"Living on a purely vegetable diet has only been a possibility since the development of agriculture and witha distancing from our “animal nature,” which simply takes what it can unreflectingly. But is vegetarianism a nostalgic harking back to a mythical age of innocenece or a step forward into a new kind of consciousness.
We have seen that discomfort at killing to eat is as old as humanity, but that this is crucially tied in with the development of ritual and social cohesion. . . . Once a reliable vegetable diet becomes available, however, separateing slaughter from nutritive requirements, there arises a new possiblility of compassion for animal suffering being experienced in a new way, unmixed with feart that the slaughtered beast might take revenge. Among the Greeks and Romans there were those who experience such compassion acutely:
He who can slit his calf's throat, hear its cries,
Unmoved, who has the heart to kill his kid,
That screams lik a small child, or eat the bird,
His hand has reared and fed! How far does this, fall short of murder?
As these lines imply, a link tends to be felt between violence and violence toward humans, so that meat eating is often connected with aggression generally, and with warlike behavior. It has been noted above that hunting and warfare are closely linked. Vegetarianism by contrast is frequently supposed to induce a peaceful nature.
Living without meat, moreover, has always tended to suggest a further distancing from the animal. . . . picking up in the hand a greasy piece of flesh and bone and tearing at it with the teeth has long had a dubious reputation as “animal behavior,” and where once the conspicuous carving of a whole animal on or in sight of the table was looked upon with pleasure, this process has in Western culture tended to retreat behind the secenes, while in China and Japan such barbarisms were confined to the kitchen much earlier, along with the potentially threatening knife, in favor of delicate eating with chopsticks. (80) [This evolution of table manners is recorded in fascinating detail by Elias in his classic book THE CIVILISING PROCESS].
…To refrain from eating meating has regularly been associated with spiritual commitment, along with that other carnal act, SEX, and has also implied a degree of asceticism (one who practices rigid self denial esp as an act of religious devotion). From this point of view, meat feeds the baser, more earth-bound aspects of manking. With Christianity, abstention from meat on prescribed days has always been intended as self-denial or penance, rathat than concern for animal welfare.
THE QUESTION IS, THOUGH, HOW FAR AWAY FROM ANIMAL BEHAVIOR CAN WE GET, SINCE WE ARE UNDENIABLY ANIMALS AND NOT DISEMBODIED SPIRITS? Lopez-Pedraza observes of vegetarians that they have:
a fantasy of purity and cleanliness, a rigidity, a feeling of superiority, a guilt-making projection upon meat-eaters, and a lack of consciousness of any cruelty and destructiveness in themselves. (81) [HERMES, pp. 22f]
The viciousness with which supporters of vegetarianism and animal welfare sometimes express themselves demonstrates the aggressive shadow (unconscious and in denial). Cruelty and destructiveness belong to us, and we had better recognize that if we are to avoid endless bitter entanglemenets through shadow-projections. If we follwo the morality of vegetarianism to the ultimate conclusion, we must fact the fact that dairy produce involves the premature and distressing separation of young from mother, and the slaughter of young males. . . . The development of humanity is inseparable from the use and abuse of other species on a massive scale, through their labor and through the uses of their carcasses, so we are all profoundly implicated in this business and indebted to it, whether we like it or not. As a race we are a very long way from dispensing with all these dependencies. VEGETARIANS MUST LOOK INTO THEIR OWN INCONSISTENCIES AND HYPOCERISIES IF THEY ARE NOT TO FALL INTO FANTASIES OF SUPERIORITY.
In Buddhist Tibet, where vegetables have been scarce and meat eating is a vertual necessity, those who had takens vows of nonkilling were permitted to eat meat as long as they did not kill it themselves. In consequence, the butchers on whom they depended were usually Muslims, onto whom the guilt could be shuffled in the same way that Jews in Christendom were made to carry the guilt of usury.
Futhermore, at this point most of us assume that plants are not sentient. We have left behind the old animistic beliefs that plants had souls, which meant that gathering and agriculture were attended by guilt feelings similar to those surrounding animal slaughter and required propitiation.
To understand the recent surge of vegetarianism, we should note the important ecological pressures and the relative wastefulness of stock raising compared to meeting our nutritional needs directly from the produce of the fields, and also put it in the context of current meating eating practice. In the past, in most settled communities all over the world, meat has been a relative rarity, a LUXARY ITEM. The decision to slaughter one of the stock was not taken lightly, and hunting expeditions brought in only occasional prized beasts, every bit of which would find a use (See what the Chinese and/or Italians do with a pig). THE REALITY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FOOD AND DEATH WAS PART OF EVERYONE’S EXPERIENCE, TOGETHER WITH THE MIXED FEELINGS FO PLEASURE AND GUILT. The ready availability of prepackaged supermarket meat and the distnace of the average city dweller from the live animal and the slaughtering process has meant that the meat-eater can enjoy considerable protection from feelings of guilt concerning the animal’s death. meanwhile, split off from collective consciousness, the quality of life of the typical food animal has diminished, often grotesquely, and the circumstances surrounding its death have arguably become far more terrible.
Though some of its members may simplistically imagine that to refrain from meat is to refrain from being destructive, the vegetarian movement ahs brought back into general awareness the conflict surrounding the consumption of meat. Re-relating to the suffering animal is no doubt also an attempt to reconnect with and respect our own ill-treated instinctual nature.
The nineteenth-century French gastronome Brillat-Savarin declared, “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.”(86) [“Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are,” Physiologie du Gout, p. 5]. We might compare this with the epigraph to this chapter, the advice from the I Ching to pay heed to the providing of nourishment, and to what a man seeks to fill his own mouth with, further explained by Richard Wilhelm: "If we wish to know what anyone is like, we have only to observe on whom he bestows care and what sides of his own nture he cultivates and nourishes (and denies).
Somewhere scientific dietetics (subject ot constant revision) merges with collect and individual projections onto foodstuffs: fish is good for the brain (Three Stooges, “Then you should eat a whale!”), beef makes you manly or aggressive, oysters are an aphrodisiac, “No sugar, thanks, I am sweet enough as I am.” What we eat can be associated with which gods were serve.
WHO ARE WE NURTURING WHEN WE NURTURE “OURSELVES”?
A woman with an ulcer took to eating baby food. It was the baby that really wanted feeding.
Whether we are feeding our individualism or our traditional values, eithical judgements or our nonchalance, whate we take in through our mouths tells us something about where we direct our energy.
After his long practice of asceticism (rigid self-denial) failed to achieve the desired result, the Buddha turned from feeding the spirit and starving the body–he accepted some milk-rice from a woman. In so doing, he was not only being fed by but also feeding the earth mother, not living on spirit alone.
THEN HE ATTAINED ENLIGHTENMENT, FOR IN ABANDONING HIS ONE-SIDED STRIVING HE HAD DISCOVERED THE MIDDLE WAY; HE WAS HONORING BOTH HEAVEN AND EARTH, SPIRIT AND BODY.
Food and Transformation: Imagery and Symbolism of Eating, Eve Jackson, Inner City Books, 1996, pp.76 to 81.
Food for thought? Balance? Yes, I eat both vegetables and meat.
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),tofu/soy,dairy (also often high fat)
