But what of the failures of those who have attempted the Vegetarian diet? Is not the movement hopelessly blocked by Mr. So-and So’s six Weeks’ experiment? He became so very weak, you know, until his “lends were quite alarmed about him, and he was really obliged to take something more nourishing. All of which symptoms, I would remark, could be matched by thousands of similar instances from the records of the temperance movement, and prove clearly enough, not that abstinence from flesh food or alcohol is impossible, but that (as any thoughtful person might have foreseen) a great change in the habits of a people cannot be effected suddenly, or without its inevitable percentage of failures. Every propagandist movement, religious, social, or dietetic, is sure to attract to itself a motley crowd of adherents, many of whom, after a trial of the new principles–some after a genuine trial, others after a very superficial one–revert to their former position. Let it be freely granted that a habit so ingrained as that of flesh-eating is likely, and, indeed certain, in some particular cases to be very hard to eradicate. What then? Is not that exactly what might have been expected in a change of this kind? And, on the other side, it is equally certain that a large number of the reported failures–nine-tenths of them, I should say–are caused by the half-hearted or ill-advised manner in which the attempt is made. It is just as possible to commit suicide on a Vegetarian diet as on any other, if you are bent on that conclusion; and really one might almost imagine, from the extraordinary folly sometimes shown in the selection of a diet, that certain experimentalists were “riding for a fall” in their dealings with Vegetarianism–taking up the thing in order to be able to say, “I tried it, and see the result!” I knew a man, a master at a great public school, who “tried Vegetarianism,” and he tried it by making cabbage and potato the substitute for flesh, and after a month’s trial he felt “very flabby,” and then he gave it up.
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.
