No wonder that food-reformers seem a strange and unreasonable folk to those who have thus failed to apprehend the very raison d’etre of food-reform, and who persist in arguing as if the choice between the old diet and the new were a mere matter of personal caprice or professional adjustment, into which the moral question scarcely enters at all.
To this same misunderstanding is due the futile outcry that is raised every now and then against the term “Vegetarian,” when some zealous opponent undertakes to “expose the delusions of those who boast that they live on vegetables, and yet take eggs, butter, and milk as regular articles of diet.” Of course the simple fact is that Vegetarians are neither boastful of their diet, nor enamoured of their name; it was invented, wisely or unwisely, a full half-century ago, and, whether we like it or not, has evidently “come to stay” until we find something better. It is worth observing that the objection is seldom or never made in actual everyday life, where the word “Vegetarian” carries with it a quite definite meaning, viz., one who abstains from flesh-food but not necessarily from animal products; the verbal pother is always made by somebody who is sitting down to write an article against food-reform, and has nothing better to say. It all comes from the notion that Vegetarians are bent on some barren, logical “consistency,” rather than on practical progress towards a more humane method of living—the only sort of “consistency” which in this, or any other branch of reform, is either possible in itself, or worth a moment’s attention from a sensible man.
Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) Excerpted from “The Humanities of Diet” (Manchester: The Vegetarian Society, 1914), serialised on The Grumpy Vegan and available in full at the Animal Rights Library. Learn more Henry Salt.
