Some say we'll die by fire, in a nuclear holocaust, some say by ice, in the eternal night of a meteorite collision. Until now, however, few have suggested that the last trumpet would be sounded by excessive bean production. That is the possibility raised at the end of Tristram Stuart's intriguing first book, an account of how vegetarianism, influenced by India, has been a potent social force over the last 400 years in Europe. The point is that the Amazonian rainforests are felled to produce beans that do not go directly into human stomachs but into chickens, themselves the unfortunate victims of our disastrous desire to over-consume meat. If only we were all vegetarian, the argument goes, far less forest would need to be razed in order to produce the same quantity of food.
Stuart begins with Bacon - Sir Francis, that is - in England at the turn of the 17th century. He observed that fruit and vegetables were good for his health and acted accordingly. The diet was adopted by various eccentrics, most of them motivated by a desire to return to the original ways of Adam and Eve. Stuart does not analyse where this belief in an original purity and perfection springs from, but it oxygenates his story, always ready to breathe fire into some zealot: men like Roger Crab and Thomas Tryon who both managed to thump the Bible until it confessed to being a vegetarian manifesto. Tryon had gone to Barbados as a sugar planter in the 1660s but what he saw disgusted him. Not only were the slaves treated appallingly, but the whole enterprise was a rapacious catalogue of natural destruction.
Returning to London, Tryon resolved to prosyletise for non-violence, even lobbying Parliament to defend the "Rights and Properties of the helpless innocent creatures, who have no Advocates in this world". A man way ahead of his time, Tryon denounced the destruction of North American forests, the exploitation of animals, and the senseless ransacking of the earth for useless "dainties". His tracts such as The Way to Wealth, Long Life and Happiness were widely read.
As Stuart points out, Tryon's ideals had their source in India. The voyages of discovery that had kickstarted the trade in luxuries had also brought back outlandish reports of people - brahmins - who ate only "herbs", much like the ancient Pythagoreans. The chaplain on Sir Thomas Roe's 1615 mission to the Mughal court, Edward Terry, delved a little more deeply and brought back a brief description of the Indian doctrine of ahimsa or non-violence. Others reported animal hospitals. Among men like Tryon these novelties raised the possibility that vegetarianism might be both healthy and ethical - the two planks on which the practice has stood ever since.
Unfortunately perhaps, the Indian connection also led to other associations, notably with reincarnation, which put it at odds with Christian theology, and also with weakness and effeminacy, a link that grew stronger in English minds as the brawny beef-eaters of the East India Company consolidated their grip on the sub-continent. Later Rousseau turned this perception to his own purposes, announcing that the "cruel and ferocious" English were the brutalised product of their meat-eating diet.
At this point, some shortcomings appear in Stuart's narrowly academic focus. To discuss the effects of Indian vegetarianism on Europe and not once mention the ayurvedic system behind it seems strange. In exchange for a few of the wild eccentrics on the English scene, I would have liked to know more about how Europeans understood and interpreted the alien theories.
Having said that, the eccentrics do provide some great entertainment. Dr George Cheyne was one of the brightest luminaries of 18th-century English vegetarianism, a hugely obese evangelist for frugality who managed to epitomise the dilemmas of the age, describing himself as "a putrified overgrown Body from Luxury and perpetual Laziness, scorbutical all over". This doctor's diagnostic methods were certainly non-veggie: he would take a blood sample, taste it, then invariably denounce the patient's prediliction for meat and alcohol that had clogged up their tubes. Cured of his own addiction to such substances by a diet of milk, fruit, roots and seeds, Cheyne became the first miracle-diet guru.
Stuart is excellent when he is tracing the influence of mavericks like Cheyne in the literature and philosophy of the times, pointing out how far vegetarianism infiltrated the 18th-century consciousness in novels such as Clarissa and Pamela. In both these tales meat-eating became symbolic of tyrannical chauvinism and depravity while a vegetable diet was the sign of sensitive souls. Only sympathy for one's fellow creatures, as displayed by the heroines, could heal the rift between the powerful and the weak. Outside of Richardson's novels, however, the French revolution soon swept away any such sympathy: moral indignation on behalf of Mother Nature could easily lead to inhuman treatment for humans, a tendency that Stuart traces as far as the Nazis (but no further - something of a let-off for modern eco-extremists).
In the 1800s much of that outrage on behalf of animals had been caused by the visibility of suffering and death in markets. Once the meat industry expanded and tucked itself away, however, the slaughter became silent. Nevertheless, the association of vegetarianism with radical politics endured. Shelley converted to a "bloodless regimen" in 1812 and seems to have even inculcated Byron for a short time. Ever-attentive to advances in science, Shelley's ideals were modern in some senses, but behind it all was that old standfast: the "original" diet. If only those French revolutionaries had been "vegetable feeders", Shelley claimed, they would not have "lent their brutal Suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre". Strangely, Stuart omits William Blake whose Auguries of Innocence ("Kill not the moth nor butterfly") read like a paean to the philosophy of ahimsa. Clearly, however, including all the famous pacifists and vegetarians could easily lead to literary indigestion.
The Indian connection - not always kept up throughout the book - returns at the close with Mahatma Gandhi finding inspiration in Shelley. Interesting as that is, it cannot hide the fact that the arguments about vegetarianism have not moved on greatly over the centuries. Perhaps that is simply because the truths - healthier, more peaceful, more respectful to the environment, more ethical - have never changed. Unfortunately for the veggie advocates, it is also true that we are biologically omnivores and that has left open the door for the carnivorous dogs of capitalism. Stuart's closing call for us "to reduce our consumption of meat" is not new either, but his book is a welcome reminder of why such a call is more important than ever.
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