Vegetarianism

This paper is an attempt to describe Plutarch's view on the idea of justice between animals and humans on the basis of a representative selection of passages from his works. Most of the analyzed passages are from De sollertia animalium and De esu carnium. The criterion of selection was lexical and contextual, so passages containing words semantically related to the Greek terms for justice or law were particularly taken into account, as well as passages simply referring to the subject of justice for animals. The conclusion is that Plutarch believed that justice between humans and animals is possible and should be applied. However, conscious of how difficult this postulate is to achieve, he was content with urging people to limit the consumption of meat.

In case you haven't consumed any health news recently, there is a big beef over research showing red meat is not bad for you. A huge study has contradicted decades of anti-red-meat advice, and the experts who gave that advice are red-faced and livid, and accidentally admit that public health policy is based on politics and bad science.

There is a surprising consensus, even among those who argue for veganism, that freeganism is permissible-that is, it's permissible to eat animal-based foods that would otherwise go to waste. What's more, Donald Bruckner has recently argued that vegans should be freegans. In this paper, we explore what the strict vegan can say by way of response. We offer a novel challenge to freeganism by drawing upon Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's 'zoopolitical' conception of animal rights, which supports, we argue, a kind of 'restricted freeganism'. On this position, it's prima facie wrong to eat the corpses of domesticated animals, in virtue of their membership in a mixed human-animal community, meaning that many standard freegan practices are ruled out. However, this is not a defence of strict veganism, as it still permits eating eggs and milk that would otherwise go to waste, as well as the bodies of wild animals killed in accidents. Crucially, this exploration reveals how a new area of enquiry-work arising from political philosophy in the wake of the 'political turn' in animal ethics-can offer fertile lenses through which to consider established ethical puzzles about the eating of animals.

This first book on Brigid Brophy embraces her life’s work, its diversity, originality and achievement. Surely the most undervalued British twentieth-century author, Brophy always wrote uniquely, her talents informing myriad other writers of renown. Her inventiveness quite wrongly made her legacy hard to summarise and easy to overlook. Our volume celebrates all aspects of Brophy’s literary career, alongside contributions on animal rights, vegetarianism, anti-vivisectionism, humanism, feminism and sexual politics. Contributors include literary critics, animal rights activists, Brophy’s daughter, Kate Levey, and Brophy herself, ghost at her own feast. This book therefore not only celebrates Brophy’s eclectic achievements – it fully reflects them.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), besides writing famous novels such as War and Peace, also wrote on political issues, especially later in his life, putting forward a political philosophy which might be termed "Christian anarchism". This book provides a comprehensive overview of Tolstoy’s political thought. It outlines in a systematic way Tolstoy’s thought, which was originally articulated unsystematically in diverse, often informal writing, such as pamphlets, letters and speeches, as well as books, and in his novels, where Tolstoy’s thinking is put forward implicitly through the novels’ characters. The book sets out the basic themes of Tolstoy’s political thought: his acceptance of the teachings of Jesus, his criticism of the way in which Jesus’s teachings have been relayed by the church through traditional creeds and dogma, his passionate rejection of political violence both by the state and those working for reform, his plea for a non-violent response to violence and injustice, and his call for society to forego its institutional shackles and enact a community of peace, love and justice. The book also includes background information on the Russia of Tolstoy’s time, including the religious context; and a discussion of how Tolstoy’s political thought has been received, both by his admirers, who included Gandhi, and his critics.

This thesis is a study of the Māṃsabhakṣaṇaparivarta (The Chapter on Meat-Eating) of the Laṅkāvatārasūtra, one of the key scriptures of the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna Buddhism which in turn was a key influence on the Chan/Zen schools of China and Japan.

The Māṃsabhakṣaṇaparivarta argues strongly that a bodhisattva should abstain from eating meat. In doing so it not only argues against but flatly contradicts earlier Buddhist scriptures with which its audience would have been familiar. The Māṃsabhakṣaṇaparivarta is unusual for a Buddhist text in the strength of the rhetoric it employs against those who hold a different view. This suggests that at the time the text was composed, the debate around whether Buddhists were obliged to abstain from eating meat or not was a heated one. Indeed, the popularity of the Laṅkāvatārasūtra in China and Japan was a major factor in promoting vegetarianism in those societies – particularly amongst Buddhist monks and nuns.

I use philological methods, and an intertextual theoretical approach to analysing this text, drawing on the key concepts of the ideologeme and the horizontal and vertical axes of a text first used by the French theoretician Julia Kristeva, as well as Roland Barthes' concept of the death of the author.

I attempt to place the Māṃsabhakṣaṇaparivarta in its historical and ideological context by tracing links to not only Buddhist texts, but also texts and ideas from the Jaina and Brahminical traditions. In the main part of the thesis I examine the text thematically, looking at the rules on the permissibility of meat-eating found in early Buddhism, the issue of karma and the karmic effects of meat-eating, loving kindness and compassion as a motivation for abstaining from meat-eating, desire as a motivation for meat-eating, the role of meat-eating and vegetarianism in the competition for support between Buddhism and other Indian religious traditions, the question of purity, and finally examine discussions of vegetarianism in other Mahāyāna texts specifically mentioned in the Māṃsabhakṣaṇaparivarta.

The beginning of Straight-Edge:
Based on Arquivo.pt, this project proposes a study of the emergence of a suburban culture connected to Punk/Hardcore in Lisbon’s metropolitan area: Straight-Edge. Born during the early 80s in the United States, Straight-Edge was opposed to the nihilist lifestyle that characterized most punks, marked by the consumption of drugs, alcohol and other behaviours considered self-destructive. Straight-Edge people advocated a life free of drugs, alcohol and tobacco, and many of them adopted vegetarianism or veganism as a diet, motivated equally by “puritan” factors but, above all, by the fight against animal exploitation.

The explosion of Straight Edge in Portugal:
In the mid-90s, there was a significant growth of this culture in Portugal, , especially in Greater Lisbon, gathering an increasing community and giving their bands and main agents visibility. The use of the internet as a means of communication and disclosure of the ideals that oriented the life style contributed to the speed of that growth and the impact it came to have in the years following its emergence. Practically invisible in the mainstream media and based in a Do It Yourself ethic, without any kind of organization or institutional intermediation, and thus solely dependent on the activity of its members, this study will be based in the online presence, namely in the websites existent between the late 90s and the first years of the 21st century, which were recovered and made accessible by Arquivo.pt.

Aims and objectives of the research project:
The research will look to identify the main characteristics of Straight-Edge culture in Portugal and inquire about its presence and impact in Portuguese society, both through the connections it established with other cultural, social and political movements, as well as through the analysis of its continuity and influence in the cultural field. In a broader perspective, this study aims to question the forms of suburban sociability and begin the study of the idea of suburb, identifying some of its specificities and exploring its importance in Portuguese society, especially since the post-revolutionary period.

The philosophical literature may seem to be replete with arguments for vegetarianism based on harm to animals. However, these arguments turn out to be arguments for veganism, not vegetarianism. This chapter explores whether anything can be said for vegetarianism. Some reasons motivating vegetarianism seem to be very personal, and so not the sorts of things that could be the foundation of a moral argument. Meanwhile, though they may hold some weight, arguments about vegetarianism as a “middle way” between veganism and omnivorism are highly contingent. Both of these routes, then, may seem unsatisfying to the vegetarian. Could there be a principled case for vegetarianism? Tzachi Zamir is the one philosopher who has argued at length for vegetarianism over veganism, but a close examination of his arguments show that they are not as compelling as they first seem. A final option remains open: there may be potential for arguments critiquing the eating of animals’ flesh and/or their bodies that are independent of concerns about harms to animals in food production. Such arguments, which have been hinted at in animal ethics, offer a critique of meat consumption, but not, necessarily, of egg and dairy consumption. Perhaps, then, they could form the basis of a principled case for vegetarianism that does not immediately become a case for veganism. The consequences of such an argument, if one can be made, are not simple.

Mainstream dietary recommendations now commonly advise people to minimize the intake of red meat for health and environmental reasons. Most recently, a major report issued by the EAT-Lancet Commission recommended a planetary reference diet mostly based on plants and with no or very low (14 g/d) consumption of red meat. We argue that claims about the health dangers of red meat are not only improbable in the light of our evolutionary history, they are far from being supported by robust scientific evidence.

Previous scholarship has suggested that ritualized giving (dāna) by laity to monastics constituted a significant factor in the creation of Buddhism as a viable social phenomenon. The giving of almsfood, in particular, provides a prime site of social interaction between monastics and laity, wherein sustained mutual relations may develop. This study aims at discerning some of the cultural dynamics of this interaction by analyzing the ritualized giving of food from two interrelated perspectives. Firstly, utilizing the concept of ‘food ideology’, this study investigates the ideological value attached to the substance (i.e. food) given in the transaction. Thereafter, the ritual performances of the mutual participants are examined. I argue that, while normative Buddhism ascribes a more positive value to food than its ascetic contemporaries, it implemented a thorough program of corporal discipline that functioned as a novel form of ‘civilizational’ asceticism congenial to the contemporaneous cosmopolitan landscape. This positive value ascription to food and emphasis on discipline converges with urban, lay sensibilities and serves to bring cohesion between the lay and monastic elements of the normative Pali tradition.

Key words: alms, asceticism, corporal discipline, dāna, dakkhiṇā, domestication, food, forest renunciation, gift, health, liberality, merit, monasticism, meat, medicine, middle way, monastic discipline, pāṭimokkha, sacrifice, śaikṣa dharma, sampajañña, sekhiya dhamma, sikkhā, śikṣā, urbanism, vegetarianism, Vinaya.

Esta tradução é de um texto que o esteta Eduard Hanslick escreveu em setembro de 1882. Neste breve artigo Hanslick critica o compositor Richard Wagner, não apenas por sua obra musical, mas também por ser adepto ao vegetarianismo e utilizar meios artísticos para ascender sua teoria.

A inexistência de estudos históricos sobre o vegetarianismo em Portugal não se deve à ausência de fontes, pois elas existem, aguardando apenas a atenção dos historiadores. Nelas se destacam os livros de cozinha, os periódicos publicados pela Sociedade Vegetariana de Portugal, os artigos e os comentários dos jornais e das revistas generalistas, que em alguns casos satirizaram o movimento vegetariano e os seus membros; a publicidade, e muito especialmente as publicações de divulgação do médico Amílcar de Sousa, pioneiro do vegetarianismo em Portugal, fundador e diretor da revista O Vegetariano, presidente da Sociedade Vegetariana de Portugal, e autor de inúmeros artigos e livros sobre o tema.

Esta obra procura dar a conhecer os primórdios do movimento vegetariano em Portugal, num momento em que os adeptos deste regime alimentar estão em crescimento. Procura ainda perceber como e quando chegaram as ideias vegetarianas a Portugal, identificar os protagonistas do movimento e as suas ações, e finalmente compreender a amplitude, o êxito ou o fracasso do vegetarianismo nos seus primórdios, cuja primeira fase terminará na década de 40 do século passado.

Entrepreneurs who promote artificial meat (factory-made tissue originated in living organisms) claim that the challenges in manufacturing and marketing artificial meat are making a product that shall be perceived by the senses as real meat (dead animal tissue), while matching the original or surpassing it in nutritional value and affordability. This position ignores additional, crucial considerations in the consumption of real meat and its analogs (meat-like products that are not dead animal tissues).
Meat analogs that more or less withstand the aforementioned challenges have already been marketed for decades, and yet consumers make successful efforts to recognize highly valued differences between any meat analog and real meat, as they will keep on doing when facing minute and unavoidable differences between artificial and real meat. Motivating such differentiation efforts are the profoundly different emotional, symbolic and moral meanings ascribed to real meat in comparison with any alleged substitute. These meanings reflect the fact that producing and consuming real meat are perceived as expressions of physical and social power, whereas meat analogs are not associated with special power.
The paper examines three approaches to the association between meat and power. According to one theory, favored by meat analog marketers, non-coercive products should attract meat eaters since consuming such products exempts consumers from association with power, which have disturbed them in the first place. An opposite, more convincing theory claims that meat analogs cannot succeed precisely because these products lack the forcible meaning pursued by meat eaters. A third theory is the most convincing one, and it claims that when a meticulous division of labor is standard, the meaning of products varies in accordance with arbitrary stories attached to these products, and foreseeing where such stories may lead to is virtually impossible. Hence it may be possible that artificial meat will succeeds in chomping off a large chunk of the real meat industry, yet it is no less reasonable to predict that artificial meat will undermine consumer boycott of real meat, against artificial meat's original purpose.
Tsovel, Ariel.  "Meat: Real and Fake, Truth and Fiction." Maarav 24 (Autumn 2018).

This blog post interrogates the image of vegetarian food in Singapore, as food that is old-fashioned, with 'old-fashioned' seen as negative. The author argues that the old image of vegetarian food needs to change with high tech veg foods becoming available and scientific evidence supporting a shift toward vegetarianism.

Arthur C. Clarke provided one of the earliest practical designs for a lunar base as well as proposals for further extraterrestrial exploration. This article examines Clarke’s propositions for an off-planet food supply, which it finds to rely exclusively on plant-farming and the possible development of synthetic meat. It explores the way Clarke’s proposed vegetarian food production methods have been reflected in subsequent plans for lunar outposts and how they have been portrayed in Clarke’s own science fiction, both before and after the Apollo 11 landing. It also considers food production methods in other science fiction involving long-term space exploration, and the role ethical vegetarianism plays in Clarke’s writing. The paper concludes with a brief exploration of Clarke’s Space Odyssey series, which is famous for its depiction of carnivorousness as a necessary step toward space travel – ultimately finding the carnivorous vision of 2001 to be superseded by the vegetarian arguments made throughout his lifetime.