It is also an outrage on every sense of refinement and good taste, for in this question the aesthetics are not to be dissociated from the humanities. Has the artist ever considered the history of the “chop” which is brought so elegantly to his studio? Not he. He would not be able to eat it if he thought about it. He has first employed a slaughterman (“It’s such as you makes such as us”) to convert a beautiful living creature into a hideous carcase, to be displayed with other carcases in that ugliest product of civilisation, a butcher’s shop, and then he has employed a cook to conceal, as far as may be, the work of the slaughterman. This is what the Spectator calls being “humanised” by schools of cookery; I should call it being de-humanised. In passing a butcher’s I have seen a concert-programme pinned prominently on the corpse of a pig, and I have mused on that suggestive though unintended allegory of the Basis of Art. I deny that it is the right basis, and I maintain that there will necessarily be something porcine in the art that is so upheld and exhibited. Nine-tenths of our literary and artistic gatherings, our social functions, and most sumptuous entertainments, are tainted from the same source. You take a beautiful girl down to supper, and you offer her–a ham sandwich! It is proverbial folly to cast pearls before swine. What are we to say of the politeness which casts swine before pearls?
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.
