Throughout the history of Western literature, and now more than ever, vegetarians, vegetarianism, and its correlates (animal rights, human health, the meat industry, and climate change) have informed the range of literary genres. philosophers explore the ethics of eating meat; journalists who criticize the filth expose the hell of the slaughterhouse; satirists amuse us with nutty leaf-eaters; progressive writers of utopian, dystopian, and apocalyptic fiction remind us that we are what we eat; and in literary fiction, diet can complicate characterization, adding gut-wrenching arrogance, say, or misanthropic compassion.
In Genesis, the Judeo-Christian god declares: “I have given you every plant that bears seed and every tree that bears fruit. yours will be for eating.” plums, berries, almonds, but not giraffes! – is the way the protagonist/antagonist of my novel rabbits for food might have put it, except that she is a rationalist. evolution, she would say, gave us the same flat teeth as the great apes, and our two tiny tusks are designed for cracking nuts.
You are reading: Books on becoming vegetarian
but the fact that bunny is a vegetarian is not related to a healthy lifestyle. he smokes cigarettes, has never been to a gym, and has no tolerance for people like his sister, who wears what bunny calls shoes made from tree bark. bunny doesn’t eat meat because he cares deeply about cows, pigs, chickens, octopuses and the environment. biting, caustic, critical and funny; his honesty is the kind that makes people uncomfortable. but you cannot enjoy moral superiority; rather, she is deep in clinical depression. bunny is not an easy person to love. The second part of the story takes place in the psych ward, where a piece of meat is the centerpiece of every meal and the bunny subsists on peanut butter sandwiches and canned fruit.
Below is a list of 10 great books on vegetarians. It could, by the way, have included Han Kang’s stellar novel The Vegetarian, but it’s so well-loved that it seemed unnecessary.
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1. elizabeth costello by jm coetzee coetzee’s eponymous character is a brilliant writer, a very opinionated literary celebrity, a complicated woman and an outspoken vegetarian. the novel is structured around a series of formal lectures, some of which deal with animal rights. a person of focused concerns, she doesn’t always have room for sensitivities beyond that sphere. At a conference, Elizabeth compares the treatment of cattle to Nazi atrocities. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t sit well with the audience, or her son, who implores her to stop making a show of herself.
2. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein The classic film version that features Boris Karloff as the murderous monster too often outshines Mary Shelley’s creature. despite the corruption of the natural order by the evil dr. frankenstein, the creature was “born” innocent. he was gentle. he was a vegetarian. (“My food is not man’s; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to satisfy my appetite.”) All he wanted was love and companionship. his inherent sweetness, destroyed by human cruelty and rejection, turned him into the monster. after killing him, his diet is no longer mentioned. Can we assume that his menu has changed?
3. ethical vegetarianism edited by kerry s walters and lisa portmessthe subtitle, from pythagoras to peter singer, speaks for itself, but even for avowed carnivores, the broad spectrum of analytical, scientific, and theological arguments make this collection a absorbing reading. it’s also great fodder for student discussions.
4. stories collected by isaac bashevis singerafter living too briefly too close to a slaughterhouse, the singer gave up meat. In these stories, set in both old-world Poland and mid-century New York, there is always at least one character who follows his unassuming lead. That the restaurants they frequent are vegetarian is mentioned only in passing, and it goes without saying that in the markets they only buy mushrooms, beets and potatoes. but the singer does not always let us go so easily. the slaughterhouse, for example, recounts the abject inhumanity of routine butchery. no details or entrails are spared. this is not a job for a sensitive man and it pushes him to the limit.
5. charlotte’s web by eb whitespiders usually spin webs to catch flies for food, but charlotte is not like other spiders. she uses her web to weave the words: “some pig”. Charlotte’s humanitarian mission to rescue Wilbur the pig from the slaughterhouse surely means that pigs that aren’t lucky enough to be saved by learned spiders are doomed to become pork chops and bacon.
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6. animals: a novel by don lepanin this satirical landscape set in the not too distant future, we humans have eaten all the animals, but we haven’t lost our taste for meat. cannibalism is the reasonable solution. if we ate animals because we were superior to them, your logic goes, why not eat the physically and mentally handicapped? And why not have a deaf child as a pet?
7. a game of hide and seek by elizabeth taylor life trumps love is the harsh truth behind taylor’s novel, but that comes later. Harriet and Vesey first meet when they are teenagers. Vesey stays with her aunt, who is the dear friend of Harriet’s mother. both families are devout vegetarians. In a hilarious and revealing scene, Harriet and Vesey take their young cousins out to lunch, where he seduces them into having a steak. doubling down on corruption, he tries to convince them to lie to his mother about it, but they won’t lie. however, they do grasp his distinction between lying, omission, and evasion. all they need to say is that there was mac and cheese on the menu.
8. Upton Sinclair’s Jungle This novel about immigrants working in a Chicago slaughterhouse exposes the appalling exploitation of desperate employees and the revulsion of the meat-processing industry, which resulted in the American Clean Food and Drug Act. supposedly, human fingers would no longer end up in sausages. the novel also caused a rise in vegetarianism.
9. we are the climate: saving the planet starts at breakfast by jonathan safran foer the environment, but we refuse to give up our meat. Factory farming not only inflicts sadistic horrors on animals, it is also responsible for a significant percentage of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. the answer is not easy.
10. hg wells’s time machinewhen the time traveler lands hundreds of thousands of years in the future, he encounters the eloi, a gentle and fun-loving group, who seem to be the only humans left in a utopian land. their diet consists of delicious fruits, which they happily share. but underground dwells another tribe. Morlocks kill animals for sport; for food they consume the fattened eloi from all that juicy fruit.
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