A Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays/Chapter 3
GOOD TASTE IN DIET.
IT is a remarkable and lamentable fact that the movement in favour of Food Reform finds but few supporters among the classes known as “æsthetic” and “artistic ;” among those, in short, who pride themselves on their so—called “good taste," and who might. therefore, have been especially looked to for favour and sympathy. For, setting aside for the present all considerations of morality and gentleness, I maintain that there are just as glaring faults of bad taste visible in our system of diet as in our dress, or furniture, or general household arrangements, all of which have been very severely and very properly criticised by the æsthetic school. How foolish and inconsistent it is to be vastly fastidious about the manner in which one's food is served up, and at the same time to be totally indifferent as regards the quality, from an aesthetic View, of the food itself! The highest art may be apparent in the decoration and arrangement of the table, but, if the food be gross in taste and smell, the result can hardly be gratifying to the truly aesthetic mind.
But, it may be asked, is it a fact that flesh-food is gross in taste and smell? One of the commonest objections of flesh-eaters to the reformed diet is that flesh-meat is “nice,” and the guests at an aesthetic dinner-table have presumably no sort of suspicion that they are eating anything which is not “high art.” Of course dietetic taste, like all other taste, is relative and subjective; there is no absolute criterion of “good taste,” but each man must decide for himself what he considers “nice.” It is therefore impossible to prove the superiority of the reformed diet, or to convince flesh-eaters that their taste is not immaculate. we can only trust to the results of experience, and the good taste which is gradually brought about by culture and education. All Vegetarians will emphatically deny that flesh-food is nice, and will assert that only a depraved and uncultivated taste can relish it; and if our aesthetic friends will give the matter a little serious consideration, they will very soon find themselves arriving at the same conclusion.
So far I have used the word æstehticism as merely equivalent to the actual perception by the senses, a meaning to which its modern votaries seem to wish to restrict it. But in real truth it cannot be thus limited, at any rate in dietetic questions, for we cannot wholly exclude the consideration of the origin of our food. However gratifying our flesh-meat may be to our immediate taste (a very gross and uncultured taste, as I have attempted to show), we cannot altogether forget its extremely unpleasant antecedents. However artistic the arrangement of the dinner-table, however immaculate the table-cloth and faultless the dinner-service, the disagreeable thought must surely sometimes occur to the artistic mind that the beef was once an ox, the mutton was once a sheep, the veal was once a calf, and the pork was once a pig. We may scrupulously make clean the outside of the cup and platter, but the recollection of the state of their interior will nevertheless cause some disquietude to our aesthetic repose. In fact, though we may well be thankful for any reaction against the gross materialism and vulgarity of modern society, it may be doubted whether any class can be truly aesthetic which does not recognise in its creed the supreme importance of gentleness and humanity. The man who keenly sympathises with the suffering of dumb animals has a more truly æsthetic mind than many of our modern connoisseurs of “high art” who are inexpressibly pained by the sight of an ugly house or an inartistic piece of furniture, while they View with entire equanimity a system of diet which necessitates the very ugly trade of the butcher.
It would be curious to know if there were any æsthetic persons present at the Alexandra Palace, among those who enjoyed the novelty of a kid dinner, given by the “British Goat Society” about a year ago (1880). At this dinner—to quote the account then given in the Daily News—“the Honorary Secretary confessed to having slaughtered two of his own goats' kids, amid the tears of his children, to satisfy the appetites of the guests, and the statement was heard without eliciting any visible sign of remorse from the company.”
We are inclined to think that the æsthetic taste of those who could hear this statement, without showing very visible signs of dissatisfaction, must have been of a somewhat question- able character.
But it is needless to refer to individual instances of bad taste, when all the country is filled with the pollution of wholesale slaughter. Dwellers in London, of superior sensibility, frequently express their disgust at the unsightly streets and buildings which everywhere meet the view, and their pity for the gross tastes and habits of their fellow-townsmen. Yet they raise no protest against the Foreign Cattle Market of Deptford, from which the wants of Londoners are largely supplied; though the deeds which are daily enacted there are such as can hardly commend themselves to an æsthetic-mind. At Deptford, as we learn from a lately-published account, there weekly arrive some three thousand bullocks, twenty thousand sheep, and a thousand calves. When they are landed at the entrance, “the creatures, to do them justice, are not often ill-conducted. Stupefied by the voyage, they are generally quiet enough, but sometimes the truth breaks in upon them, and they make a desperate effort for freedom. It is easy to guess what frightens them, for there is a strange scent in the air.” Such are the circumstances under which the animals enter these slaughter-houses, all of them, be it remembered, naturally harmless and gentle. They are finally “conducted to the long range of narrow Stalls at the rear of the slaughter-houses. The scene is here busy enough, and the celerity. with which the work is done sufficiently remarkable—at the one end the fine great beasts go in, at the other emerge great sides of beef, hoofs, hides, and horns. There is much less uproar over the sheep, which are killed and dressed with great celerity.”
Pitiable indeed must be the mental and moral condition of those who can read such an account as this without loathing and disgust. And if the mere mention of it is well-nigh intolerable, what is to be said of the system which necessitates the continual enactment of such scenes? Can any thoughtful man, in the face of such horrors, deliberately choose to be a flesh-eater? Must be not rather turn with relief to a vegetarian diet, with which alone can exist that widely sympathetic intellectual gentleness which recognises the rights, not of man only, but of all the animal creation. To repeat the oft-quoted but seldom-appreciated lines of Coleridge—
“He prayeth best that loveth best
All things, both great and small:
For the dear God, who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."
This brings me to the subject of higher æstheticism, the only true worship of the beautiful, that which does not regard only the perceptions of the senses, but admits the consideration of the moral and the humane. Such a doctrine finds its fullest development in the works of Mr. Ruskin, a teacher whom we Food Reformers, in common with all who strive after a purer life, must revere above all living writers. The superiority of his teaching to that of the æsthetic school in general is due to the fact that he has not thought it necessary to divorce morality from art, but has shown that the consideration of morality is inseparable from true art, as also from true political economy, and indeed from any true science whatever. But alas! “non omnia possumus omes ;” and it must be confessed that, on the subject of humanity, Mr. Ruskin's teaching is not quite self-consistent ; while his utterances on the subject of Vegetarianism show that he has never really given it his serious attention, though in the last number of Fors Clavigera[1] he seems inclined to reconsider the question. Of all great writers Mr. Ruskin is the one from whom the advocates of Food Reform might most reasonably expect at least a word of sympathy and assistance; he is the one who is least able. if he wishes to be self-consistent, to disregard the aspirations of Vegetarianism.
“Without perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman’s education, no Christian education, could be of any possible use.” So he said in 1877; and I am not aware that he has ever explained how perfect sympathy with the animals around us can be co- existent with the system of breeding and slaughtering them for food. Again, Rule 5 of Mr. Ruskin’s Society of St. George runs as follows: “I will not kill nor hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle life, and guard and perfect all natural beauty upon the earth.” These are noble words, and they express the very essence and spirit of the Vegetarian movement; indeed, it is difficult to see how they can be uttered, consistently and conscientiously, by any but Vegetarians. The only loop-hole of escape for the flesh-eater seems to lie in the word “needlessly,” and of course the impossibility of Vegetarianism once proved would be a real justification of flesh-eating. It is evident, however, from the May number of Fors Clavigera, that Mr. Ruskin is fully aware of the practicability, if no the desirability, of the reformed diet, for he speaks approvingly of Mrs. Nisbet's "very valuable" letter on Vegetarianism to the Dunfermline Journal. It is therefore incumbent on the members of St. George's Society to obey the rules of their order by ceasing to uphold the needless, and therefore cruel, institution of the slaughter-house, and by adopting that diet which alone is in harmony with the instincts of morality and good taste.
- ↑ May, 1883