THE ETHICS OF DIET

[An introductory essay of Leo Tolstoy. The animal rights debate in Postface] Thanks to (…) Howard Williams’s The Ethics of Diet, readers can gain easy access to the book against flesh-eating that so inspired Tolstoy, Gandhi, and a host of other modern vegetarians. Williams, like many other vegetarian activists in the late nineteenth century, grew tired of feeling constantly called upon to justify his decision not to eat meat and to defend his noncarnivorous diet against the charge that vegetarianism was merely a passing fad. The Ethics of Diet were designed to demonstrate that there is indeed a long, rich, and continuous historical tradition of informed opposition to flesh eating that vegetarianism is not some kind of faddish quackery. Citing one’s vegetarian predecessors has proven to be a particularly effective way for vegetarian writers to legitimize their ethical opposition to meat eating, and Williams’s book remains important today in large part because it continues to help provide some much-needed credibility — especially in Western societies where meat-eating is very much a mainstream activity — for the modern vegetarian movement. The introductory essay, titled “The First Step”, initially appeared as an article in the journal Questions of Philosophy and Psychology in 1892. Tolstoy’s essay, which includes a brief but graphic and quite disturbing account of a visit the author paid to a slaughterhouse in nearby Tula in June 1891, quickly became what some Tolstoian followers characterized as a veritable “bible of vegetarianism.” Like Williams’s book, Tolstoy’s essay was instrumental in helping to convert a number of readers from the ranks of human carnivores and convince them to join the vegetarian cause. — Ronald D. Le Blanc, Gastronomica. Vol. 4, No. 4 (Fall 2004), pp. 104-105.