A review by nohoperadio
A Plea for Vegetarianism, and Other Essays by Henry Stephens Salt

3.5

The first book in a little Wikisource kick I’ve gotten on. Interesting as a document of how the vegetarian movement was positioning itself intellectually in the early days, fun to see the overlap as well as the differences compared to today’s debates. Fun to see that Mr Salt’s Victorian interlocutors were already worrying about what would happen to the millions of cows and sheep wandering the land if we suddenly stopped eating them. Fun also to see how much emphasis he puts on the aesthetic superiority of vegetarianism: the great painters and poets love to use imagery of fruit and other plants but wouldn’t dream of depicting pork joints and the like, so we all must know on some level that this stuff is unworthy of a refined sensibility. That’s sure some kind of point! Easy to make fun of obviously, but why do that, the real point of books like this is to breathe in a good whiff of that pastness and then be on your way.