Julia Keay
How to be Lank, Fleet and Nimble
The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India
By Tristram Stuart (HarperCollins 453pp £25)

One of the hardest things about writing on what might be called a ‘special interest’ must be convincing potential readers that you are not going to preach at them. Rest assured. Tristram Stuart doesn’t preach. What he does do is try to make us think about what we eat, and why, and what effect our choice of diet has on ourselves, the animal world, and the ecology of the planet. And, in spite of his misleading subtitle, he succeeds triumphantly. ‘Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India’ suggests a claim to spectacular achievement on the part of a fringe group trying to enhance its credentials. In fact The Bloodless Revolution is a scholarly, wide-ranging and utterly absorbing history of vegetarianism.

Although the word ‘vegetarian’ was not coined until the 1840s, as long ago as the sixth century BC Pythagoras propounded a theory of immortality that entailed the transmigration of the soul between living creatures – and thus the immorality of eating the flesh of any of them. Pythagoras was thought to have encountered this theory while travelling in Egypt, to which country it was believed to have been introduced by philosophers from India. His doctrines were later advocated by such philosophical giants as Socrates, Diogenes and Plato and would become a seminal part of the Hellenistic philosophical tradition. Pythagoras may not have visited India himself, but Alexander the Great certainly did; and when Alexander arrived in Taxila (now in Pakistan) in 326 BC and encountered Brahmin, Jain and Buddhist ascetics (he called them ‘gymnosophists’) who also believed in reincarnation and non-violence and therefore did not eat meat, the link with (if not ‘the Discovery of’) India was confirmed. Just as this evidence of an early and exotic provenance lent credibility to Greek philosophy, so the existence of a culture that had survived – even thrived – for so long on a meat-free diet has inspired the vegetarian movement ever since.

In western Europe, where Alexander’s encounters with the Brahmins were soon forgotten if they had ever been widely known, those who survived on a meat-free diet were not called vegetarians, they were called the poor. Meat-eating had status. It was also considered (particularly in Britain – the land of the rosbifs) essential for strength and virility. The French physician François Bernier, who arrived at the court of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in the 1660s, was astonished to discover that vegetarianism was not only a viable option, it was a military asset. ‘Whereas European armies were weighed down with barrels of salted beef and tankards of wine – without which the European soldier would absolutely refuse to fight – Indian armies were perfectly content with readily transportable dried foods such as lentils and rice.’ To assert, as Stuart does, that ‘Hindu culture shook Europe’s self-centredness to the core’ is probably overstating the case, but it certainly opened a few eyes.

Nowadays, when vegetarianism is so widespread and unremarkable (there are 4 million vegetarians in the UK alone), it is hard to imagine it was ever such a contentious subject. While diehard meat-eaters derided anyone who abstained from eating meat as effeminate, weak and lazy, radical vegetarians like the ‘Pythagorean’ Thomas Tryon preached that ‘eating our Brethren and Fellow Creatures qualifies Men to be sordid, surly and soldiers’. Even the churches got themselves tied up in knots over it. In Protestant England fasting of any description (even when it was only abstaining from meat) was seen as a superstitious vestige of Catholicism, while the Catholic Church, which taught that the world and everything in it (including animals) had been made for man’s use, regarded those who rejected this teaching as dangerously subversive, possibly even heretical. Not eating meat was a form of penance; but come Friday abstinence, it was fillet of fish not nut cutlets that got the priestly nod.

People decide to be vegetarian for the same reasons now as 2,000 years ago – it is good for their health and they don’t like the idea of killing animals. In Europe, at least, religious considerations and the debate over whether or not animals have souls play a smaller part in that decision than they used to; health concerns, on the other hand, have been forced to the fore by modern intensive farming methods and our reluctance to partake at second hand of the cocktail of chemicals – antibiotics, growth hormones, etc – that goes into meat production. The most potent arguments, however, and this is where Stuart is at his most compelling, are ecological and economic. It has long been known that a vegetable diet sustains many more people per acre than meat, yet great swathes of irreplaceable rainforest are being destroyed every year to make way for grazing and for the cultivation of soya beans, ‘the bulk of which are used to feed animals which end up on the plates of the affluent West and, increasingly, China’. Even the most resolute of meat-eaters must surely agree that something has to change.

Although sections of the book, particularly those on literature, are overlong, it is rescued from indigestibility by a cast of extraordinary characters. George Cheyne, ‘the fattest man in Europe’, lost sixteen stone and became ‘lank, fleet and nimble’ on a diet of milk (which, since it came from a cow that ate only grass, he defined as ‘semi-digested vegetables’); the free-thinking physician Erasmus Darwin, on the other hand, argued that ‘ecosystems as a whole gained more “pleasure” from an individual animal’s death than the animal lost in dying’ (however did he quantify that?); while Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had joined an eccentric network of nudist vegetarians in Bracknell, was warned by his doctors that his declining health would never recover unless he abandoned his vegetarian diet.

Stuart is awesomely well-read (his bibliography runs to sixty-eight pages and his footnotes to ninety-one more) and he writes fluently and with extraordinary confidence on the philosophical, religious, political, medical, literary and ecological history of his subject. In his eagerness to make his readers understand he is inclined to keep hammering when his point has already struck home. He also sometimes finds it hard to gauge his readers’ intelligence. While some (maybe even most) might need help with the distinction between metempsychosis, reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, few need to be told the difference between a Jacobite and a Jacobin or need a translation of sans-culotte. But these are mere quibbles. His enthusiasm is infectious and his commitment to his subject admirable. Surprisingly, he is not apparently a vegetarian himself. He describes himself as an ecologist and a ‘freegan’, an ‘anti-consumerist who eats supermarket waste that would otherwise be thrown away’. His book, too, should open a few eyes.