Grumpy Vegan

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.

There are, however, many critics of Vegetarianism who have not grasped this ethical principle, and whose contentions are, therefore, quite irrelevant. It has been said, for example, that “the most enthusiastic Vegetarians scarcely venture to deny that the destruction of many animals is requisite for human existence. What Vegetarian would allow his premises to be swarming with mice, rats, and similar pests? Does he permit caterpillars, snails, and slugs to devour the produce of his vegetable garden? Perhaps he satisfies his conscience with the reflection that the destruction of vermin is a necessary act.”

Perhaps the Vegetarian draws a distinction between the avowedly necessary destruction of garden and household pests, and the quite unnecessary (from the Vegetarian standpoint) butchery of oxen and sheep, who are bred for no other purpose than that of the slaughter-house, where they are killed in a most barbarous manner! Perhaps the Vegetarian “satisfies his conscience” with this distinction! I should rather think he did.

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.

Let it therefore be clearly understood that this step–the “first step,” as Tolstoy has called it, in a scheme of humane living–has been the main object of all Vegetarian propaganda since the establishment of the Vegetarian Society in 1847. To secure the discontinuance of the shocking and inhuman practices that are inseparable from the slaughter-house–this, and no abstract theory of abstinence from all “animal” substances, no fastidious abhorrence of contact with the “evil thing,” has been the purpose of modern food-reformers. They are, moreover, well aware that a change of this sort, which involves a reconsideration of our whole attitude towards the “lower animals,” can only be gradually realised; nor do they invite the world, as their opponents seem to imagine, to an immediate hard-and-fast decision, a revolution in national habits which is to be discussed, voted, and carried into effect the day after to-morrow, to the grievous jeopardy and dislocation of certain time-honoured interests. They simply point to the need of progression towards humaner diet, believing, with Thoreau, that “it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other, when they came in contact with the more civilised.”

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.

I say ethical principle, because it is beyond doubt that the chief motive of Vegetarianism is the humane one. Questions of hygiene and of economy both play their part, and an important part, in a full discussion of food reform; but the feeling which underlies and animates the whole movement is the instinctive horror of butchery, especially the butchery of the more highly organized animals, so human, so near akin to man. Let me quote a short passage from the preface to Mr. Howard Williams’s “Ethics of Diet,” an acknowledged text-book of Vegetarianism.

“It has been well said,” remarks Mr. Williams, “that there are steps on the way to the summit of dietetic reform, and if only one step be taken, yet that single step will not be without importance and without influence in the world. The step which leaves for ever behind it the barbarism of slaughtering our fellow beings, the mammals and birds, is, it is superfluous to add, the most important and influential of all.”

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.

Let me first make plain what I mean by calling Vegetarianism a new idea. Historically, of course, it is not new at all, either as a precept or a practice. A great portion of the world’s inhabitants have always been practically Vegetarians, and some whole races and sects have been so upon principle. The Buddhist canon in the east, and the Pythagorean in the west, enjoined abstinence from flesh-food on humane, as on other grounds; and in the writings of such “pagan” philosophers as Plutarch and Porphyry we find a humanitarian ethic of the most exalted kind, which, after undergoing a long repression during medieval churchdom, reappeared, albeit but weakly and fitfully at first, in the literature of the Renaissance, to be traced more definitely in the eighteenth century school of “sensibility.” But it was not until after the age of Rousseau, from which must be dated the great humanitarian movement of the past century, that Vegetarianism began to assert itself as a system, a reasoned plea for the disuse of flesh-food. In this sense it is a new ethical principle, and its import as such is only now beginning to be generally understood.

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.