St Augustine would not have approved of the recent British tendency to eat less meat or even to adopt a vegetarian diet. The author of The City of God had enough trouble with his British contemporaries, but it was the gnostic dualists of the Manichean sect, most prevalent in Persia, who provoked his anathema against their renunciation of flesh. If, as reported in a survey published yesterday, one in 10 Britons no longer eat red meat and nearly 4 per cent eat no meat at all, it is not absurd to ask whether this might not be something more than a fad.
Ever since Mani, founder of the Manicheans, was flayed alive more than 1,700 years ago, vegetarians have endured ridicule and worse. The Cathars and other persecuted medieval heretics were vegetarian. Yet St Francis and his followers were scarcely less reluctant to slaughter animals. Heretical or orthodox, in Europe the abandonment of a carnivorous diet came to signify a moral attitude both more all-embracing and more vague than straightforward obedience to the dietary laws of Judaism, Islam and the religions of the East.
In more modern times, vegetarianism attracted many whose appetite for religion was inadequately satisfied by the spiritual nourishment of the Christian churches. Both Wagner and Nietzsche took it up for a time; so, more consistently, did writers as various as Shaw and Kafka. Nemesis came in the form of Adolf Hitler, who took his vegetarianism like everything else to extremes of megalomania. Had he won the war, all Europe would have been forced to consume the insipid mush on which he fed his staff. The spectacle of a herbivore who murdered millions has disposed of any pretence that vegetarians per se enjoy moral superiority.
The desire to live a long and healthy life, not moral scruple, seems to be the driving force behind the present British trend. Yesterday's survey suggests that young, middle-class women living in the South-east are especially averse to meat. Young women are more likely than most people to take care of their health and appearance.
The reaction has already begun. Older generations may take a sceptical view of the trend: all is vanity, fashion or "image", they are heard to murmur. Red-blooded types treat vegetarians as spoilsports, lumped together in the same motley category as teetotallers, anti-smoking militants or the arsonists who burn down weekend cottages in Wales. Useless to enjoin such bigots to greater tolerance; their protestations are more tiresome than the rare vegetarians who also attempt to proselytize.
Whether or not the vegetarian trend continues, the British diet, though much improved in recent years, still merits the castigation it receives from foreigners. If vegetarians encourage greater attention to vegetables, that can only be good for all concerned. This includes the producers, who will be expected to provide the nation's cooks with greater choice and better quality. Those who rear, slaughter and cook meat have nothing to fear: for them, the challenge is to offer a more attractive alternative to a meatless diet.
