This chapter will analyze reasons for the tendency of many scholars to ignore the signs of the alliance between feminism and vegetarianism. To counter the gaps in interpretation, I propose that not only was vegetarianism a logical enacting of a moral viewpoint, but it also resonated with feminist theory and female experience. I begin by defining the “vegetarian body” as both a body of writings and the idea that many vegetarians hold that we are physiologically predisposed to vegetarianism. In this I use as a basepoint the insight articulated by ethicist Beverly Harrison that asserts the moral importance of being in touch with our bodies:
If we begin, as feminists must, with “our bodies, ourselves,” we recognize that all our knowledge, including our moral knowledge, is body-mediated knowledge. . . . Failure to live deeply in “our bodies, ourselves,” destroys the possibility of moral relations between us.1
Vegetarians identify a connection between a healthy body and a diet that honors the moral relations between us and the other animals.
Defining the vegetarian body
I take no credit for abstaining from flesh eating. I was born without any desire or relish for meat.
—Lucinda Chandler after 45 years of being a vegetarian2
Feminist fundraising dinners and conferences often serve flesh food; some feminists lecture in leather or fur. This is the literal distortion of the vegetarian body. Ethical vegetarianism is a theory people enact with their bodies. “The Vegetarian Body” is a concept that incorporates this understanding and many others. We find a body of literature celebrating vegetarianism that has been distorted because of lack of appreciation by a dominant culture.
A major theme of this body of vegetarian protest literature proposes another level of meaning to these words: the argument that humans have bodies that resemble the bodies of herbivores rather than bodies of carnivores. Marshaled in support of this definition of the human vegetarian body was evidence from the teeth, saliva, stomach acids, and length of the intestines. This argument was often the one which undercut the ethical issues concerning the eating of animals; meat eaters of the past greeted the claims for a physiological disposition to vegetarianism as such a wild stretching of a point that all other arguments were seen as untrustworthy. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft’s angry attack on Rousseau’s opinions about women, begins not with a focused review of his misogyny, but with a footnote to assail his vegetarian-anatomical argument. When she first directly names Rousseau, she cannot resist discussing the absurdity of his position: “Contrary to the opinion of anatomists, who argue by analogy from the formation of the teeth, stomach and intestines, Rousseau will not allow a man to be a carnivorous animal.”3
That vegetarian converts also argued the connection between meat eating and diseases such as cancer only made them more laughable. Now such a connection is confirmed in countless medical studies. The Western omnivorous diet is associated with higher levels of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer. On the other hand, a plant-based diet provides the protective benefits of phytochemicals, antioxidants, fiber, and no cholesterol.
A reconceptualization of the vegetarian body of literature is necessary in the light of the growing medical information about the human body. In addition, anthropological sources indicate that our earliest hominid ancestors had vegetarian bodies. In the records of their bones, dental impressions, and tools, these anonymous ancestors reveal the fact that meat, as a substantial part of the diet, became a fixture in human life only recently—in the past 40,000 years. Indeed, it was not until the past two hundred years that most people in the Western world had the opportunity to consume meat daily.
Archaeological remains provide evidence of our early plant-based dietary. The masticatory system of the early hominids include teeth that could pulverize plant foods rather than rip into flesh. Scratch marks such as are found on the teeth of carnivores are absent. Instead, fossil teeth bear patterns of wear consistent with consumption of large quantities of plant food. In addition, sharp flakes that have survived—originally credited with use in skinning and cutting up animal flesh—bear chips and damage on the edges of the flakes consistent with digging activities. Analyses of fossilized human fecal matter confirm a diet of plant foods as well. From this, vegetarians argue that we are the meat eaters who never evolved a body equipped to digest meat. We have first-stage bodies with a fourth-stage diet. The primary distortion of the vegetarian body, in their eyes, occurs each time a person eats meat and forces the body to digest high-fat, protein-loaded, cholesterol-rich, animal-based foods.
It is not just in our early history that a plant-based diet is suggested. The internal signs that are read to proclaim our anatomical disposition to a vegetarian diet are many. Our saliva “contains the ferment pytalin, for digesting starch, characteristic of the herbivore.”4 The special saliva proteins found in apes and humans “are thought to make tooth enamel more resistant to decay caused by large amounts of plant carbohydrate and/or a high variety of texture in the diet.”5 Jane Brody discusses at length the difference between our “canine teeth” and the canine teeth of carnivores. She concludes: “Our teeth are more like those of herbivores than of flesh eaters. Our front teeth are large and sharp, good for biting; our canines are small—almost vestigial compared to a tiger’s; our molars are flattened; and our jaws are mobile for grinding food into the small bits we are able to swallow.”6 We lack the carnivore’s rasping tongue, and compared to the amounts in a carnivore, our gastric juices have only a small amount of hydrochloric acid.7 The intestines of carnivorous animals are short, only three times the length of the animal’s body. We, on the other hand, have an intestinal length twelve times the length of the body.
If our anatomical makeup suggests more of a similarity to herbivores than to carnivores, what occurs when meat is ingested? We might argue that the absent referent of the animal is never actually absent at all: just redefined. The absent referent makes herself present in one’s body through the effects that meat has in the form of disease, especially heart disease and cancer. More than one hundred people die every hour in the United States from heart disease. Vegetarians are about fifty percent less likely to die from heart disease than are meat eaters. According to studies in developed countries, vegetarians have lower cancer mortality rates than meat eaters. While other factors increase cancer risk, “the National Cancer Institute estimates that one-third of all cancer deaths in this country and eight out of ten of the most common cancers are related to diet.”8
For at least two hundred years, vegetarians have argued that a connection exists between meat eating and cancer. Sarah Cleghorn, early twentieth-century vegetarian and feminist, mentioned the writings of a Dr. Leffingwell who suggested “a carnivorous origin for cancer. I wish the national cancer society would ascertain the percentage of cancer among vegetarians.”9 After World War II, Agnes Ryan wrote a manuscript entitled “The Cancer Bogy.” In it she claimed that
I became sufficiently convinced in my own mind as to the root cause of cancer to put into effect such a complete right-about-face in my mode of living as to produce a very drastic effect on my own health. . . . I am thoroughly convinced that cancer is preventable now, cheaply, with our present knowledge, by means easily within our reach.10
“The Cancer Bogy” is perhaps the first modern vegetarian self-help guide to good health. Ryan begins by establishing a correlation between the number of deaths from cancer and meat eating. Her formula for predisposing one’s body to cancer is: “Poison Intake [by which she means ‘all flesh foods’ as well as tobacco, intoxicants, and drugs] plus Vitamin Starvation plus Faulty Elimination.” Conversely, her formula for health is “Natural foods plus Proper Elimination plus Exercise over the period of one’s life.”11
The gestalt shift in which vegetarians see meat as death and meat eaters see meat as life influences the receptivity of each group to information that suggests associations between meat consumption and disease. Vegetarians literally see vegetarianism as
giving life and meat as causing death to the consumers. They know that the heart of the average meat eater beats faster than that of the vegetarian. They know that the cancer-preventive benefits of consuming vegetables such as broccoli, brussel sprouts, and cabbage have been demonstrated, from which they conclude that a vegetarian immunity to the degenerative diseases that plague our culture may arise. They see meat as causing death because of the effects of high-fat diets on one’s susceptibility to cancer and heart disease.
Many who stop eating meat for a limited period of time comment on the differences they felt. They were no longer sleepy after a meal, a certain undefinable lightness replaced a heaviness or grossness they had associated with food consumption. Others have found that vegetarianism improves their health. When she attended medical school in Paris in the late nineteenth century, Anna Kingsford’s vegetarianism helped her overcome “many obstacles and trials, physical and moral, rendered specifically hard by the artifical disabilities of my sex, and by a variety of personal circumstances.”12 In experiencing body-mediated knowledge, many have concluded that the word the human body speaks is vegetarian.
Critical distortions
With your immense knowledge of women’s activities, can you give me any information about Anna Kingsford, so far as I know the world’s first woman vegetarian? I can not find anything about her anywhere.
—Agnes Ryan to Alice Park, 193613
When I speak for my friends the Anti-Vivisectionists, the Anti-Vaccinationists, the Spiritualists, or the advocates of freedom for women. . . . I always feel that such of these as are not abstainers from flesh-food have unstable ground under their feet, and it is my great regret that, when helping them in their good works, I cannot openly and publicly maintain what I so ardently believe—that the Vegetarian movement is the bottom and basis of all other movements towards Purity, Freedom, Justice, and Happiness.
—Anna Kingsford14
In attempting to interpret vegetarianism from the dominant perspective, historians often explain it away rather than explain it. Numerous texts of meat that distort the radical cultural critique of vegetarianism appear. For instance, reasons offered for the rise in the interest in vegetarianism during the time of the French Revolution and afterwards dwell on personal responses to cultural change. Historians have suggested that vegetarians were attempting to subdue their animal nature and disown their (feared) beastliness by their focus on the cruelty of meat eating. They neglect to discuss the uniquely human inventions of meat eating for which there are no animal parallels: the use of implements to kill and butcher the animal, the cooking and seasoning of meat.
Vegetarian writers of the past, starting with Plutarch through Percy Shelley to Anna Kingsford and into the twentieth century, were not troubled by the fact that the other animals ate meat, they were concerned that in eating animals humans did so in ways very unlike the other animals. As we saw in chapter 2, the classic line in the vegetarian body of literature goes something like this: animals do not need to cook their meat before they eat it, and they do not need help ripping meat off of a bone. If meat eating is natural, why do we not do it naturally, like the animals? Vegetarians did not fear what was natural to humans, they bemoaned the acceptance of an unnatural, and to them, unnecessary practice.
Vegetarians recognize the cultural aspects of meat eating, what I have been calling the texts of meat. Since meat is not eaten in its “natural” state—raw, off of the corpse—but is instead transformed through cultural intervention, vegetarians have directed their energy toward analyzing the specifics of this cultural intervention. They claim that the structures that transform flesh as it is eaten by the other animals into meat as it is eaten by human beings are not unimportant or trivial, especially as they signal the degree of distancing that our culture has determined is necessary for consumption of animals to proceed. Even a steak tartare is a result of cultural intervention in the form of haute cuisine.
If the vegetarian body is not distorted by the claim that vegetarians feared the animal aspects of being human, historians have argued that vegetarians reflected a conservative impulse, and sought to recapture the fading pastoral society of a pre-Industrial Revolution Europe. But many vegetarians saw themselves responding to repression and oppression, not as agents of regression. In chapter 6 we learned of the numerous Romantic vegetarians who linked their radical politics with their concern for animals. In 1845, Maria Loomis, resident of the Skaneateles utopian community, wrote that vegetarianism “is the beginning place for Reformers. I have little confidence in any very considerable reform that does not commence here.”15 At the end of the century, Henry Salt in The Logic of Vegetarianism concurred: “Vegetarianism is, in truth, progressiveness in diet.”16 His associates in the Fabian Society of the 1890s, such as Bernard Shaw and Annie Besant, agreed in substance as most were vegetarians.17
A history of distortion is required that would examine the problems embedded in how we judge social activism on behalf of animals; the person is viewed as dysfunctional rather than society. The explanations provided such as status displacement, the erosion of rural society, or a strong identification with pets are obvious attempts to eviscerate the critique of the dominant culture by attributing psychological motives rather than political motives to those who protest the activities of the dominant culture.
One way that the dominant culture avoids the radical critique of vegetarianism is by focusing on individuals who seem to disprove the claims of vegetarians. Thus, meat eaters refer to Hitler’s “vegetarianism.” In fact, Hitler was not a vegetarian.18 But many meat eaters need to believe that Hitler was a vegetarian to comfort themselves with the idea that vegetarianism does not necessarily make you a better person. The message appears to be: “I don’t have to deal with this issue since Hitler was a vegetarian.” But so was Mohandas Gandhi. So was Isaac Bashevis Singer. After a woman commented to Singer that her health had improved when she stopped eating meat, Singer replied, “I do it for the health of the chickens.”19
Singer’s statement is a reminder that the health benefits of vegetarianism—the arguments from the vegetarian body—should not be severed from body-mediated knowledge that gives rise to our moral knowledge. Otherwise, the result is self-absorption. One finds in the writings of vegetarians like Percy Shelley the concern that any illness would be used to judge the appropriateness of their diet and the efficacy of their arguments. As with Singer, the health of the chickens was the primary moral concern. In his preface to Heartbreak House, Bernard Shaw reiterates Singer’s point: “Being an idle house it was a hypochondriacal house, always running after cures. It would stop eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds but in order to get rid of a bogey called Uric Acid.”20 Finding organic meat acceptable can arise from the tendency to focus solely on health concerns. Like the focus on Hitler’s so-called vegetarianism, it evidences a resistance to examining one’s own acceptance of the structure of the absent referent. And defending vegetarianism solely for its health benefits diminishes the potential of body-mediated knowledge.
The distorting perspective of the dominant culture is evident in the accusation that vegetarianism is racist. Because people of color, like white women and vegetarians, experience muting by the dominant culture, exploring this issue is neither easy nor simple. Yet just as most women adhere to the prevailing texts of meat of the dominant culture they are both a part of and yet separate from, so do other oppressed groups. Thus, the encounter the late Pat Parker describes in her poem “To a Vegetarian Friend” is troubling yet revealing. Apparently her vegetarian friend was critical of Parker’s meat consumption. Parker reminds her friend that the chitterlings and greens, neckbones and tails she was eating connected her to her ancestors who had survived generations of slavery and racism: “This food is good for me,” Parker writes. “It replenishes my soul.” Do us both a favor, Parker suggests, if you cannot keep quiet about my food, stay home.21
Parker’s poem implies that two oppressions—racism and the eating of anim
als—are in opposition to each other. The implication is that vegetarianism must accommodate meat eating so as not to accommodate racism. But if Parker’s poem is one form of representation, meat is another. The conflict she depicts is not a conflict between anti-racism or black tradition and vegetarianism but a conflict between the role of meat as representation and the reality of meat eating. For Parker, the meat represents her ancestors’ food and provides a sense of continuity. However, Parker’s support of meat is not the same meat as that consumed by her ancestors, though they are classified as such. The meat she is eating comes from a commodity, capitalist world in which the fourth stage of meat eating prevails. Contemporary meat-production methods that imprison animals and overmedicate them create an extreme difference between the dead animals, which Parker’s ancestors would have eaten, and Parker’s meal.
Parker explains the meaning of her meat meal in words that demonstrate the functioning of the absent referent. The chitterlings, neckbone, and tail do not refer to the animal from whom they were taken but metaphorically embody a connection with ancestors oppressed, as is Parker, by a system of white racism. Parker is positing the importance of ritual meaning; I do not disagree with its importance. But to posit the meaning of meat as referent to something other than the animal—i.e., that it operates as her linkage to her ancestors—is to participate in the structure of the absent referent. I do not propose what the ritual food should be that connects one with ancestors who were victimized by an oppressive system; but it is important not to dismember the meaning of meat from the animals’ lives. In fact, the vegetarian body of literature demonstrates that soul food can be vegetarian and that knowledge of enslaved and oppressed ancestors need not be at the expense of the enslaved oppressed animals.22
As much as white people determine what is normative and important while ignoring the culture and experience of people of color, so have meat eaters of all races, sexes, and classes presumed the normativeness and centrality of their activity. Consequently, feminist historians and literary critics have absorbed the dominant culture’s view of vegetarianism though women writers and activists have often demonstrated an alternative perspective.
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Page 21
