I recently finished a book called The Vegetable Passion, or, The Passionate Vegetable as I keep calling it in my head, bringing to mind all sort of activities with cucumbers etc.
It’s a fairly old book, first published in 1975, and is a meandering discussion of various famous vegetarians, as well as vegetarian movements. Of course Gandhi, Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw are discussed, but new to me was that Hitler was vegetarian.
The book is quirky, and the author’s conclusions and opinions sometimes strange and overstated, but it was an enjoyable read. Gandhi was apparently a rebellious youth who ate meat and looked up to the west (a reaction against his conservative Hindu upbringing), but he later became vegetarian for his own reasons, and was strongly influenced by Tolstoy.
Hitler was influenced by Wagner. The author’s opinions take over here, as she digresses into an attack on utilitarianism, claiming that moral issues could still be discussed in the days before utilitarianism became the god it later did. I understand the sense, as, not eating meat myself, I sometimes feel it’s easier to say I do so for health or environmental reasons, and that ethical reasons are less acceptable, seen as more childish. Children can be the most honest, giving up meat because they don’t want to kill animals. However, Wagner supported the ideas of vegetarianism more than the practice, continuing to eat meat for health reasons in a flawed attempt to improve his weak heart and his eczema. For early Greek, Jewish and Christian vegetarians, health was barely a reason, before antibiotics and growth hormones in meat, and before the wide variety of plant foods available today. Early vegetarians tended to survive on to much bread, and many became quite chubby with the high-starch diet.
Hitler is always fun to speculate about. Many dispute the claim that he was vegetarian, probably mainly in an attempt to distance themselves from him, claiming that this was part of the depiction of a puritan fuhrer for propaganda purposes. It also doesn’t fit too well with the common claim that vegetarians are less aggressive. As always, a stark divide into a vegetarian and non-vegetarian box means little. Hitler did eat meat at times, as have many vegetarians, but opposition to meat eating was a significant part of his identity.
However, during Hitler’s reign vegetarian societies were suppressed, along with most other activities outside of central state control.
The author also had fun discussing Hitler’s relationship with his mother, Wagner and others from a speculative psyschological viewpoint.
Probably the main result of the book is that I know want to read War and Peace, and other works by Tolstoy.