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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
During the great black-pudding controversies of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it was put about that Sir Isaac Newton abstained from this dish because of the Old Testament prohibition against eating blood. After his death, Newton's niece defended his reputation, insisting that he had followed St. Paul's injunction not to make a fuss about food prohibitions--don't be like the bloody Jews--and to "take & eat what comes from the shambles without asking questions for conscience sake." It was true, she explained, that Newton refrained from eating black pudding and also rabbits (whose meat remained bloody because they were killed by strangulation), but his reasons were quite different from those alleged: "He said meats strangled were forbid because that was a painfull death & the letting out the blood the easiest & that animals should be put to as little pain as possible, that the reason why eating blood was forbid was because it was thought the eating blood inclined men to be cruel."
By the time of Newton's death, in 1727, the English black-pudding debate had been running for most of a century. In the "Triall of a Black-Pudding" (1652), Thomas Barlow, a future bishop of Lincoln, noted that God had specifically proscribed blood eating among the Hebrews, whose laws of kashruth mandated the slaughtering and handling of food animals so as to drain them, as far as possible, of residual blood. Genesis 9:4 said, "Flesh with the life thereof, which is the Blood thereof, shall ye not eat," and Leviticus 17:10 underlined the prohibition: "Whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people." Barlow pointed out that the New Testament had never rescinded this law, despite the relief from various other Jewish dietary prohibitions offered by both Jesus and Paul; furthermore, the ban on eating blood and the flesh of strangled animals was repeated in the Acts of the Apostles. God, Barlow asserted, "would not have Men eat the life and the soul of Beasts, a thing barbarous and unnaturall." No meat was unclean in itself, but that bit of black pudding in the Great British Breakfast was a violation of both Jewish law and the Christian dispensation.
In Newton's time and beyond, you couldn't discuss meat eating or its rejection without biting into some tough theology, and Tristram Stuart's sprawling "The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times" (Norton; $29.95) shows just how hard it was to decipher God's dietary will and how many other considerations--both sacred and secular--were wrapped up in decisions about whether or not it was right to eat animals. The book is a magnificently detailed and wide-ranging collection of scholarship on what has been said to justify either refraining from meat or consuming it. Of course, a history of justifications is not the same thing as a history of what people actually ate, or didn't. For many people, through most of history, not eating meat was a given: it was just too scarce or expensive. But, among the few who had the resources, meat's richness, fatty satisfaction, and nourishment were much appreciated, as in the wonderful Scottish Selkirk Grace:
Some hae meat and canna eat,, And some wad eat that want it;, But we hae meat and we can eat,, And sae the Lord be thankit.
With few exceptions, European proponents of vegetarianism emerged from those who had meat. You can define vegetarianism in any...
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