Sins of the Flesh: A History of Ethical Vegetarian Thought (review)

This is a masterful and fascinating study by a leader in the field of critical animal studies. Having already authored, co-authored, or edited seventeen books exploring a range of cultural, ethical, and political attitudes toward other animals, Rod Preece here returns to the history of vegetarianism. His clearly defined purpose is to recast this history through a strictly defined and crucial question: among all the renowned vegetarian thinkers and organizations throughout human history, which ones repudiated flesh eating for ethical reasons alone?

Tackling murky definitions involving kinship and stewardship, Preece refuses to define as ethical anything that fails to see other animals on their own terms. Abstaining from their flesh out of an implicit sense of human superiority – or for the sake of health, ritual, or purification – does not count here. Not even Pythagoras gets off the hook, if you will pardon the fishing metaphor.

In his introduction, Preece outlines eight ‘Grounds for Vegetarianism,’ including environmental protection and unacceptable factory-farming conditions, and explains that his approach to the topic differs from others because it is primarily concerned with the eighth ground: that ‘the eating of animals is unethical in and of itself.’ He then begins with prehistory and moves forward to the twenty-first century, searching for those moments when ‘humans . . . examined their omnivorous practices with any degree of rigour.’

Each chapter is beautifully written, attentive to historical and geographical frameworks, and mindful of the possibility of wishful thinking. Thus, many historical figures and communities – including those otherwise thought to be entirely opposed to flesh eating – emerge as contradictory and inconsistent when Preece approaches them with new evidence or from a different angle of light. Why did Voltaire, for instance, insist on compassion for other animals but keep cattle and tanneries on his property? What do these historical records tell us? It is hard to put this book down as Preece paints these strange and complex pictures of the world for us.

Filling his pages with compelling details and stunning anecdotes, he also sustains a warm tone, even as he resists easy answers in his quest to know who stayed the course and why. A treasure trove of evidence comes together as Preece draws upon and quotes centuries of letters, treatises, lists, biographies, menus, and diary entries. He even analyses gossip and cultural assumptions, pushing us to read the silences surrounding famous people or famously attended dinners at different points in history. For example, Alexander Pope did write about other animals in generous ways, but he also threw parties where heaps of beef were served. If no remarks about his refusal to partake exist, then it becomes difficult to include him in the radical vegetarianism of his era.

One of Preece’s most fascinating arguments arises when he pulls advocacy for animals by literary figures apart from ‘rhetorical flights of fancy’ that imagine their liberation. Preece asserts that the writing must be connected to the writers; if they do not practice what they preach (by refusing to eat the subjects of their prose and poetry), then genuinely ethical possibilities for other animals vanish from the historical and cultural background of the words.

Preece’s exploration of ethical eating is as valuable a contribution to the history of vegetarianism as Tristram Stuart’s masterful tome of 2007, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times. Preece’s focus is, moreover, even sharper than Stuart’s, more cautious about what constitutes radical redefinitions of human relationships to other animals. He goes beyond Stuart by attempting to understand human rituals and organizations in relation to the psychological forces that give rise to carnivorous entitlement. What Preece concludes with is the need for ‘rituals [that] can satisfy the imaginary need for flesh’ and for the necessity of confronting how ‘oblivious’ a species we are, given that ‘humanity has never, as a rule, practiced humanity.’