Vegetarians in 18th Century France

From the perspective of a meat eater, vegetarian discourse depends primarily upon what must appear to be a rather vicious and uncharitable characterisation of the production of meat and the people who produce and eat it. I have chosen the most extreme examples of the rhetoric of monstrosity available in each of the vegetarian texts I wish to explore, first of all, a touch of provocation and controversy, but also to convey a sense of the difficulty one can experience when trying to balance an uncensored vegetarian perspective with the sensibilities of a non-vegetarian audience.

A comprehensive account of vegetarian food and eating in the Romantic period. Includes detailed analyses of works by Rousseau, Blake, Gillray and John Stewart.

Estudios del Hombre, 19, 2005

Meat, in all human cultures, has been and still is a sensitive subject. Highly valued or prohibited, symbolically always very powerful, it has often been at the core of all food lore. This book is an attempt to understand some aspects of the complicated relationship between Man and Meat. There are all sorts of animal foods. Possibilities range from insects and reptiles to fish, fowl and all other warm blooded animals. Every human society, culturally, has selected and established the animals it considers edible, and this may vary from snails to beef, bugs to fish, rabbit to reindeer. It is not inconceivable that humankind at some point or other has tasted all living creatures. From a nutritional point of view, animal flesh is not absolutely essential to the human diet. Proteins of animal origin can be absorbed through milk and milk products, as well as eggs. Thus we have several cultures, such as Buddhists and Hindu groups, who, for philosophical or religious reasons, have abstained from the flesh of animals and maintained an excellent level of health. But groups abstaining from all animal products whatsoever have been few and far between. In the post-Pythagorean Western world, these have never established structured societies, and even today, if such groups develop, they are small and not really representative; the very exacting effort they have to make to achieve a diet that provides all necessary types of protein, relegates them rather to the sphere of philosophical or religious peculiarities. Conversely, societies where meat is a staple are also extremely rare, and confined today to the Arctic, the best example being the Inuit. However, one of the most important topics discussed and researched by food anthropologists and primatologists has been the original condition of humanoids: were they vegetarian or meat eaters? It is indeed a major topic still today, possibly because it carries strong philosophical interpretations of the “true” nature of Man. And this remains so even if the general consensus is that our ancestors were, like most primates, occasional meat eaters.

2005

Current studies of food consumption fail to deal with vegetarians. They are not represented. Vegetarians cannot be found in statistics and only not appear in nutritional nomenclatures where their diet is mainly subjected to normative evaluations. Such a blank in representation and nomenclatures makes room for vegetarian advocates to impose their sole definitions of the diet. Vegetarianism appears as a philosophy of life embedded in core features, such as the rejection of cruelty towards animals, an intense awareness of health, and love of nature. Consequently, the adoption of the vegetarian diet proceeds from an exclusively moral choice which, though a typical privilege of the elite, ought to be open to everyone because of the particular edifying virtues the diet entails. In this paper, it is my concern to show that vegetarianism cannot be reduced to a moral choice: it is an important social fact that maintains close relations with the conditions of living, social aspirations and wa...

Food as a Cultural Signifier. Perspectives on the Middle East and Beyond, Kirill Dmitriev, Bilal Orfali, and Julia Hauser, eds. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2019

This article shows shows how and why perceptions of foodways in the Middle East played an important role in debates on vegetarianism in nineteenth-century Germany, where the region appeared as an epitome of frugality.

The historical link between wealth, food and health is a highly complex one. In this respect one of the most influential historical narratives has been developed for the late medieval period. In the 14th century, demographic decline would have resulted in “Das Goldene Zeitalter des Handwerks”: labour had become scarce, and nominal wages rose while prices remained stable or decreased. As a consequence, diet and nutrition intake would have improved for large parts of the population, peasants as well as urban wage-earners. Instead of the monotonous grain-based diet of the 12th and 13th centuries, food became more varied. Especially meat and fish, sources of proteins and iron, became affordable for larger parts of the population - Europe was more than ever turning into “l’Europe carnivore” eating up to 100 kilograms of meat per capita a year in the 15th century according to Wilhelm Abel . In recent years both the regional variation of this diet improvement and its presumed positive impact on health and mortality have been questioned in the historiography. The link between diet improvement, disease and mortality in the wake of the Black Death turns out to be an uncertain one, with important regional variations, and biased by epidemiologic, environmental and social conditions . As to the supposed increase in meat consumption, Massimo Montanari advocated a more nuanced approach, indicating important regional and chronological divergences within late medieval Europe, as well as the lack of evidence for increased overall meat consumption on the late medieval countryside: in many rural regions beef-eating remained uncommon and both the extension of animal husbandry and the booming international oxen trade were more than ever oriented towards the urban markets . In this paper we will take up Montanari’s remarks for one of the core regions of “L’Europe carnivore”: the county of Flanders. For the towns of the densely populated and urbanized Southern Low Countries, a significant increase in meat consumption from the late medieval period on has already been noticed by Herman Van Der Wee in 1966 . However the main problems remain unsolved: did late medieval diet indeed improve for large numbers of the both the urban and rural populations? We can further question whether such ‘improvement’ consisted solely of an increase in the quantities of meat consumed or conversely, whether more qualitative changes were also visible. Finally, it remains an open question whether the improved nutrition intake was sufficient to change health conditions and mortality on a more than individual base. In what follows we will concentrate on meat consumption, although the presumed nutritional changes of the late medieval period also concerned other foodstuffs like fish, cheese and butter. We will try to argue that an ‘overall’ increase in meat consumption in late medieval Flanders is highly problematic. Regional and social variations in food consumption were often more significant than ‘general’ chronological evolutions. As we will see, this wide variety of diets can only be explained by linking food consumption to regional economic and environmental conditions . In our Flemish test-case this will be illustrated by comparing the inland part of the region, where a more traditional small-size family survival economy had developed and where animal husbandry was focused on manure and dairy production, and not on private meat consumption, with the coastal area, where extensive and commercial cattle-breeding developed from the late medieval period on.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing

Vegetarianism is abstinence from the consumption of animal flesh. Today, it is often distinguished from veganism, which is abstinence from all food products derived from or bodily produced by animals. In Victorian Britain, vegetarianism emerged as a controversial practice, a philosophical ethos, a personal identity ("a vegetarian"), and a socio-political movement. Victorians promoted vegetarianism as a healthy diet, a solution to food scarcity, inequity, and adulteration, and a complement of temperance (abstinence from alcohol consumption). Victorian vegetarians were never numerous, but vegetarianism peaked during the 1840s and 1850s, which saw the founding of the "Vegetarian Society," and again at the fin-de-siècle. It was always controversial. Some Victorian women writers, such as Eliza Lynn Linton and Margaret Oliphant, found it disturbing and disruptive. Others, including

Rarely does a subject strike a chord with the general public in the way that the study of food history has. This extremely popular topic has the advantage of including themes and subjects as common to us today as they were to people in the past; food, kitchens, cookery and recipes all resonate through the ages and now more people are looking to the past in order to guide them in their food consumption today. Yet it would also be true to say that few subjects have as many persistently held myths attached to them as food history seems to, whether it is the assumption that our forebears used spices to cover the taste of rotting meat or that Henry VIII’s meals were a veritable food fight, people are happy that they know the ‘facts’ and are often shocked to find out the actual truth of our culinary history. Popular culture, such as poorly researched television programmes and movies, repeat these myths over and over, but just as frequently we find the accepted works on the subject adding their own myths to the popular mix; meat was the preserve of the wealthy whilst vegetables were the foodstuff of the poor and that surviving recipes are representative of the foods served on a regular basis to the higher levels of society, but are they actually true? They are often presented with little or no corroborating evidence and given the current vogue for the presentation of live historic cookery demonstrations across the country, these facts are being passed on to thousands of people all of whom are keen to see if they can learn something about the food that they eat by looking at food from the past. At a time when the consumption of meat is considered in some circles to be unfashionable, this paper aims to present a balanced view of meat on the historical table. Throughout, I shall concentrate on evidence from the late medieval and early post medieval periods as these are the periods most associated both with the origins of ‘English’ food and many of these food myths.