambridge University , develops a leisurely and episodic narrative to show the increasing influence in France, Italy, and Britain of the Brahmin lifestyle in India, especially once it became part of the British Empire and civil servants returned from south Asia with new notions of healthy habits. For those with exotic tastes in theology, the kabbalah even provided support. Stuart contends that there were so many prominent thinkers from widely different intellectual backgrounds who challenged the "practice of killing animals that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the late seventeenth century harboured a vegetarian renaissance. In many minds at least, there had been a bloodless revolution."

As his own evidence makes clear, however, there was no singular revolution centered on a particular place and time. Rather, irregular waves of interest occurred at different moments and in various cultures, from mid- 17th-century radicals in England to French revolutionaries in the later 18th century. From time to time more literal-minded vegetarians, with visions of re-creating the Garden of Eden, also practiced nudism. Shelley provides a prime example along with his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley . The poet believed his vegetarian writings could help restore harmony in nature. Along with many previous practitioners, Shelley also abjured alcohol and for a while persuaded Lord Byron to adopt this austere lifestyle.

The book ends with "Vegetarianism and the Politics of Ecology: Thoreau, Gandhi and Hitler," a fascinating epilogue that is nonetheless overly compressed, considering that many lesser-known figures receive an entire chapter. These three figures each had distinctive reasons for their dietary choices and deserve more space than Stuart provides. It is true that Gandhi was deeply influenced by Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience (1848), but Gandhi was attracted to vegetarianism when he discovered Indian restaurants while studying law in London during the 1880s. In Hitler's case he abandoned meat to counteract his chronic flatulence, constipation, nervous tension, and stomach cramps that he feared as signs of cancer.

The book might have been briefer had Stuart not been tempted to indulge in discursive narratives. The Marquis de Valady, for example, is a little-known participant in the French Revolution whose vegetarianism leads the author into an extended excursus on the bloody internecine struggles of that momentous event . On the other hand, without Stuart's case study of the influential Cheyne, we would never understand why abstemious diets figure so prominently in the works of Samuel Richardson, notably "Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded" (1740) and "Clarissa Harlowe" (1749), progenitors of the modern English novel. For Pamela and Clarissa, foods of choice included bread, butter, water, tea, milk, toast -- and chocolate . Some contemporaries criticized Pamela for making young ladies too weight-conscious. She perfectly exemplified the diet that Cheyne had urged upon Richardson, and she remains a negative poster child for anorexia.

This is not a book for every taste, but it goes well with tea and sympathy -- and time, a prime requisite.

Michael Kammen teaches cultural history at Cornell. His recent book is "Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture."