My dad went to seminary late in life, taking on ministry as a second (third?) career. He got his M.Div. at Emory in Atlanta when I was about three through eight years old.
I do remember certain things about childhood in Atlanta. I spent a lot of time in preschool and Bible camp during the days. It was a very integrated environment and I recall being one of the few white girls at my particular preschool, since my father believed very much in making sure I had that type of experience of diversity. It was a value that I’m fortunate he had taken out of the sixties and given in at least some portion to me. My own M.Div. was earned at Vanderbilt in Nashville. As an adult I had another opportunity to really engage in dialogue (especially of a philosophical and theological nature) with a diverse student body. I bumped up against my own white privilege many ways, and acknowledge it to be an active, life-long process.
I remember from childhood in Atlanta that there, MLK Jr. Day is a very, very, very big deal. There and in the South and, I hope, in many other places, it is a holiday where people are encouraged to go out and do some public service as a way to honor his legacy.
Like Gandhi, MLK Jr. understood the connection between our treatment of other animals and our treatment of one another. Intersectionality goes back into the ancient times, and is by no means a remotely new fad.
That brings me to my own act of service. Though this is, unfortunately, not the most divisive or violent or racist period in American history, it is a pretty rocky one. As my own day of service in honor of MLK Jr., I wanted to offer this blog. Obviously (I hope), I am not attempting to speak for African Americans about this topic. I am trying to use what platform I have to push the issue out into our human system, for my readers’ consideration. I’m attaching several resources here. If you only do one thing besides read this blog post, I suggest that it be taking an hour to listen to this workshop on Uprooting White Fragility by Dr. A. Breeze Harper.
If you’ve read more than a couple posts here you also know I am a vegan. I first learned about Dr. Harper’s work because she has been a strong and leading voice about the racism of American food systems and about the intersectionality between human and non-human (animal) rights. Again, I am not the one to lead in this discussion but I strongly recommend Dr. Harper’s book on the topic called Sistah Vegan.
There are at least two big branches in this river of a conversation. One is food systems inequality and “the colonization of diet.” Or, as activists like Karen Washington call it, “food apartheid.” In this discussion our attention is called to the ways cultural diets, often more plant-based and certainly including more healthy and homemade foods, have been destroyed in the creation of junk food “deserts” where especially Native, African, Hispanic folks have very little access to fresh and healthy foods, and are incentivized (if not forced) to eat low value, low cost meals.
I’m not trying to say that no non-white cultures ate animals. We know better. But the removal of cultural, localized diets has deprived folks of the beans, grains, fruits, berries, and veggies that their ancestors lived off of far more than animal products, leading to better health and more balance in the ecosystem. Epidemics of diabetes and heart disease in these communities are exposed as another form of genocide when explored to their logical conclusion. In recent years grassroots activism like that of Dr. Harper has reached many non-white communities, and may be a reason that there are currently more African American and generally non-white vegans in the US than white ones. This, despite the common dismissal of the lifestyle as elitist, and/or an eccentricity of white privilege. A really good cookbook dealing with the decolonization of diet from a Native American perspective is this one, which all we residents of the Americas may find particularly interesting. PCRM (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine) also puts out free resources about Native American decolonized diet, and food desert activism, etc.
This conversation can be extremely fraught because speaking about food is every bit as heated as talking about other deeply indoctrinated aspects of our lives, like politics and religion. But, the even more tender aspect of this conversation is the contemplation of intersectionality between human rights and non-human (animal) rights. Many of us as women and sometimes men have been shamed, marginalized and bullied in various social settings by being called “cows,” “pigs,” “dogs,” “whales,” “hogs,” “monkeys,” etc. enough times to understand that it can feel like a default attack to be compared in any way to other animals. This applies much more so when you have actually been rounded up, transported, bought and sold or mass-slaughtered like other animals. Yet this is the recent and occasionally ongoing history of African Americans, Jews, Native Americans, any type of refugee immigrants (especially black and brown ones), and more.
“I think there is a connection between … the way we treat animals and the way we treat people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy.”
Angela Davis
The first time I encountered the intersectionality between racism and carnism (eating other animals), it was in the book, “The Dreaded Comparison.” I was most drawn to that book because Alice Walker, one of my fave authors, wrote the introduction and described her own reasons for vegetarianism. Since then I’ve found other resources like Sistah Vegan to be very helpful in becoming more aware of all the different aspects of dietary ethics that I had no clue about when I first became a ovo-lacto vegetarian and then, in 2011, vegan.
I’m not going to go into all the aspects of these issues because the wonderful, awesome, very accessible resources I am linking in are much better than what I could ever do. I am strongly suggesting that consuming some of this information is a very important thing for all of us to consider (food pun intended). Whether we are new to considering the intersectionality, the veganism, or anything in between it’s the job of the privileged to take on information about how to bring balance and equality. This applies to our relationship with the other living beings on the planet as well as other people. There, I want to get this info out quickly so folks have time to look at it on the holiday if they have that time free. If not, it’ll be there for you later!
Resources:
Dr. Harper is a great place to start at the resources already mentioned, her website and/or her first book Sistah Vegan.
The newest issue of VegNews is devoted to black veganism in the US.
A wonderful blogging family who are African American vegans raising a fam and keeping folks up to date on tons of vegan foods and resources are: This Infinite Life. Here’s one YouTube video of theirs, introducing their cookbook, to help you find them on their various channels.
PETA info sheet about civil rights activism and vegetarianism.
There are quite a few “vegan soul food” cookbooks out now, but this is the one I own so I’ll point you over here. I also like that the author Bryant Terry adds music playlists for cooking and eating every dish. It’s called Vegan Soul Kitchen. Bryant Terry also wrote the forward to the “Decolonize your Diet” cookbook I linked up above.
Circles of Compassion is a book of essays that came out of the World Peace Diet collective and deals with racism, heterosexism, sexism, and many other issues interacting with speciesism within intersectionality.
Here we are at Lughnasadh, which Wiccan-influenced Neo-pagans (what a harvest of words!) celebrate as the first-fruits of harvest. While it’s nowhere near Samhain (the meat/blood harvest that was syncretized into Soul’s Eve and Halloween), it already carries undertones of death. The Pagan god, like Christ, dies to protect and nourish his people each year. Sometimes called the barley or corn king, he dies back like a plant only to regenerate through the unseen magic of roots and seeds.
Heavy, right? I guess I get a little mopey every year around this time. I can feel the summer getting older by the second. “How did it go so fast?!” is my annual reprieve. That and, for the past couple of years, it’s the anniversary of my dad passing away. August 3, 2017. This year we celebrated by rushing my mom to EMMC with a possible heart attack. Fortunately, it seems to have been something a bit milder than this, though proper precautions are being taken. Anyone who is an energy sender or prayer, please send. Even if you read this message-in-a-virtual-bottle ten years from now. I’m sure I’ll still be needing help with something!
Before all the horrible, terrible, no good, very bad festivities at the cardiac ward, I was zoom-attending this year’s Glastonbury Goddess Conference. While it is a summer celebration, it also has autumnal themes. Sure, we play with Henna and dance and sing and all that (yes, even on zoom). But, we also talk in smaller circles about ageing, childlessness, assault, death, political injustices, and all manner of other things. I guess that’s life. You can’t prance around on the beach all the time without stepping on a little glass. Probably. Just me?
I have also blogged on my Witches & Pagans spot more about Avalon. I solved the riddle of the Grail quest. Just sayin’. You’ll have to read it to see if you agree.
Meanwhile, to remember my dad. One of my step-sibs and I were just doing so. To summarize:
A childrearing strategy that involved talking way over our heads about Kirkegaard, Wiesel, or Aquinas when we were still on comics.
Wild interactive story telling in the car during short commutes just as much as long drives, which surely made me at least three-quarters of the weirdo I am today.
At his first parish in Nebraska when I was about eight, he started paying me a penny a page to read my kid Bible (like a comic book). I guess he wanted me to seem devout. I don’t think he knew I spent the cash on candy cigarettes, which I regularly let hang off my lips like the grown-ups did while sitting on the steps of the parish house. Sorry, Dad.
Duke basketball, stomping and shrieking and using sporty terms I’m pretty sure he didn’t understand much better than I did.
Various forms of reckless (assertive?) driving that terrified many both in and outside the cars, which he always blamed on the time-frame and rigors of rural parish ministry. Do all parish ministers keep their collars in the glove box in case of speeding stops?
The Cadillacs. Sooo many Cadillacs.
His love of old time blues and gospel. I particularly remember his love for old video clips of Mahalia Jackson, at festivals and singing her guts out with sweat pouring down her face and her hair everywhere. Frikkin. Awesome.
His gusto for food and life. When dining out is was not unusual for us to find ourselves alone in our section while he roared with laughter and told rather off-color jokes. Oh, and sampled everyone else’s food to the point where my step-brother sometimes cried. Of course, my dad’s life-long love for rich food is part of why he’s not here. He occasionally buttered his meat. Just. Don’t.
His sense of fair play. He would always be willing to go to the mat for anyone on any cause that he felt sounded just, and he was a formidable mat-goer. Big, loud, brave, kind.
The parish visit was where the really shone. He loved to work his circuit doing sick-bed visits. He had chaplaincy privileges at every hospital and nursing home and home for the disabled within a hundred mile radius of any place he ever served.
Clown college. He went there. How many of us are willing to wear the nose just to cheer some sick people up?! That’s hard core.
Thrift stores. Ohmygod. The thrift stores. And book stores. Same thing. Many times as a child I literally thought I’d been left behind, he’d lose himself in those shelves for so long. Thank god most of them had cats. Late in life, his fave was the Salvation Army in Oneonta, NY, which he lovingly referred to as “the Sally.”
Being proud to call himself a feminist and raise a tough broad like me. The last vacation we took before he died I chewed his ass for some off-color joke (which was a hundred percent why he told them). He laughed and I, not ready to stop being mad, was like, “What?!” He said, “I’m just admiring the nuclear stealth missile I’ve launched into the world.”
I guess that’s it for this year. I have to save some stories for the rest of my life. I know he was proud of his Viking heritage and he might be hanging out in some Heaven/Valhalla hybrid, but I kind of hope we get to see each other in Avalon.
Wishing all a peaceful and healthy harvest. And much love to my daddy from his little missile.
Okay, probably a fair amount of each. Maybe I’m feeling the COVID-19 shutdown (when does it become COVID-20?). I don’t care. I’m doing this. As no one else has ever said (I’m pretty sure), it’s no fun failing unless you do it in public.
Writing is a fickle pastime. I’ve written so, so many things that have never seen the light of day. Not even a hint of moonlight. In many cases I am vastly grateful. In some, however, I feel regrets. Such is the case with Varley the Vegan Vampire. I know, I know. It’s meant to be a kid’s’ book okay?! That’s what I told myself, though I think I wrote it entirely for my own enjoyment. It is, in fact, an unmarketable monstrosity. Yes, with literal monsters.
This thing is in common meter (tetrameter/trimeter) rhyming verse. That’s right, rhyme. It’d make Emily Dickinson think she’d been slipped a bad mushroom (possibly not for the first time). It’s vegan. Did I mention it rhymes? You get it. I could go on. It could only ever be marketable to far left, plant-eating, kinky-goth octogenarians who are super comfy with their inner (way inner) child. I haven’t found a publishing house that has a catalog for that. Strangely, though, this little tale is very dear to my heart.
I probably have sentimentality for Varley because my dad loved him. We worked on the story together. It’s kind of an homage to our shared hero, Edward Gorey. One of our last vacations together before Dad got sick was to the Gorey homestead on Cape Cod.
Additionally, it was Dad’s idea to name the character Varley. After reading the first draft he insisted, “It’s a tribute to Varney but he’s vegan. Get it? Rhymes with barley!”
My dad was of course referring to Varney the Vampire from the British “penny dreadful” papers of the nineteenth century. He owned an authentic printing of one of the Varney tales which he treasured for years. Yes, my Methodist minister father. He had a real goth streak. He loved vintage horror (more kitschy than slashy). He owned several hearses and funereal sedans over the years that he’d bought from local undertakers. “High miles but easy miles,” he said. As mentioned, we both loved the Gorey vibe. You knew I had to get it from somewhere, right?
So, enjoy this little offering if you dare. You may want to read it in segments if you aren’t accustomed to rhyme. It can cause painful brain cramps until you build up your tolerance. Since it was meant to be a story book, I found some vintage Halloween cards (and a couple of Gorey bats) to illustrate. I know, it’s not Halloween anymore. But, it’s not 2019 either. We’re all on a bit of a delay.
Cooking on Sunday is kind of a thing for me. It makes me feel nourished in more ways than one. It’s when I take the time to try tricky recipes and break out (sometimes break) the decent dishes. Sometimes, about halfway through this ritual, I realize I might have bitten off more than I can chew. Yes, a food pun. Deal with it. Anyhow, that’s today.
As I build my Sunday dinner of tofurky divan (why did I try something so fussy?!) I am contemplating how I want to write about the hundredth anniversary the women’s vote (“women’s suffrage”) in the United States. Yep. I contemplate stuff like that.
Maybe it’s the bubbling sauce of tahini, cashew and white wine talking but I’m going at it through food. More than food, really. Our agency over our bodies. Bear in mind I am documenting my own cerebral and experiential meanderings. I’m not trying to deliver an ultimate truth. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of one of those little beauties. In other words, bear with me. Okay, here we go.
Women got the franchise in 1920 in the U.S. and in 1928 in the U.K. In both countries, suffrage activists were pushed, hit, thrown, spit on, and jailed. They held the 1913 women’s march to protest the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson (an event that was heavily compared with the women’s marches in the U.S. after Trump was elected). At this event over a hundred women were injured badly enough to wind up in the hospital when Wilson supporters were unleashed on the marchers by unfriendly police.
The Secretary of War had to dispatch federal cavalry to help quell the violence and allow ambulances to help the women. The D.C Police Commissioner was forced out in the subsequent scandal which even included special congressional hearings into the matter.
Two of the most notorious prisons where these women activists ended up were the Occoquan Workhouse in Virgina, U.S. and the Holloway Women’s Prison in London, U.K. Once in jail they were deliberately (not surprisingly) treated with optimal lack of dignity.
They were often charged in ways that put them on an equivalency with prostitutes when, as activists, they demanded instead to be treated as political prisoners. As women were moved in and out of these prisons for repeat sentences, they developed collective action strategies. They first tried to refuse wearing prison uniforms (a marker of a person with special political prisoner status) but male guards were perfectly happy to be called in to undress them. At the worst prisons some were stripped, chained naked to cell doors, and sometimes raped.
The most successful action the women developed across the continents (though certainly very unhealthy for them) was the infamous hunger strike. This was a collective action known to be practiced by political prisoners. In Europe, people who were allowed to hold that designation were protected from force-feeding. The women, of course, were not offered that protection.
Women would take turns hunger striking. They were so effective at this tactic in England that, also in 1913, Parlaiment enacted the “Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill Health Act” that was more commonly known as “The Cat and Mouse Act.”
Basically they would turn hunger-striking women out of prison when they were close to death and then round them back up after they’d gone home to recuperate on their own dime. The other intervention used by corrections staff against the women prisoners was force-feeding.
This was a violent process virtually the same as a sexual rape in which women’s agency over their bodies was violated with food. It wasn’t a “here comes the airplane into the hanger” scenario. Women were held down by several corrections officers, sometimes also trussed in heavy restraints, after which fairly large and unhygienic rubber hoses were shoved down their throats through the mouth or nose. Many got pneumonia from food and liquid reaching their lungs. Permanent damage was common. Some of the Holloway survivors gave testimonials that the BBC has available here.
What does all of this have to do with my tofurky divan? Of course, there is the obvious. I’m grateful for my privilege to choose my own food and to eat it. I’m grateful for the right to cast a vote. I’m grateful that I have the safety to make choices about what goes in and out of any part of my body. We’re used to thinking about this in terms of sexual agency, including reproductive rights. It occurs to me that we’re more used to thinking about our agency in terms of our sexuality. That’s certainly important and appropriate. Yet, it’s at least as important to think about our agency over food. Like with our sexuality and (I’m pondering this) perhaps even more, it’s an agency we are taught to very easily give away.
There are many ways to understand our agency around food. Can we afford the food we want? Do we feel safe and able to follow diets according to our religion or ethics? Do we feel emotionally and physically in control over our food choices? Do we see our diet as a battle with food waged over our self-image or the opinions of others? In what ways has our dietary agency been taken by others? In what ways are we giving it away?
According to stats compiled for the 2020 eating disorder awareness week, the Eating Recovery Center shares that 2.8 percent of American adults deal with a binge eating disorder in their lifetime. While we think of this as a women’s issue, about a third of adults with reported eating disorders are men. It’s pretty hard not to worry about our size and appearance given all the media messages out there. And those are far from new. The diet and image industries have been churning away in our lives and inside our heads through the generations.
In my own life story I had a sort of split-screen reality of a childhood. I lived two very different ways in my parents’ two households. My mother was a battered woman. My father was a rural minister. In both of those realities, I was low-hanging fruit to fall prey to eating disorders. In my mother’s household there was abusive misogyny that left all of us as our batterer’s victims feeling like objects (and not very valuable objects). In my dad’s house was the middle class pressure to be the minister’s kid who is polite, polished, and always able to make a good impression.
Both of my parents loved me and parented the best that they could. These issues around self-image and food are cultural more than individual, though individual resources and resilience can help. In fact, I understand as an adult that my father had self-image and dietary issues to rival my own. I wish we could have supported each other in a productive manner while he was alive, rather than suffering on our own. Though, adopting animals to fund at the Catskill Animal Sanctuary was a special experience and I am so grateful we did it. It was a process where we teamed up to take dietary choices beyond the plate and into the ethics, and I think we both felt more empowered. I highly recommend it.
I remember learning about the force-feeding of suffragettes while I was in college. I happened to be in active treatment for my eating disorders at the time. I recall having a kind of epiphany about my agency in my diet at that point. It helped me in my recovery. For me the awareness dawned that I had arrived at the safety and the privilege to decide what I ate. Why was I wasting my time and energy torturing myself? I can’t say my battle was totally over at that moment, but it was a meaningful step forward. I eventually settled into a rather uneasy peace with myself. I committed to allowing my body to be as it was, as long as I was eating healthfully and in accordance with my ethics. That brings me to the veganism.
Back in college I was also learning to be a vegetarian. This was another piece of my puzzle. The ethics of diet that I learned by reading books like Carol J Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat gave me another reason to see my food as more than a malicious list of calories, fats and carbs. Like sex, food is power. And even the most rapacious of paramours probably don’t have sex nearly as often as they eat. As Will Tuttle points out in The World Peace Diet, dietary ethics are the core of our ethics. They are a big factor in our impact upon our worlds both personal and global. As I grew into that material I gradually became totally vegan. In terms of my self-image and my relationship to food it’s worked really well for me.
During this period of discovery, material in Carol Adams’ work (The Pornography of Meat as well as Sexual Politics of Meat) brought me right back around to the suffragettes. Alice Paul, the subject of my previous blog, was a dedicated vegetarian. She picked this up from the London ladies along with her propensities for other radical collective actions. So many of the British suffragettes of the Women’s Social & Political Union were vegetarian that they ran their own veggie hostels so they’d have places to rest and to dine the way they wanted when they were on a lecture tour or recovering between stints in prison.
Vegetarianism wasn’t just a frivolous fad for these women. It was part of the beliefs that informed all their actions. A great and very detailed research project on this topic is, at the time I write this, available in full online. This is, “The awakened instinct: vegetarianism and the women’s suffrage movement in Britain” by Leah Leneman.
As documented by Leneman, the suffrage activists advocated for vegetarian food when they weren’t hunger-striking. They even did this when they were in jail. Maude Joachim, after doing a stint in Holloway in 1907, recorded this fact in her memoirs, saying:
“Dinner is supplied in two tins. In the deeper one lurks two potatoes in their skins; in the shallower, are an egg, and some cauliflower or other vegetable. Many of us are always vegetarians, and acting on expert advice, others are so [for a time], for the meat supplied is so generally disliked.”
In her 1914 memoir “Prisons and Prisoners,” staunch vegetarian Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton recalled watching stockmen abuse a sheep on its way to slaughter. In that moment, watching an innocent creature being brutalized by those with power for no reason other than cruelty, she made a connection we would now label as one of “intersectionality.” She wrote:
“[The incident] seemed to reveal to me for the first time the position of women
throughout the world. I realised how often women are held in contempt
as beings outside the pale of human dignity, excluded or confined,
laughed at and insulted because of conditions in themselves for which
they are not responsible, but which are due to fundamental injustices
with regard to them, and to the mistakes of a civilisation in the shaping
of which they have had no free share.”
Those who were ethics-motivated vegetarians experienced even more horror from force-feeding because the food being forced was invariably derived from animals. Lady Lytton recounted that she was force-fed violently, at least eight times. Besides giving vivid details about the pain of the tools they used to shove tubes in her nose or sometimes mouth (past her bridgework, which cut into her gums), she “had the strongest objection to it of a vegetarian kind, and I begged [the doctor] not to give it to me again. . . It was only when I was sick that I knew what were the ingredients put down my body.” (Cited by Leneman and derived from Lytton’s Prisons and Prisoners).
A tough lady by any standard, Lytton was more upset by the use of animal products in her feeding than the permanently debilitating pain. This, even though she knew at the time that she had a heart condition and could easily have died. She did rather casually recount having “double pneumonia and pleurisy” due to the feedings, but she recovered to write her memoirs and eat many more vegetarian meals.
Lytton’s experiences showcase two of the core elements of food agency. In prison she lost her choice over whether she ate and she lost her choice over what she ate and why (for her ethical beliefs). Sometimes seeing the absence of choice helps us to see its importance.
How does all of this (as I forewarned) cerebral and experiential meandering tie together, if it does?
For one thing, I hope we can all embrace our own food agency in an empowering and perhaps even joyous way. It occurs to me that:
If we are able to purchase foods we prefer, that’s a win. If we are free to make our own ethical choices about diet, that’s a win. If we can find peace with our bodies and eat to care for ourselves instead of make war with our forms, that’s a win. If we have the added bonus of having supporting community to back up any or all of those choices, we are very blessed.
I hope you find that at least some of these blessings apply to you.
I suppose, as I watch the world shift and change around the animal-agriculture implicated pandemic of COVID-19 and the fires of unrest due to police racism in my own country, I am also looking to all my power-sources past and present for the lessons of agency.
As we put our society back together (micro and macro), we will surely have opportunities as well as barriers. When putting our food infrastructure back together post-pandemic, we could take the opportunity to look at what types of large-scale farming we do with an eye toward food equality and environmental sustainability. A well-fed world is a great resource site for this work.
When addressing the terrible pain beneath civil unrest, we could use the intersectionality of social justice movements to try and heal inequities related to gender, race, and even species. Speaking of intersectionality, VINE animal sanctuary in Vermont has a great resource page on the topic. Focusing in on race in particuar, Dr. A. Breeze Harper does the work on her website and with her book, Sistah Vegan. The resources are there for us if we decide to take them up.
Beyond that, I don’t have an easy answer. I can’t even tell you whether I’d bother with the tofurky divan. Not bad but lots of work. What I do think we should all do is nourish ourselves and try to nourish each other. That’s always worth the effort. Right?
At this point in my life, I am mostly an interior darkling. In my busy life, the idea of spending a lot of time on any type of visual aesthetic is completely foreign to me. Yet, in my heart, I will always be what may most closely be classed as a variety of Romantigoth. If only I had known that there were others like me when this tendency was at its peak (my adolescence)!
Poetry, Music, Art, Darkness, Spirituality, Beauty, Creativity…yeah. When I was in high school I went through a fervent Romantigoth period, wearing vintage Victorian clothes, bustles, hoops, authentic granny boots, and the like. I shopped at antique stores and flea markets the way my classmates did at the mall. I begged my mother to help me make vintage dresses and bustles, from patterns. I had a collection of riding hats. I repeat…riding hats. Of course, this was before the internet, so I didn’t know I was a Romantigoth. I intuitively went that direction on my own. Painfully socially awkward, I spent my time alone, likely reading a Bronte novel and ignoring the other kids.
As a child of domestic violence and sexual abuse, never making the normal types of friendships, I had always been bullied. By high school, I saw most of my peers more as hostile forms of alien life, so my look was probably as much a buffer to keep them at a distance as anything. Again, probably due to my context, I longed desperately to exist in another time and place. I fervently believed that, in that “simpler time,” everything would be okay and I would fit in. I don’t mean to imply that these are the motivations of others with Gothic leanings, but merely mine.
The Romantigoth part of me is now just a deeply inherent, yet not overwhelming, aspect of my identity. Once dressed to the nines in period clothes, I now but rarely even wear a skirt! But as you can see, my love of the culture is very real.
One of the hallmarks of a Romantigoth is love of poetry. Mind you, I enjoy a deliberately “bad,” playful verse as much as I do the classics. But today I want to highlight the veg leanings of some of the old masters.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was a philosopher, a “radical,” and an environmental activist before he discovered vegetarianism in 1813. One of his most ardent biographers was Henry S Salt, who was also a prolific author on vegetarianism, animal rights, and other types of social reform. A website on Salt that references his work on Shelley is here.
