There are more and more of them
and they are also being talked about more
They're invading our streets, our restaurants
They're being seen and heard in the media, they're telling us about THEIR diet, THEIR lifestyle
Even about their "philosophy" (no less...)
They want to move us to tears
With videos of slaughterhouses, deforested forests
They're trying to stop us from eating
meat, fish, eggs, CHEESE
and they sometimes succeed in doing so
(that's what they told me)
Who am I speaking about ?
Vegetarians and vegans, duh !
And I feel like they're everywhere...
it's a conspiracy...
- Yes, we're everywhere
- What are you doing here ? - We're few but we're everywhere
- What are you doing here??
- Vegans are taking over - Okay we'll I'm letting you taking over
During the past few years, the vegan phenomenon has been growing like never before
Last year for instance, the Montréal Vegan Festival has received over 20 000 participants
The milk consuming per habitant (even here in Québec)
is collapsing, for the benefit of soy, almond or rice milk
Even the most famous fastfood corporations are following this trend
as they offer vegan hamburgers
VEGAN HAMBURGERS, DO YOU REALISE THAT ?
As a consequence, which is understandable, meat or cheese eaters and producers are not willing to be pushed around
They're accusing vegans of sacrifying culture in the name of a newly born trend
and of trampling on an ancestral tradition
By the way, is this true ?
Is veganism a recent phenomenon ?
Well,
Today in "L'Histoire nous le dira"
With the collaboration of Jean Philippe Cyr
Jean Philippe ? C'mere...
the fool was eating his tofu
...but also with Renan Larue,
We'll discuss a seemingly recent phenomenon : veganism
Is that right ? - YIS
Let's go !
"History will tell us"
It is commonly acknowledged that in Asia, and most importantly India,
vegetarism has been practiced since thousands of years
This is particularly the case of JaÏns, who found their religion on non-violence
and of Hindus from the elite, more specifically Brahmans
But what is MUCH lesser known is that the occidental vegetarian tradition
dates back at least to Pythagoras
The latter lived in Greece, then in Southern Italy in 500BC (6th century BC)
Pythagoras wasn't only doing geometry
He was also the most famous philosopher in Antiquity
And among the things he stood for
was respect for animal life, and thus...
vegetarianism
or even veganism according to some sources.
Not only would he not eat meat and fish,
but it is also said that he would refuse wearing leather or wool
Just like our vegans from the Milan[?] or the Plateau Mont-Royal
For a long time, Pythagoras' name was so associated with vegetarianism
that it used to be called
"The Pythagorean Diet"
actually this was up until the creation of the terms "vegetarian" and "vegetarianism" in the 19th century
In this 1620 painting from Rubens, for instance,
one can see Pythagoras exhorting his followers to adopt a "cruelty-free" diet
(as the english say)
Saying things like :
Refrain, mortals, from sullying your bodies with abominable meals.
You've got cereals, you've got fruits the weight of which makes branches bow
and, on grapevines, grapes swollen with juice
You've got tasty plants and some that may be made sweet and tender by the flame
[...] The Earth, lavish with its treasures, is giving you delicious foods ;
It offers you meals which are not being paid by blood and murder (Ovidus, Metamorphoses)
Pythagorus has had so much prestige in his time
and his arguments seem so convincing
that a lot of philosophers started to follow this diet as well
Not even background philosophers
but thinkers and poets as influential as :
Empedocles, Theophrastus, Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, or Plotinus
Back then, giving up meat and criticising the violence inflicted on animals was no insignificant thing
Vegetarians even found themselves in a delicate situation regarding the political and religious authorities of the time
who saw in bloody food sacrifice the epitome of piety, and the core of religious life
To vegetarians like the pythagorician philosophers,
bloody sacrifice was a shameful pretext which served to justify or even sometimes sanctify the barbarous appetites of meat-eaters
The atmosphere must have been a little tense during banquets...
And this can stretch even further
Some vegetarian philosophers
like Seneca for instance
had to waive their vegetal diet, in the fear of reprisals from Emperor Tiberius' police...
who was particularly attentive to the respect of traditional religious matters
Vegetarians also had to face critics from philosophical schools
Like Stoïcismus, an extremely popular school which teached that the gods have created the whole universe
to satisfy the desires and needs of the human race
The. Entire. Universe
That is : stars, mountains, rivers, fruits and of course :
animals.
It is essentially around this world view (anthropocentrism)
that carnist (as they are being called nowadays) and vegetarian philosophers
battle.
Are animals merely means to satisfy our appetites ?
Are we the center and the summit of Creation ?
Do we have duties towards other inhabitants of the world
even if they are less intelligent than ourselves?
For nearly a thousand years, these thrilling issues have agitated philosophers of the ancient time
However with the triumph of christianism
they were fairly sidelined
Why is that ?
In his book "Vegetarianism and its ennemies"
historian Renan Larue argues that several reasons are overlapping.
Although mainly two of the three reasons seem to specifically caracterise the phenomenon of that time
FIRST :
Charity/mercy
The first theologians are confronted with a dilemma :
They state that Jesus is God, and God's son
and that God is the God of Love
the God of Charity
In the meantime, they find that Jesus-Christ ate meat and most importantly fish
and that he's never had a benevolent word about animals,
that he's even been showing, if not cruelty, at least great indifference to them
How would they be able to reconciliate these two things?
Especially when a vast number of pagan philosophers, and even some christians
were vegetarian in the name of compassion for animals
This was particularly embarassing
as the Church was sort of getting surpassed in benevolence matters
and the "new God" seemed way less merciful with innocent creatures like animals
than with a vulgar Pythagoras
To solve this problem, theologians like Saint-Augustine
stated that vegetarianism was a superstitious, most scandalous ethic
which was totally incompatible with real Faith.
- YES IT IS
They proclaimed (just like the Stoicians Laurent was talking about earlier)
that everything had been created for mankind,
and that the refusal to use the body of animals was a form of ungratefulness regarding the Lord.
SECONDLY:
The will to break away from Judaism
The first Christians decide early on to distanciate themselves from Judaism
and to preach the Christ's wise words worldwide, not only to the Chosen People
i.e. the Jewish people
In order to accomplish this, not only did they give up on the complex diet rules which existed in Judaism
but they also fully rejected any form of food restriction
The idea is to facilitate the spreading of the new religion
and to put an end to those taboos
which were an obstacle to the conversion of other people
Banning any type of food was now banned
In other words :
the Church, to become Catholic, that is becoming universal
chose to become omnivorous.
By the way, up until this day,
Christianism is the only one among the Great Religions
the followers of which are not bound to adopt a specific diet
"- But what about Lent ?" will you tell me
Well, you are right !
The Catholic Church (until around the 19th Century)
has imposed periods of food restrictions
which were called the "Frugal/Skinny periods"
However the idea wasn't saying that some foods (namely meat or cream) were impure in themselves
but, quite the contrary, that they were extremely good for health
thus the need to refrain oneself from them for a certain period of time,
in order to weaken the body, which meant lightening the soul.
It was therefore acceptable to be vegetarian in the name of mortification,
but it was wrong if done in the name of animal respect, according to theologians.
Admittedly crooked, but totally logical.
Anyways, this conception of meat, animals and vegetarianism
has been overwhelmingly dominant between the end of the Roman Empire
and the 18th Century
(the era of the Enlightenment).
It was at this moment that several philosophers started to question
the christian/anthropocentric way to consider animals.
They took up the torch of Pythagoras
and promoted vegetarianism as well.
As you may know, the 18th Century is altogether
an era during which things that seemed obvious were being radically called into question
butchery, hunting, fishing or vivissection are no exception to the rule
Philosophers stopped believing that the world had been created 6000 years before
and that God had created it for us alone
They were overall more and more skeptical (that's the least we could say)
It was at this moment that animal ethics appeared
a flourishing new branch of moral philosophy
with which pro-vegetarian arguments were brought back.
Among famous french-speaking thinkers of vegetarianism
there was, to begin with :
Voltaire
You heard me, the famous Voltaire
who, apparently, had more interest in animals than in Canada and its acres of snow.
You know the story, Benoît Melançon has made a video dealing with the subject on this channel, I'll link it to you.
Voltaire's vegetarian side is actually little known to the public
Voltaire started getting interested in vegetarianism in the beginning of the 1760s
He realised the moral dimension implied by the treatment of animals
(which represent 99% of the earth's inhabitants)
is gigantic
and that no one (and certainly not priests) had called it into question since the Antiquity.
Yes, Voltaire definitely had a slight anti-clericalist tendency :
he could not help being critical about the Church
Anyways, he tackled this problem
endeavouring to demolish with a bulldozer every reason one could use to justify the exploiting of animals.
Here are two examples :
FIRSTLY :
The food chain
We aren't on top of it, says good old Voltaire
Sharks and bears are !
Careful though not to say they are the center of the world
The truth is : the human being is the king of the world
not because of the Holy Spirit
but rather because he progressively managed to dominate other creatures
thanks to the weapons he has built.
That is to say : Our domination of animals is not God's wish
but a historical fact.
SECONDLY :
The human soul
Nobody has ever seen a human soul, Voltaire explains,
Nobody knows exactly what it is
apart from theology professors at the Sorbonne
and they aren't even clear about it.
There could be no proper human soul :
maybe the difference between humans and animals
is only a matter of level/degree, not nature.
This conceptual difference could have been invented
only to legitimate our taste for sausages and cutlets.
This was Voltaire's mind on the question.
At the same time, Rousseau (with whom he was rarely on the same wavelength)
also got interested with this subject
and sought to prove that the human being is a naturally frugivorous species
i.e. a fruit-eater
Why would that be ? It essentially relates to the fact that Rousseau thinks that Man is naturally good
and that society is responsible for his perversion.
In order to prove his point, he had to demonstrate that our physiology, our anatomy
is comparable to that of frugivorous animals
or else (if we were carnivorous) we would be bound by nature to be mean
and to be merciless
Rousseau, in his "Discourse on the origin and basis of inequality among men" as well as in the "Emile"
accumulated arguments that sustained this thesis :
He begins with the fact that children spontaneously love sweet foods, like fruits,
and are reluctant to eat meat
He speaks of the intestine's length and shape,
or talks about our inability to kill and eat animals with our bare hands.
According to Rousseau, all of this proves that meat consumption is a cultural thing,
rather than a natural one.
Besides, why would we eat meat that is so far from looking like the animal it comes from ?
This stems from the fact that we are naturally led to feel compassion for animals,
and that we would be upset if we had to eat them alive or freshly killed.
Rousseau also was the first great theorician of animal rights
According to the latter, you and me have natural rights.
The right not to be tortured,
or eaten for example
NOT because we are sensible beings,
but because we are SENSITIVE ones.
This is obvious in the way we treat babies or senile people for instance
who cannot (or not anymore) reason, but still benefit from rights
which is for the best
Rousseau explains that, for the exact same reason,
we should grant those most fundamental rights to animals
They too can experience pleasure and suffering
All non-necessary violence is thus fundamentally immoral and unjust.
It was in the wake of the Enlightenment philosophers (like Rousseau, Voltaire and several others)
that the first vegetarian association (the Vegetarian Society) was born
in the mid-19th century
A century later, in 1944,
the Vegan Society was created
This marks the limit between those who accept a certain form of breeding (vegetarians)
and those who suggest its outright abolition :
vegans.
This second stance is the one currently going through an upswing
although it still remains minor.
Will veganism stop being minor one day
to become the norm ?
Well....
History will tell us, of course !
Meanwhile, veganism has the perk of spicing familiy dinners up
You know, when your cattle-breeder cousin sits face to face with your vegan niece
and roasted chicken is being served...
Yeah... you can feel that...
Okay, that's it for today,
thanks to Jean-Philippe Cyr
- Jean Philippe ?
Uh... You wrote two cooking books, is that it ?
- Yes, two vegan cooking books
You may be followed on your Youtube channel, on Twitter...
No.. You don't have Twitter do you ?
- Yeah I do, I'm everywhere
- Okay well go follow him on Twitter then.. - Vegans are everywhere
- I know, that's mad... It's freaking mad..
Thanks as well to Renan Larue who wrote about this theme,
we'll put lots of links below
most importantly go check his channel
it's good (I know cause I've tasted it)