Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.
Shapin reviews a new book on the history of vegetarianism in The New Yorker. One quote:
With few exceptions, European proponents of vegetarianism emerged from those who had meat. You can define vegetarianism in any number of ways, but the simple absence of meat from the diet isn’t an interesting way to do it. To be culturally significant, you need some sort of principled justification, and there has been no shortage of that. The arguments that Stuart assembles are part of an immensely tangled and resonant debate. There’s no demonstration of the wrongness of eating flesh that hasn’t been countered by equally powerful arguments for its rightness, and different justifications have a way of both supporting and interfering with one another. Broadly speaking, though, for many centuries the debate centered on three questions, each of which was reflected in Newton’s dietary choices and the objections raised to them: there was the religious question, concerning the implications of Scripture for human alimentation; there were medical questions about the effect of eating meat on human health and character; and there was a philosophical debate about the proper relationship between man and other animals. There was no distinct category you could call moral, because all of them were, as they remain, intensely moral. Vegetarianism has always been less about why you should eat plants than about why you shouldn’t eat animals. And so arguments about vegetarianism, by drawing attention to rights that we claim for ourselves but deny to other animals, inevitably involve basic questions about what it is to be human.
I am not convinced that it's about morality, but it's an interesting piece. At Maggie's Farm, we are all dedicated, guilt-free carnivores. Whole piece here.
