"The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times" by Tristram Stuart is a history of vegetarianism. A history of veganitarianism would have been more useful for "The Curious Vegan," but there is an amazing amount of material here. Here is some trivia from the book. Answers can be found below.
1. Who said "plants are created for the sake of animals, and the animals for the sake of men"?
2. Why did John Calvin (1509-64) think that vegetarians were blasphemers?
3. What did Europeans discover about their diet as they explored the world in the 16th and 17th centuries?
4. Why did the belief among Jewish mystics, in the 16th century, that animals had souls not encourage vegetarianism?
5. Who was the most famous physicist not to win the Nobel prize and to be vegetarian?
6, Descartes' logic: a. humans deserved to suffer because they sinned. b. animals are innocent and therefore do not deserve to suffer. c. therefore ______ (what follows?)
7. Who believed that flowers had sex lives very much like people, and even committed adultery?
8. By the time of Adam Smith (1776), English philosophers and economists knew that an acre of farmland would support more people with produce than as food for animals, which were then slaughtered. Therefore, they thought, India had so many people because Indians were ______?
9. What was Gandhi's first political cause?
10. Who renounced meat in 1931, loved to be filmed with animals, and even thought that cooking was an unnatural health risk?
11. How did the Soviets claim to have identified Hitler's charred remains?
12. When did the word "vegetarian" come into usage?
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1a. Aristotle echoing Genesis 1:28
2a. He thought that God "gave man the free use of flesh" to sacrifice and of course eat. He did not seem impressed with the argument that to be vegetarian was to be like Adam before the Fall.
3a. That the Europeans were exceptionally carnivorous and that there were vegetarians all over the world and especially in cow-worshipping India.
4a. To the contrary, the killing of an animal released its soul to be re-incarnated elsewhere. It did however encourage compassionate treatment of animals.
5a. Sir Isaac Newton.
6a. it must be that animals do not feel pain.
7a. Darwin (well, Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather).
8a. vegetarian, of course.
9a. vegetarianism.
10a. Hitler
11a. They claimed his yellow teeth were "typical of a vegetarian."
12a. 1840s
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