The fatted calf
Philippa Pufilar
The Vegetable Passion Janet Barkas (Routledge and Kegan Paul £3.95) "Who can be more cruel and selfish than he who increases the flesh of his body by eating the flesh of innocent animals?" asks an old Indian text. The answer must be most of the population of the Western world, for although the eating of meat is not necessary to health, whenever the economic conditions are favourable man is generally carnivorous. Furthermore he commonly supposes that there is something decidedly odd about his vegetarian brother, who is, in his view, cranky and antisocial — and from what Janet Barkas tells us about certain practising ones, he may well have a point.
Vegetarians, unlike carnivores who automatically swallow meat through habit and flavour, are moved by an intricate web of belief. The Vegetable Passion is a selective history of those organised groups and notable people who have objected philosophically to a diet which includes the flesh of slaughtered animals. Thou shalt not hill is a command shared by every religion, yet only certain Eastern beliefs still hold to this. It was Ghandi who accomplished a worldwide focus on Indian vegetarianism. He ate meat only six times in his life and would wake with frightful nightmares that a live goat was bleating inside him. With his writings he tried to educate the Indians who blamed their malnutrition and poverty on their meatless diet rather than their poor education. His dietary theories were unsuccessful in reaching the masses, which is all too evident today when even the rich who can afford all the food they need are symbols of exactly the excesses against which he preached — diets of carbohydrates and starch rather than highprotein uncooked food. Today only the Hare Krishna movement carries on Ghandi's strict asceticism. Since all unnecessary violence must be avoided vegetarianism is essential.
Adam and Eve, Miss Barkas tells us, were intended to be vegetarians. It was only after Eve had defied God and eaten the apple that killing animals for food is recorded in the Old Testament. Until Noah, he who killed an animal was as guilty as he who killed a man. It is a consequence of original sin that man eats meat. Rabbis explain that meat eating is certainly not meant to be a pleasure and that Kosher slaughter is the least painful method of obtaining animal food — a view by no means universally accepted since pressure is constantly being applied to ban by law Kosher slaughter on grounds of inhumanity. We have two of the most influential religions in the West, Judaism and Christianity, failing to enact one of the basic principles of their Gods: thou shalt not hill. Judaism evolves an intricate, unsatisfactory system of slaughter, Christianity advocates omitting meat on Fridays — substituting fish.
The Church remains significantly silent on the subject of factory farming — so incidentally does Miss Barkas. Over the years we have progressed to the situation we have now: a highly aggressive food industry in whose interest it is that man should demand his daily flesh and devour more than he requires. People grow up believing that vegetables are food for the poor and that they have a right to their daily flesh-pots — indeed they take them for granted, often scraping them round their plates and wasting them. Even so in America, Miss Barkas says, the population consumes double the amount of protein it requires. All over the West, heart disease, resulting from too high a consumption of saturated animal fats, is a killer second only to cancer. Meanwhile back on the farm, farmers are squeezed by economic policies into agribusinesses, animals live their lives confined, mutilated, degraded, unable to walk or turn.
Unlike Leonardo da Vinci and certain Eastern sects, most of us neither have a reverence for life nor a stomach for death. As the industry knows, many people, were they to see the interior of a slaughterhouse, would never eat meat again. Animals are killed behind locked doors and we are shielded from reality by the syntheticism of the supermarket where music plays and meat, safely wrapped in cardboard and tins, bears no relation to the animal it was, with its whiskers, eyelashes and breath.
Some vegetarians live entirely without animal products, some are ovo-lactarians. Ethical issues are avoided, says Miss Barkas, by clean humane dairy and chicken farms — here I fear the ovo-lactarians are deluded, dairy farms may be humane, but not chicken farms: 90 per cent of our eggs in England are produced by battery systems and certainly the position can be no better in America. Not all vegetarians are by any means good. On the highest level are those that match their gentleness towards animals with kindness to human beings, on the lowest are the psychologically moved zealots, who at the same time practise violence towards men. Such a man was Hitler, who with such diverse plant-eating companions as Shelley, Shaw and Tolstoy is one of the notable individuals to be examined. He, like Gandhi and Tolstoy, showed an over-reliance on his mother. It is possible here that meat was symbolically connected to motherhood: to consume the flesh was to eat the mother. Hitler, who was deeply influenced by Wagner, loved animals, forbade vivisection and enjoyed an oral fixation, always sucking his finger when aggravated. He talked excessively and repetitively and guzzled sweet things. Meat eating he believed contributed to flatulence and fostered bacteria and underwear stains. His secretary, Martin Bormann, was the only member of his staff to imitate his meatless habits — rushing off secretly afterwards into the kitchen to pick at the viands.
Vegetarianism, says Miss Barkas, is a growing movement. It is a way for an idealistic youth to show their parents that they can fight the aggression and violence of earlier generations, a way also of returning to nature. She is confident that once an alternative diet is available meat eating will be universally viewed with the same horror that is now attached to cannibalism and will be accepted only as ritualistic practices for savages. Here she is getting carried away. Most people enjoy meat and will continue to eat it, but in the future it seems likely that they may have to cut down their consumption. More and more it is pointed out, both on grounds of health and economics, that our present regime, is unsatisfactory, that our intensive systems are inefficient, requiring imported foodstuffs and fertilizers, leading to surpluses and waste — even now in the EEC there is a surplus of eggs, the poultry industry is calling for subsidised slaughter and recently to keep up the price herds of Irish cattle were killed and improperly cooled; they rotted in their cold storage. We are importing food not for ourselves but to feed our animals — and then we waste them. Doctors and economists alike advise that we should revert to old-fashioned systems and diets, consuming fewer carcases, more decent bread and potatoes. Soon the greeL:!est flesh-gobblers among us may suffer a reverse and be considered as antisocial as vegetarians are today.
Philippa Pullar, who has recently published a biography of Frank Harris, has also written The Consuming Passion, a study of eating habits
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