{"id":449,"date":"2007-12-08T09:52:24","date_gmt":"2007-12-08T13:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/?p=449"},"modified":"2007-12-08T09:52:24","modified_gmt":"2007-12-08T13:52:24","slug":"449","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/08\/449\/","title":{"rendered":"Thought for the Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>No wonder that food-reformers seem a strange and unreasonable folk to those who have thus failed to apprehend the very raison d&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>To this same misunderstanding is due the futile outcry that is raised every now and then against the term &#8220;Vegetarian,&#8221; when some zealous opponent undertakes to &#8220;expose the delusions of those who boast that they live on vegetables, and yet take eggs, butter, and milk as regular articles of diet.&#8221; 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 &#8220;come to stay&#8221; until we find something better. It is worth observing that the objection is seldom or never made in actual everyday life, where the word &#8220;Vegetarian&#8221; 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 &#8220;consistency,&#8221; rather than on practical progress towards a more humane method of living&#8212;the only sort of &#8220;consistency&#8221; which in this, or any other branch of reform, is either possible in itself, or worth a moment&#8217;s attention from a sensible man.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) Excerpted from &#8220;The Humanities of Diet&#8221; (Manchester: The Vegetarian Society, 1914), serialised on The Grumpy Vegan and available in full at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.animal-rights-library.com\/index.htm\">Animal Rights Library<\/a>. Learn more <a href=\"http:\/\/www.henrysalt.co.uk\/index_old.html\">Henry Salt<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No wonder that food-reformers seem a strange and unreasonable folk to those who have thus failed to apprehend the very raison d&#8217;etre of food-reform, and who persist in arguing as if the choice between the old diet and the new &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/08\/449\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thinking","tag-thought-for-the-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grumpyvegan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}