When you think of early man, odds are that the first image that pops into your mind is that of spear-carrying Neanderthal dragging a large, dead animal home to his cave for dinner. We’ve long held onto the erroneous notion that our ancestors were mighty warriors, taking down gigantic beasts with their bows, arrows and flint knives, and tearing into meat as their primary source of nourishment.
But the truth is more complicated than that. Certainly there were eras in human history when meat was a staple – during the Ice Age, for example, the ground was so cold and hard that vegetation was difficult to find, so that Neanderthal was forced to hunt down meat to fill his grumbling tummy. But the very earliest humans were more gatherer than hunter and actually scavenged the remains of animals that were killed by other predators, essentially gleaning from others’ roadkill. Studies by anthropologists indicate that early man was far more interested in feasting on the nutrient-rich bone marrow of found animals rather than on their flesh, using tools to cut away the meat not to eat it, but to remove it from the desired bones.
No, early man’s diet consisted of what he could find growing where he lived – vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. By combining those, and relying primarily on a diet of calcium-rich wild greens, he was able to get all of the vitamins, iron, protein, fats and carbohydrates that he needed.
Animals had yet to be domesticated, so the only meat our ancestors had to eat was either what they chased down or found lying about – gathering nuts and seeds was simply more productive than counting on being able to catch and cook an animal by supper time. Eventually, man developed agriculture, raising vegetables and grains, and domesticating animals for meat and dairy. But before that time, some 10,000 years ago, man relied heavily on that which he could pluck from trees, bushes and the ground, and his diet was about 90 percent plant food. So toss out the idea that man is at heart a carnivore – we are, in fact, omnivores, able to eat meat but certainly nor required to by our biology or our history.
The Pythagorean Credo
By the time that man’s adventures were being jotted down in scriptures and testaments, meat-eating had become commonplace – but there were still those who advised against the practice. In the Old Testament’s book of Daniel, it was set down that Daniel refused the wealthy King Nebuchadnezzar’s feast of rich foods, meat and wine, asking for only vegetables and water for 10 days. At the end of that period, Daniel asked that his health and that of his companions be compared to those who indulged in the fare of the king’s table, and Daniel’s group was deemed "better in appearance and fatter in flesh" than those who ate the king’s diet. The parable was intended to show that Daniel was a smart, strong iconoclast, able to assert himself in the presence of a king, but it also serves as one of the earliest records of the superiority of a vegetarian lifestyle – and how going against the meat-eating norm was, even then, considered an act of rebellion!
But the earliest vegetarian diet, way back in the sixth century B.C. and long before the term "vegetarian" was coined, was the Pythagorean Diet. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, famous for his contributions to geometry and mathematics, strongly believed in the reincarnation of the soul and preached an ethical lifestyle that included injunctions against killing living creatures, whether through animal sacrifice or for the eating of meat. His proscribed diet was very close to today’s vegan diet, and attracted two different classes of adherents. One group, an elite group who studied directly under Pythagoras called mathematikoi ("mathematicians" followed an extremely restricted regimen, eating only cereals, bread, honey, fruits and some vegetables. A larger group of followers called the akousmatikoi ("listeners" who attended lectures by the philosopher were allowed to eat meat and drink wine, but were required to abstain on certain days.
According to historical documents, Pythagoras told his followers, "Oh, my fellow men! Do not defile your bodies with sinful foods. We have corn, we have apples bending down the branches with their weight, and grapes swelling on the vines. There are sweet-flavored herbs, and vegetables which can be cooked and softened over the fire, nor are you denied milk or thyme-scented honey. The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter: only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass." His biographer, Diogenes, wrote that Pythagoras ate millet or barley bread and honeycomb in the morning and raw vegetables at night, and that he paid fisherman to throw their catches back into the ocean.
The Pythagorean diet – which the philosopher claimed had been taught by the goddess Demeter to Heracles, who taught it to him – became known as that of intellectuals and rebels, and was banned by Rome. But in the smaller, outlying Greek states, the Pythagorean diet was more acceptable and found a wide share of adherents. And Pythagoras wasn’t the only philosopher to advise that a vegetarian lifestyle was healthier and more ethical than a meat-eating diet – Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Ovid and Virgil all advocated vegetarian diets.
Throughout the times that followed, Pythagoras’ teachings, included his diet, retained its advocates, even seeing a resurgence of popularity in Europe during the 17th century when a devout Christian named Thomas Tryon read the works of the German mystic Jacob Böhme and started a Hindu vegetarian society in London.
Towards an Enlightened Way of Eating
The Age of Enlightenment during Europe’s 18th century saw an upsurge in interest in vegetarianism, following hundreds of years in which diet was dictated by need – after all, during periods of famine and disease, one eats whatever one can get. But by the 18th century medicine had curtailed many of the more widespread diseases, and Europeans had discovered a number of delicious New World vegetables like potatoes, cauliflower and corn. The intellectuals of the time, including the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer – who were now able to think about loftier issues than mere survival – began to reappraise man’s place in the order of things. For the first time, arguments were put forth that animals were intelligent, feeling creatures, and that it was immoral to mistreat them.
During the 18th century, painters like Oudry and Delacroix made artworks that showed animals as individuals with personalities, rather than just beasts to be used and slaughtered for human convenience. During this time, the treatment of animals was often horrific – beating one’s horse wasn’t considered out of line, nor were cock fights or bear-baiting, the setting of bulldogs against bears as sport. Pigs were beaten to death with knotted ropes in the belief that it would make for more tender meat and, in Paris, the slaughter of animals was done in the alleys next to the city’s many, many butcher shops, which led to public outcry against the horrible sounds of slaughter, the blood in the streets and the stench of rotting flesh. When Napoléon took control of Paris in 1799, he began a program of extensive city works that including sewers, and slaughterhouses located on the outskirts of the city. The methods used to butcher animals were made no less humane, but at least people no longer had to witness the slaughter as they walked down the city streets – beginning a tradition of killing mass quantities of animals for meat behind closed doors that continues to this day.
A painting of Slaughter House
The 1800s saw a number of religious and educational communities spring up which advocated vegetarian diets. In 1807, the Reverend William Cowherd broke with the Church of England and established the Bible Christian Church, founded on a literal interpretation of the scriptures. Cowherd believed that the Bible prohibited the eating of meat – a view that was not shared by leaders of the Church of England – and he quickly developed a large congregation. His timing was perfect, capitalizing on a widespread backlash to the industrial revolution that inspired a more romanticized view of nature and animals. Cowherd’s flock abstained from consuming meat, coffee, tea, tobacco and alcohol, and many also eschewed dairy products and eggs. The Bible Christian Church handed out free bowls of vegetable soup to the poor, and are often credited with coining the term "vegetarian."
In 1817, a disciple of Cowherd’s named William Metcalfe sailed for America with 41 church members and formed a small but influential Philadelphia congregation. Among Metcalfe’s followers was a Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham, a raw foods enthusiast and inventor of the graham cracker. Graham toured the United States, giving lectures on temperance (abstention from alcohol) and the importance of proper diet to good health. Through his lectures and his writings in the "Graham Journal of Health and Longevity," he counseled that certain foods and activities were unhealthy because of their "stimulating" qualities, including white bread, alcohol and the wearing of tight pants. He was a tireless advocate of the vegetarian diet – he compared human physiology to that of orangutans, concluding that vegetarian food was optimal for all primates – and founded the American Vegetarian Society in 1850.
But Graham’s two greatest legacies are health related – he lectured extensively on the connections between diet and disease (stating that New York residents had weakened their resistance to epidemics through their unhealthy eating habits) and promoted the use of whole grains, denouncing the increasingly popular use of refined flour in baked goods, pointing out that while bakers were able to turn out more loaves of bread due to the faster baking times, the nutritional value of the bread was lost.Among those that Metcalfe and Graham influenced was Amos Bronson Alcott, father of "Little Women" author Louisa May Alcott. A writer, philosopher and educator, Alcott was a proponent of Transcendentalism, which began as a reform movement within the Unitarian church and proposed that the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world, and contains what the world contains.
In 1843, he and educational reformer Charles Lane established Fruitlands, an ambitious utopian community in Massachusetts. Gathering together a small but eager group of disaffected intellectuals, Alcott advocated an austere vegan lifestyle, writing, "The entrance to paradise is still through the strait and narrow gate of self-denial. Eden’s avenue is yet guarded by the fiery-sworded cherubim, and humility and charity are the credentials for admission." The diet at Fruitlands consisted of fruit, grains, beans and peas. All animal flesh and by-products were forbidden due to their "corrupting" nature, and tea, coffee, rice, molasses and sugar were off-limits because they were produced by slave labor. The community’s goal was to produce only what they needed, believing that the acquisition of material goods inhibits spirituality. For a time, Alcott admired the self-supporting activities of the nearby Shaker community, but ultimately condemned them for indulging in production and trade with the outside world.
As well-intentioned as Fruitlands’ goals were, it didn’t take long to discover that successful communal living requires more than a well-tended vegetable garden and discussions of philosophy – Alcott’s experiment lasted just seven months. Louisa May Alcott wrote of her experience at Fruitlands in "Transcendental Wild Oats," and Fruitlands stands today as a museum.
Adventists and Corn Flakes and Vegans – Oh My!
One of biggest influences on modern-day vegetarianism in the United States has been the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church, founded in the 1840s by vegetarian health reformer Ellen White. She believed that the proper diet for humans was prescribed by God in the Bible, and wrote in 1864 that Adam and Eve were given all they needed for nourishment – "He designed that the race should eat. It was contrary to His plan to have the life of any creature taken. There was to be no death in Eden.
The fruit of the trees in the garden was the food man’s wants required." The SDA church focuses heavily on spiritual health, diet and exercise – in fact, several studies have found that Adventists are significantly healthier than the general population! Today, almost all of the church’s clergy and roughly half of its two million members worldwide are lacto-ovo vegetarians, and the SDA church owns its own publishing company, plus a number of hospitals, natural food stores, and vegetarian restaurants. Church-affiliated universities are leaders in scientific research into dietetics, and continue to promote vegetarianism with a strong emphasis on health.
One man who worked as a printer for White, helping to publish the Adventists’ health journal, was a fellow named John Harvey Kellogg. White and her husband, James, took a liking to Kellogg and paid for his medical school education, then placed him in charge of their Battle Creek Sanitarium, a spa retreat for "health restoration and training." A believer in the value of preventative medicine, Dr. Kellogg’s treatments were founded in the Adventist philosophy with an emphasis on fresh air, sunshine, exercise, rest and diet.
The diet he prescribed, which he called "biologic living," forbade meats, condiments, spices, alcohol, chocolate, coffee and tea, but he worked tirelessly to create a vegetarian diet that was also varied and tasty – over the course of his career, Dr. Kellogg invented over 80 different products using nuts and grains, including peanut butter, a cereal-based coffee substitute (an early version of Postum) and corn flakes. Dr. Kellogg was convinced that a great many illnesses were caused by toxic bacteria in the bowels and favored a high-fiber vegetarian diet, blaming some 90 percent of all disease on stomach and bowel problems.
He was especially concerned about the effects of meat-eating on the intestinal tract. In many ways, Dr, Kellogg’s practices can be viewed as somewhat different – he disapproved of sexual activity of all kinds, gave patients multiple daily enemas, and shocked them in electrified tanks of water – but his influence as an advocate of vegetarianism was profound. Among the visitors to his sanitarium were automobile tycoon Henry Ford, retailers J.C. Penney and S.S.Kresge, actress Sarah Berhardt, explorer Richard Byrd, inventor Thomas Edison, industrialist Harvey Firestone, President William Howard Taft, and aviator Amelia Earhart. Once he started marketing his food products, Dr. Kellogg had to hire his brother to take over because the enterprise was so successful, and his method of mass-producing cereal for the marketplace was copied by numerous competitors
Battle Creek Sanitarium was just one of many vegetarian health retreats in the United States, and advocates of the lifestyle – and shrewd businessmen hoping to capitalize on a trend – opened vegetarian restaurants in large cities across the country. Toward the end of the century, however, interest in vegetarianism waned. In the early part of the 20th century, the United States Department pf Agriculture (USDA) began producing food guides, ostensibly to help struggling families plan nutritious meals during times of little money and, later, food rationing.
These food guides, unsurprisingly, recommended that Americans eat hefty amounts of meat, eggs and dairy – all products of the food industries overseen by the Department of Agriculture.
The Swingin’ 60’s: Peace, Free Love and Vegetarianism
Vegetarianism regained some popularity in the 1960s with the teaching of Michio Kushi, an advocate of macrobiotics who founded the Kushi Institute in Massachusetts. Born in Japan, Kushi came to the United States in 1949, eager to share what he’d learned from macrobiotic educator Georges Ohsawa, who taught that food was the key to health, and that health was the key to peace.
In Boston, Kushi founded Erewhon, the country’s pioneer natural foods distributor,making organically grown whole foods and naturally processed foods widely available and introducing countless people to miso, tofu, tempeh and other soy products, as well as sea vegetables, barley malt and rice syrup, azuki beans and rice cakes – the mainstream availability of health foods that we have today simply wouldn’t exist if not for Michio Kushi. Throughout the 1980s, Kushi met with government leaders at the United Nations and around the world, promoting macrobiotics, working to convey the philosophies of healthful, thoughtful eating.
But the real vegetarian boom came in the early 1970s following the publication of Frances Moore Lappé’s "Diet for a Small Planet." Published at a time when the world was beginning to register alarm over depletion of the earth’s resources, Lappé’s book raised awareness of the wasteful manner in which animals are reared for consumption as meat. Though not a vegetarian herself, Lappé promoted feeding ourselves in a healthful, respectful ways that made a gentler impact on the environment. Her book advocated a complicated methodology for eating complete proteins that involved combining food low in certain amino acids with other foods high in that amino acid – in later editions of the book she abandoned that method, saying, "In combating the myth that meat is the only way to get high quality protein, I reinforced another myth. I gave the impression that in order to get enough protein without meat, considerable care was needed in choosing foods. Actually, it is much easier than I thought." While Lappé’s book was slow to gain popularity, in the three decades since its release its sold over three million copies and spawned a 2002 sequel, "Hope’s Edge" The Next Diet for a Small Planet," in which Lappé once again looks at the way we feed ourselves. In 2001, Lappé and her daughter, Anna, founded the Small Planet Institute, a research and education organization which partners with foundations, individuals and socially responsible businesses to promote "living democracy," a philosophy of sustainable, positive, working communities.
The ethical side of vegetarianism also received a boost in the mid-1970’s, with the publication of the book "Animal Liberation" by ethicist Peter Singer, which argued against what the author called "speciesism" – discrimination based on the belief that humans own animals and can do whatever they like with them. His contention that all beings capable of suffering should be granted equal consideration helped to promote not just vegetarianism but a vegan lifestyle, due to his belief that the use of animals for food is unjustifiable because it creates unnecessary suffering. A few years later in 1975, the non-profit group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was formed, founded on the tenet that "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment." In addition to high profile campaigns against animal testing and fur farming, PETA has lobbied passionately against the use of animals for food. The group has had great success in uncovering and stopping inhumane treatment of animals in laboratories and in spreading awareness of veganism, particularly through their placement of "Lettuce Ladies" – lovely young women dressed only in bikinis made from lettuce – and a 2003 advertising campaign which compared animals killed in factory farms with concentration camp victims.
So Where Are We Now?
Vegetarianism is more popular and acceptable by mainstream society than ever before. The more that we learn about diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and with more meat-borne illnesses from E. Coli, Mad Cow disease and other bacterial infections on the rise, a vegetarian diet is a smarter option than at any time in the past. In a world where our natural resources are being depleted at a rate far faster than they can possibly be renewed, it makes more sense than ever to walk gently on the planet. Fortunately, the ranks of vegetarians are swelling as people figure these things out for themselves – with any luck, most of the world will come around to the vegetarian way of thinking, while we still have some of those resources left.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment