A surge of vegetarianism followed during the revolutionary period of the 1640s and '50s, when England was torn by civil war between parliamentary Roundheads and royalist Cavaliers. Rather than scientific exploration, the goal this time was more overtly political. The similarity between the mistreatment of animals and the common folks' ill treatment at the hands of the old ruling class was too obvious to ignore. Eliminating one surely entailed putting a stop to, or at least limiting, the other. Thus, a radical preacher named John Robins declared himself the new Adam and demanded that his followers, known as the Ranters, give up meat and alcohol so as to "reduce the world to its former condition, as it was before the fall of the first Adam," in the words of one of his disciples. A bricklayer-preacher in the town of Hackney told an excited crowd that "it is unlawfull to kill any creature that hath life because it came from God." An ex-soldier named Roger Crab accused his oppressors of "thirsting after flesh and blood" and asserted that "humour that lusteth after flesh and blood is made strong in us by feeding of it." Not feeding of it was the surest way to eliminate such aggressive tendencies.

A growing number of travelogues from India, the world capital of vegetarianism, gave such arguments an inestimable boost. Europeans were astonished by stories of Brahmans who lived on fruits and vegetables and of Jains who regarded life as so valuable that they swept the streets to avoid stepping on insects. A Dutchman named John Huygen van Linschoten reported in the 1590s that Indians "kill nothing in the world that has life, however small and useless it may be." An Englishman named Ralph Fitch wrote that they even have "hospitals for sheepe, goates, dogs, cats, birds, and for all other living creatures," adding that "when they be old and lame, they keepe them until they die." This was an eye-opener for Europeans who automatically killed their animals when they were past the productive age. Although Westerners assumed that meat and alcohol was what made them more manly, the French traveler François Bernier noted in the 1660s that Indian armies traveled more quickly on rice and dried lentils than European armies weighed down by their barrels of salted beef and tankards of wine. Indian ways were not only different but might actually be superior.

Unfortunately for vegetarianism, however, it was also during the Enlightenment that the ideology's shortcomings grew more obvious. The most difficult had to do with ethics. Vegetarianism is most fundamentally about the importance of not taking life other than under the most extreme circumstances. But cruel as it is to kill an ox or a pig, nature is even crueler. A tiger or wolf does not knock its prey senseless with a single blow to the forehead and then painlessly slit its jugular; rather, it tears it to pieces with its teeth. Freeing an animal so that it could return to its natural habitat meant subjecting it to a life of greater pain rather than less. This was disconcerting because it suggested that animals might be better off on a farm even if they were to be slaughtered in the end. There was also the fact that human agriculture created life that would not otherwise exist. If people stopped eating meat, the population of pigs, cattle and sheep would plummet, which meant that the sum total of happiness, human or otherwise, would diminish. This was enough to persuade the Comte de Buffon, a freethinker and naturalist, to declare in 1753 that man "seems to have acquired a right to sacrifice" animals by breeding and feeding them in the first place.

Vegetarians were unsure how to respond. Benjamin Franklin turned anti-meat at one point and for a time regarded "the taking of every Fish as a kind of unprovok'd Murder." But he had a change of heart when he noticed the many small fish inside the stomach of a freshly caught cod: "Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." But Franklin's contemporary, the radical English vegetarian Joseph Ritson, wrestled with the same problem only to reach the opposite conclusion. He railed against "sanguinary and ferocious" felines, and when his nephew killed a neighbor's cat on the grounds that it had just murdered a mouse, he sent the boy a note of congratulations: "Far from desiring to reprove you for what I learn you actually did, you receive my warmest approbation of your humanity." Vegetarians wanted to knock Homo sapiens off their pedestal and bring them down to the level of the other animals. Simultaneously, they wanted to turn human beings into supercops patrolling nature's furthest recesses in order to rein in predators and impose a more "humane" regime.

Some of the Western world's most exemplary intellectuals immersed themselves in debates of this sort. Leonardo da Vinci ranted against cruelty to animals, worried that eating eggs deprived future beings of life and reportedly purchased caged birds for the sole purpose of setting them free. Isaac Newton admired vegetarians and believed in the humane treatment of animals, although reports that he was a vegetarian himself proved exaggerated when a bill from a butcher, poulterer and fishmonger turned up among his personal effects after his death. Except for the occasional egg, Descartes limited himself to a fruit-and-vegetable diet in hopes that it would give him long life (he died at age 54). Shelley, who adopted vegetarianism at around age 20, believed not only that eating meat made people violent but that it fed the desire for luxury goods, a prime factor in the growth of human inequality. The hope was that the rich might not lord their wealth so much over the poor if they ate a humble diet.

Somewhat less exemplary--or exemplary in a different way--was Adolf Hitler, who gave up meat for a time in 1911 to treat a stomach ailment and then again in 1924 to shed some weight. Thereafter, he became a dedicated vegetarian, believing, according to Stuart, that a meat-free diet was the only thing that "alleviated his chronic flatulence, constipation, sweating, nervous tension, trembling of muscles, and the stomach cramps that convinced him he was dying of cancer." (The recent movie Downfall shows him consuming a meatless last supper of ravioli in tomato sauce before committing suicide in his Berlin bunker.) Urged on by their Führer, Nazi officials nagged Germans to abandon sausage and potatoes for "more natural diets based on wholesome roots, fruits and cereals," according to The Bloodless Revolution, and "legally obliged bakers to sell wholemeal bread--the patriotic food of the great German peasant." German theosophists applauded, as did George Bernard Shaw and meat-eschewing Seventh Day Adventists. The latter group declared in 1933 that Germany had at long last gained a leader "who has his office from the hand of God, and who knows himself to be responsible to Him. As an anti-alcoholic, non-smoker, and vegetarian, he is closer to our own view of health reform than anybody else." The same regime that sent millions to the death camps, Stuart adds, promulgated rules for the humane slaughter of fish and crustaceans.

What drew Hitler to vegetarianism were most likely its antihumanist and authoritarian elements. "The monkeys, our ancestors of prehistoric times, are strictly vegetarian," he pointed out on one occasion. "If I offer a child the choice between a pear and piece of meat," he said on another, "he'll quickly choose the pear. That's his atavistic instinct speaking." Atavism was a virtue, of course, because it put the good Nazi in touch with his inner beast. "Man, alone amongst the living creatures," Hitler added, "tries to deny the laws of nature"--laws that Nazism was out to reimpose. Since 1945 this nihilist strain has been carried forward by such figures as the Fascist vegetarian Maximiani Portas (a k a Savitri-Devi), who argued that "you cannot 'de-nazify' Nature" and, says Stuart, "laments that ancient forests have been destroyed to build roads, cities and to grow food for 'more and more people who might as well never have been born.'"

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