Reviewed By: Richard D. Ryder

Colin Spencer
The Heretic's Feast: A History of Vegetarianism
London: Fourth Estate, 1993. xiii, 402 pp. £20.00

Is the desire to eat meat innate or learned? Most who give up meat say they never want to eat it again. A few, like myself, live in a state of constant craving. Yet meat seems to be bad for our health. In China, where meat consumption is rising, so is cardiovascular disease. If there is such a thing as addiction to meat, and I believe there is, then it is as bad for us as most other addictions.

Surveys in Britain in 1988 and 1990 found that many vegetarians said they had given up eating meat for health reasons (76%) but concern over cruelty to animals was very close behind (75%). All over the Westernized world meat-eating is on the decline while in the developing world it is rising rapidly. Is this because people spontaneously desire meat and eat it as soon as they can afford to do so, or is it because meat-eating is regarded as a mark of affluence or prestige - or, ironically, of Western "civilization"?

These are some of the questions raised rather than answered by Colin Spencer. His main emphasis is upon the history of vegetarianism from the days of ancient Egypt to modern times. In an excellent account of ideas, he shows that a vegetable diet usually has been part of something bigger in religious or political terms. Preoccupations about diet, far from being modern phenomena, have nearly always been features of human life, being accentuated when economic conditions have allowed a degree of choice in what we eat.

Spencer is confident that meat-eating appears quite late in the evolution of humankind and even suggests that our Pliocene forebears would have consciously declined killing for food. Sadly, by the time agriculture appears in the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean regions some ten thousand years ago, human culture is already steeped in animal blood.

Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, Pythagoras and Buddha, all born in the sixth century B.C., are the first of many outstanding individuals known to have followed a vegetarian diet. It seems they did so principally because they believed in transmigration of the soul. Buddha, however, also taught compassion for all sentient life.

Some 500 years later, another trio of thinkers, Seneca, Ovid and Plutarch, all near contemporaries of Jesus, also followed vegetarianism, the last two chiefly for reasons of compassion. Indeed, Plutarch specifically rejected metempsychosis. A pity, then, that Plato and Aristotle, far more specieist in their philosophies, should have come to dominate the development of Western thought. Perhaps Jesus, too, was a vegetarian, but his philosophy of love was to be warped an proselytized by less compassionate men - Paul, Augustine and Aquinas; sexists and specieists all.

Throughout the history of vegetarianism until the present day, we see the same four main motives - compassion for animals, a concern for health, asceticism (purity) and a belief in metempsychosis.

Spencer suggests that the dominant culture of Europe so easily could have gone another way. Instead of Pauline/Aquinan Christianity we could have had Manicheanism (a kindly and vegetarian asceticism), Neoplatonism (which owed more to Pythagoras than to Plato) or some synthesis of ideas. The fact that most sects which subsequently came to be regarded as heresies by orthodox Christianity happened also to be vegetarian meant, so Spencer implies, that vegetarianism itself came to be seen as a subversive practice. To this day vegetarians are ridiculed by guilt-ridden carnivores.

What, then, is the origin of the specieism of Judaeo-Christianity? Spencer's account raises the possibility in my mind that the specieism of the Israelites may have been, in part, a reaction against the animal-obsessed culture of their Egyptian masters.

This is a well-written and intelligent book. Strangely, Spencer does not cite many of the works of the modern animal rights movement which sometimes cover similar ground. Nevertheless, his sources range from ancient to modern and across many disciplines giving the finished work a richness and depth that is a delight to delve into.

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