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books: Reading between the lines.

Meat vs. PotatoesThe real history of vegetarianism.

By Laura Shapiro
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2007, at 2:16 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Perhaps the history of European vegetarianism is a history of wishful thinking. Stuart, of course, doesn't see it that way. But he does focus on India as the inspiration for a great deal of Western philosophizing (the book's original subtitle, jettisoned for the American edition, was "Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India"), and wishful thinking has long been a popular souvenir to bring home from the subcontinent. Early travelers to India returned with amazing tales of a population that lived entirely on vegetables and enjoyed perfect health. Nicolo Conti, a Venetian merchant, saw Brahmins who lived to the age of 300; travel writer Jean Baptiste Tavernier saw a man "whipped to death for shooting a peacock"; John Ovington, a cleric, saw Hindus living in a state of grace like Adam and Eve, practicing "Justice and Tenderness to Brutes, and all living Creatures." True or not, says Stuart, these reports were influential, for they offered a vivid and dramatic challenge to a way of life that Westerners took for granted.

But what did those travelers really see? Stuart doesn't go down that path; he's interested in the long cultural reach of these travelogues, not their veracity. Still, it's surprising how little attention he gives to the fact that vegetarianism in India was anything but monolithic. Contrary to what Stuart asserts, Buddha did not teach "that it was wrong for people to eat animals." (His own last meal, famously, was a dish of pork.) Stuart quotes Europeans who described Syrian Christians in Kerala "abstaining from animal food," just as the Hindus around them did; but he ignores a long tradition of beef-eating in that same Syrian Christian community. In truth, historians and archaeologists have traced meat-eating in the subcontinent back thousands of years; European travelers would have seen Indians consuming fish, fowl, mutton, and beef, as well as all-vegetable diets. But the West was most fascinated by tales of Indians who swore off all meat in the name of religion and nonviolence. That was the image of India that sold books, and that was the image that took root in Europe.

The travelers were right about one thing: In India, it was considered perfectly natural to live without meat. Vegetarianism wasn't a novelty, a hardship, a form of rebellion or a sign that a screw was loose. It was simply a way of life, in a region where many ways of life coexisted. In Europe, by contrast, vegetarianism grew up as an aberration swathed in asceticism and self-denial. Nobody was supposed to live sumptuously on a vegetarian diet; the point was precisely the opposite. Radical preacher Roger Crab, who became a hermit in 1652, renounced meat with a fervor typical of the early vegetarians and decided to eat only "broth thickned with bran, and pudding made with bran, & Turnep leaves chop't together, and grass." Had he been lucky enough to be a devout Hindu instead of a heretical Christian, he might have been eating the glorious vegetarian cuisine developed in the South Indian temple town of Udipi, notably those big, airy crepes called dosas, filled with spicy potatoes and accompanied by a few spoonfuls of coconut chutney and a little cup of hot, soupy sambhar, laced with vegetables and tamarind. When vegetarianism is about what to eat, instead of what not to eat, life picks up considerably.

In recent decades, the West has finally started to catch on. Anna Thomas, Deborah Madison, and all the other gurus of contemporary vegetarian cooking have dismantled the bleak, defiant approach to food that for so long characterized meatless menus in Britain and America. Nut patties and boiled carrots have given way to a new culinary tradition that draws on nearly everything in the edible kingdom—vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, grains, herbs, and spices—and evokes flavors from cuisines around the world. The absence of meat is unremarkable, just as it should be.

And who chooses to eat this way? People who like food, whether or not they call themselves vegetarians. There was a bloodless revolution, all right, but it happened in the kitchen. The rest is commentary.

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Remarks from the Fray:

Laura Shaprio's review of The Bloodless Revolution would leave you thinking that the sum total of this experience is the new word vegetarian. The other creatures, though, weren't of the barnyard variety. They were other people introduced through expanded colonization and the peculiar institution of slavery. European countries came into increasing contact with people who were dehumanized into an otherness that could be expolited for gain, human chattel.

It is in reaction to the peculiar institution in addition to the expanded knowledge of the world noted by Stuart that makes a philosophical place for vegetarianism. One reformer of note, John Comenius argued that "we are all citizens of one world, we are all of one blood." How then did they assign a hierachy to the essence of this feeling? Once the Europeans began to acknowlege the humanity of the people sold in marketplaces and bound for lives of the most base servitude, it seems their sentiments had developed some additional consideration for those "other creatures".

--bright_virago

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