Garden of Eatin' A Short History
So we all know about The Garden. According to the Bible, the first human beings were vegetarian. Meat-eating was a concession to the more aggressive tendencies of human beings . . . a channel for their "baser" impulses.
The story of creation after the flood parallels the story of creation "in the beginning" in important ways -- but one way it is very different is that the world is no longer peaceful and harmonious. Animals live in fear of each other and in particular of human beings, and we are left longing for a return to the time when "the lion and the lamb will lie down together."
Indeed, the structure and content of the biblical text tells us that the goal of creation is to struggle toward redemption -- and that redemption is a return to the harmony of the Garden -- the vegetarian Garden. Some interpreters therefore associate redemption with vegetarianism, a time when the lion and the lamb and the human being can all lie down together without fear of one another.
This vision is profoundly meaningful to me and is the basis of my own vegetarianism. In the beginning, we were given, as the Bible tells us, "every good herb" to eat. And they are good! We don't need to terrify other creatures, slaughter them, drench the ground with their blood, divide them into pieces and put them on our plates in order to be satisfied. We can enjoy bountiful variety and taste and texture and color from the Garden. We can be fully nourished and fully satisfied from this bounty if we are thoughtful and wise in how we use it.
It strikes me that religious rituals have a great deal to do with the idea that it requires taking life to sustain life. The closer that life is to our own (i.e., mammals are closer to us as human beings than fish and fish than plants, etc.) -- the more elaborate and dramatic the ritual. Religions help us deal with complex issues of life and death and our implication in the death of fellow creatures.
Throughout history, religions and individuals have confronted the stark reality of intertwined life and death and our involvement in it simply by being and living in the world. As a Kleenex commercial humorously suggests, a sneeze kills, causing guilt for a Buddhist monk who is not even allowed to garden for food since it ultimately kills plant and microbial life. Religious traditions and individuals have come up with a variety of positions with regard to what and how they eat. "The vegetarian movement didn't really begin gaining momentum in the western world until the mid-nineteenth century," however.
High profile vegetarians of that time included George Bernard Shaw, the source of many pithy quotes related to vegetarianism including "It is nearly fifty years since I was assured by a conclave of doctors that if I did not eat meat I should die of starvation," and "While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?" or "Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends."In Judaism, there is a long rabbinic tradition of protection for animals, known as (do no harm to living creatures)... Although mainstream Judaism has not historically embraced vegetarianism, individuals have been vegetarian and have found support in Jewish ethical teachings. is perhaps the most famous of these individuals. Nobel Prize winner, Isaac Bashevis Singer, was vegetarian. In The Letter Writer he wrote, "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka."
Many believe that the nature of contemporary animal husbandry is in conflict with Jewish teachings. is a contemporary authority who has written a number of books and articles on this theme and who suggests that in these times.