Sunday, 16 February 2014

Veganism and the Romantics Part 3: The Representation of the Body

During the Romantic era, everyone seemed to be fascinated by physiognomy
and anthropology. Connections were being drawn between human and non-human
bodies and, for some, the similarities were too great to ignore. The man we
will be studying today, Joseph Ritson, even believed that the consumption of
animal flesh would eventually lead humans to eat their own kind: “As human
sacrifices were a natural effect of that superfluous cruelty which first
produced the slaughter of animals, so is it equally natural that these
accustomed to eat the brute, should not long abstain from the man”. This quote
was taking from his 1802 “Essay on the Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral
Duty”, a text that covers everything from the history of man’s diet to the
moral implications. However, this post will focus specifically on Ritson’s idea
about vegetarianism and the body, both in terms of physiology and health.

According to Ritson, “the two most general distinctions of the
carnivorous type of quadrupeds are deduced, one from the conformation of the
teeth, and the other from the conformation of the intestines”. He argues that the
conformation of the intestines is too short to digest meat easily and that our “blunt
teeth” resemble “the horse, the ox, the sheep, and the hare”, rather than “the
cat, the dog, the wolf and the fox”. Ritson believed that humans essentially
lacked the biological tools to be carnivores and instead were conditioned by
habit.

In 1809, Darwin was born. Years later, in 1871, he would publish his
controversial work The Descent of Man,
where he outlines human evolution from apes. However, seven years before he was
even born, in Ritson’s publication, parallels between the two species are being
explored. As a result of the similarities between man and ape, Ritson believed
that their natural diets would be the same. He discusses “the ourang-outang
which resembles man” and “never meddles with animal flesh, but lives on nuts
and other wild fruits”. He also talks about baboons “principally feed[ing] upon
fruits, roots and corn”. He believes that a plant based diet belongs to “all
the ape or monkey genus except man”.

Ritson was also a great believer in the health benefits reaped from a
plant based diet. He noticed that in cultures where less meat was eaten, there
was also less disease and death. He claims that the “Orientals live to a great
age…owing to their abstinence from animal food”. In fact, he was on to
something there. Nowadays, out of
the ten countries with the lowest obesity rates, eight are in Asia and the
remaining two are in Africa. This is undoubtedly because their diets consist of
plain starches such as rice, whole grains, fruits and vegetables.