Diet as the basis of a collective identity: an old trick
Ancient Judaism
The incorporation of dietary restrictions within a system of domination is not anything new. Decades have passed since archaeologically-based criticism of the Bible refuted the argument that the Torah's provisions regarding the treatment of food were based on maximizing health rationality.
What led the theocratic monarchy to lean on the inhabitants of the Judean highlands and to define what is right, what is kosher, on the basis of local culture as a way of avoiding the influence of the coastal cities, is apparently a historical accident. Diet - itself a product of economic and environmental conditions - was one of the main differentiating characteristics of this particular group. The priests of Jerusalem would then define more than 300 rules that they would then codify in the Torah, thus establishing a veritable dietary policy.
By turning local dietary particularities into religious canon, the priestly caste have thus created two mechanisms of social control that are particularly important for the preservation and development of their power. Namely, a collective identity... and a system of taxation.
Identity was the real innovation, an us reaffirmed on a daily basis without the need for particular doctrinal vigilance. This would serve on the one hand for the Jerusalemite monarchy to maintain control over its subjects during periods when it suffered territorial losses or during exiles, and on the other as a way of measuring the territorial expansion of ideological power.
The theocracy of the Temple was thus equipped with a tool to absorb and ideologically homogenize populations. This appears in passing in the Christian Gospels when it shows how the term ‘Nazarene’ at the time cast a shadow of doubt on the authenticity of the Judaism of the Galileans.
The underlying battle, which may seem anecdotal but was not at all so in its economic and political repercussions, was a consequence of Deuteronomy's prohibition of mixing meat and milk (you shall not eat the calf in its mother's milk). The typical dish of the Galileans, however, combined chicken and milk.
Putting an end to this gastronomic practice, which like any such custom implied a certain productive structure, became the main political objective of the theocratic power in the region until the priestly elites disappeared with the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in the year 70.
No identity created from power is innocent. Basing a sense of belonging to the people on a recognisable external sign which at the same time is rooted in the productive structure, gave the temple nobility the opportunity to organize around food a general system of exactions, more or less voluntary according to the time and the political context.
Religious control of identity through diet would later turn into priestly control over slaughter and sacrifice. And this control over protein became the main source of income for the theocratic nobility.
Medieval Identity and Diet
With the demise of slavery and the rise of feudalism, the competition between Judaism, Islam and Christianity had made an impact on the dietary policy of the ruling classes. The three great ideological apparatuses, converging and clashing on the Iberian peninsula, the Levantine Mediterranean coast and southern Italy, would come to develop competing and conflicting dietary policies and ideologies.
As the system of urban segregation deepened and spread from the 12th century onwards, Christians on the Iberian peninsula would turn pork, a food whose consumption is forbidden under Islam and Judaism, into their rallying cry. The Christians had turned pork into a differentiating symbol to the point where they ended up generating a whole gastronomy of confrontation from the 14th century onwards, in which an exaggerated use of pork derivatives became a profession of faith. This is the period where Duelos y quebrantos came about, that is, the dish that Cervantes decided that Don Quixote should eat in the novel in order to demonstrate his old Christianity.
Each of the three apparatuses would generate their own innovations in dietetic policy which would later be incorporated into the ideological-political arsenal of the medieval world.
Medieval Judaism, whose intellectual center was in Al Andalus, would establish for the first time a rationalist justification for prohibitions and dietary policy.
The most important and innovative: the need to maintain health. In his Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides states:
Everything that the Torah forbids us to eat is also harmful to our bodies.
For the Cordovan scholar, the health of the social body of the Jewish quarters of the world and the physical health of Jewish individuals converge, not surprisingly, in the observance of the Torah.
Thus begin the attempts to rationalize not only religious dogmatics, but also and primarily the association between the political establishment of food restrictions and public health.
The Muslim side was no less concerned with dietary control. With the Almohad and Almoravid invasions, Islamization policies reappeared. But if traditionally they had depended on the Jizya, the religious tax, and with it, access to economic opportunities, under the new fundamentalist rulers, dietary policy would take center stage.
On at least two occasions, halal would be made compulsory, pig farming would be banned and - for a short period of time - the cultivation of vines would be prohibited. The battle against the new dietary policy would be fiercely fought by Christian Mozarabic Christians - who would bring back wine under the excuse of liturgy - and Jewish rabbis, who would keep slaughtering, especially poultry, behind closed doors, hence its prominence in Sephardic gastronomy.
If we take a look at Christian Europe, abstinence and fasting mark the rhythm of the ‘medieval man’, as Le Goff asserts, reducing medieval Europe to Christendom and placing the center of the relationship between the body and feudal ideology in Lent and its opposite, carnival. This is important, because it points out to us that the logic of Christian dietary politics is not prohibition, but restriction and therefore scarcity. And where there is scarcity, a lucrative market inevitably arises as soon as the economy is commodified and monetarized, which is precisely the economic phenomenon that redefined Christian Europe from the end of the 11th century onwards.
Thus, with the Crusades, the bulls and indulgences appeared which, in exchange for alms and donations, allowed food and access to animal proteins in the context of the war against Muslim armies. This type of rule, which became generalized from the 13th century onwards with the Bull of the Holy Crusade, brings an important novelty: it is not limited to armies.
It is not just a question of getting soldiers to eat on the eve of battle. It was about financing the kings who took part in the Levantine crusades and the Iberian reconquest. They have a distributive function: the alms collected by the Pope are given - for the most part - to the Christian princes. So the bulls are mainly addressed to the ruling classes who do not go to battle. Eating meat during Lent and other feasts became a sign of nobility... and soon of the aspirations to merge with it of a new rising class: the commercial bourgeoisie.
For the first time in Europe, it was dietary policy that gave the social classes an external identity. A regime of class-based dietary restrictions was thus established in practice... which, in the absence of crusading armies, became a central element in the regular financing of the ecclesiastical apparatus. This is why indulgences and bulls were later at the origin and center of the Lutheran critique of the Papacy and the dominant theology.
A diet based on capitalist morality
When capitalist relations began to spread in eighteenth-century Britain, the egalitarian rigorism of the first ideological-religious manifestations of the bourgeoisie gave way to a true moral revolution.
Smith, Bentham and Malthus, before being economists, were moral theorists. In fact, their morality was the first theorization of what constitutes optimal morality under the system in which we live. Let's take a look.
The English moral revolution
The United Kingdom of the late 18th century was not the most propitious terrain for industrial enterprise. Both the landed and merchant aristocracy and the peasants whose communitarian morality had not yet been shattered by the most wretched poverty constituted an obstacle to the industrial bourgeoisie and the liberal luminaries.
At the end of the century, the Elizabethan ‘Poor Laws’ were still in force, which imposed forced labor, but also provided food and basic support for the great masses of poor people driven out of the countryside by the legal destruction of communal property and the resulting enclosures of communal land and pastures.
Smith, the Invisible Hand and Divine Will
It is no coincidence that Adam Smith, a Scottish professor of moral philosophy, published his ‘Wealth of Nations’ in 1776, only three years after the ‘Inclosure Act’ finally put an end to the commons in the kingdom.
Smith, sees the Newtonian law of gravity as a manifestation of God's law which, by demonstrating universal love between bodies, would demonstrate that the natural order and Christian theology point towards the same place. His first attempt to bring the Newtonian logic of spontaneous equilibria to the social field, the ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ (1759), fails to go beyond a merely theoretical model. So he takes a new path: instead of trying to show that the spontaneous - and therefore divine - order tends towards achieving the happiness of everyone, he focuses on something more pedestrian: well-being and wealth.
Basing his argument on Newton's gravitational model, Smith explained that the social result of the generalized free exchange of goods is a social optimum which, thanks to an invisible hand which in reality is none other than the divine law of love, maximizes welfare and ensures human progress.
Contradictory? Not at all. The destruction of the commons turned the labor of the peasants who arrived hungry and destitute to the cities into a commodity, the only exchangeable commodity on the market that they possess. The point was to show that this extension of mercantile exchange was not what it seemed at first sight - a massive pauperization and an outbreak of inequality - but rather that it expressed an underlying divine will which, left to its free development, would lead to a better social outcome.
Malthus' theodicy
The day-to-day events seemed not to agree with Smith. There were regular revolts against the price of bread and, from 1789 onwards, the situation in France would cause increasing concern among the British elites. But far from reconsidering their actions, the gentrified aristocracy ruling Britain decided to accelerate the juggernaut they had set in motion.
Following in Adam Smith's footsteps and putting the finishing touches to Smithian theodicy, Thomas Malthus constructs a new moral order that breaks with all precedent. While Smith points out that laissez faire free trade leads to the best of results thanks to accumulation, Malthus orders to put into operation what he himself calls the social ‘machine’ by cutting aid and forcing the poor to work in order to survive. According to him, life is activity, and this activity can only be guaranteed through the threat of the evil of scarcity.
All of Malthus' statistical work on the need to control population, whose famous ratios he never demonstrates, serves as a justification for the moral argument that occupies the last two chapters of his most famous treatise.
Malthus began his theodicy with a critical analysis of human nature. As in Aristotle's theory of motion, the natural state of humanity was rest. Men were “inert, sluggish, and averse from labour;” it was movement that needed explaining. Some impetus was required “to awaken inert, chaotic matter, into spirit; to sublimate the dust of earth into soul; to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay.” This impetus was the physical and moral evils occasioned by the law of population. To avoid pain, men awakened themselves into activity.
To avoid evil, and to pursue good, seems to be the great duty and business of man; and this world appears to be peculiarly calculated to afford opportunity of the most unremitted exertion of this kind: and it is by this exertion, by these stimulants, that mind is formed.
Men were by nature passive; the discomforts of life prompted motion. Evil was the Prime Mover of the human realm. It was consequently the force behind civilization. Malthus confronted the potentially embarrassing problem of evil by transforming it into a theory of incentive. At the lowest level, the “cravings of hunger, or the inchings of cold” obliged men to seek food and form a society based on ultivation. At the highest level, “some of the noblest exertions of the human mind have been set in motion by the necessity of satisfying the wants of the body.”
DL LeMahieu, «Malthus and the Theology of Scarcity»
To the dismay of some of his contemporaries - and the delight of others - Malthus not only tolerates but welcomes evil and scarcity as creative forces.
Scarcity, as a guarantee of hunger and torment for the workers, must be artificially maintained in order to ensure the functioning of the great machine of accumulation: capitalism.
Malthus would thus succeed in having the extensions of aid to the poor rejected and would become a figure of his time, influencing politicians and training officials who would apply his principles on population control to the British colonies. The morals of Malthus and Bentham would underpin all discussions of the Poor Laws and the formation of the new independent proletariat “free to sell its labor power”:
The Poor Law Report of 1834, which summarized the findings of the Royal Commission, was replete with Malthusian language:
We have seen that one of the objects attempted by the present administration of the Poor Laws is, to repeal pro tanto that law of nature by which the effects of each man's improvidence or misconduct are borne by himself and his family. The effect of that attempt has been to repeal pro tanto the law by which each man and his family enjoy the benefit of his own prudence and virtue.
One of the main objectives of the new regime, the report claimed, was “the diminution of unpredictable and spoiled marriages; thus arresting the increase of population.” By abolishing subsidies to able-bodied men and their families, the New Poor Law, Dean asserts, revealed its Malthusian aim of “making the...independent laborer solely responsible for the welfare of his wife and children.”.
James P. Huzel, «The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth Century England»
Bentham: Vegetarianism and The Animalization of Workers
While Malthus characterized the hunger and misery of the workers as beneficial elements of natural law, explaining that their function was to serve as necessary motors of the great social machine of accumulation, Bentham on the other hand, taking from Helvetius a denaturalized version of Epicurean morality, united the parts by putting forward what would come to be the nucleus of the commodity religion.
"How can capitalism not be moral?" he says: all it takes is to ensure individual freedom to exchange commodities and equality will surge on its own. In fact, the deepest equality lives in every exchange, since no one would freely exchange something for something else which for him has less utility. Overall outcome: the more exchanges, the more complete, fluid and intense the circulation... the greater the social welfare thanks to providence acting as an invisible hand!!
That there exists a class of people who can only sell a very particular commodity, labor power, and therefore know no other freedom than to sell it or perish, is diluted in the magma of individualities of circulation and accumulation. For Bentham's universal individualistic morality they are only sentient beings, capable of suffering and enjoying, who act in the market calculating at all times how to increase their total utility.
Bentham is aware that in the ideological operation that is culminating both Malthus, as well as he, is reducing workers to the level of subhumanity attributed by capitalist-slavers to slaves, almost to the level of beasts of burden. So he decided to add a libertarian flair by equating labor condition, blackness and animality and demanding mercantile freedom for all.
The day may come when the non-human part of the animal creation will acquire the rights that never could have been withheld from them except by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the whims of a tormentor.
Perhaps it will some day be recognised that the number of legs, the hairiness of the skin, or the possession of a tail are equally insufficient reasons for abandoning to the same fate a creature that can feel? What else could be used to draw the line? Is it the faculty of reason or the possession of language? But a full-grown horse or dog is incomparably more rational and conversable than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. Even if that were not so, what difference would that make? The question is not Can they reason? or Can they talk? but Can they suffer?
Why should the law deny its protection to any sentient being? .... The time will come when mankind will spread its mantle over everything that breathes.
Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Veganism and vegetarianism: a Malthusian dietary policy under the Crisis of Civilization incubated by Puritanism.
Puritans embrace Bentham
In the quote, where classism and the most savage racism are evident, the radical Anglo-Saxon petty bourgeoisie would locate the roots of animalism and the moral foundation of a new dietary policy: vegetarianism.
The British bourgeoisie, much more practical, had long ago renounced any dietary policy that could curb the globalization of the market and capitalism. But in Great Britain the bourgeois revolution had originally taken the form of religious dissidence, and both there and in the United States the main expressions of democratic radicalism were born in continuity with different expressions of Protestant Puritanism.
Thus, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Anglo intellectual petty bourgeoisie, which maintained the umbilical cord with Puritanism, would increasingly associate itself with the cynical universalism of Bentham's sentient beings in search, among other things, of a food morality.
It is not by chance that the first “vegetarian societies” arose in the USA (1844) and Great Britain (1847) by the hand of Presbyterian pastors. Adam Smith is not the only direct product of that context. The connection between Bentham himself and Scottish post-Calvinism is becoming increasingly clear.
In the USA, the founder of modern vegetarianism was none other than the Reverend Sylvester Graham, inventor of “Graham crackers” and founder of the now multinational Nabisco, the Oreo cookie company. Graham promoted the umpteenth reform of manners based on temperance and chastity... but he also added a novel triad: hygiene, temperance and vegetarianism.
Graham is in fact one of the first “hygienists”, that tendency of the advanced bourgeoisie of the second half of the 19th century who began to consider that by transforming urban planning, hygiene and diet from political power, the city could become that “ascending” and virtuous island of the Baroque messianic myth that Swift parodied in Gulliver's Travels.
From then on, with the Victorian boom of spiritualism that would give way to theosophists and ‘Western gurus’ and Tolstoy's mystical pacifism, the hygienist dream would come to increasingly take on neo-ruralist overtones and generate a thousand and one ‘returns to Nature’. Ecologism and vegetarianism would become the regular ingredients of puritan utopias.
And the fact is that veganism and vegetarianism are not diets, they constitute dietary policy. They are ideological practices with the same desire to homogenize and transform under a certain morality, and therefore under a certain social order, as kosher, halal or Lent.
The morality that underpins veganism and vegetarianism is clearly a capitalist one. But one wonders if, from a truly universalist and humane point of view, they are not as immoral as the Malthusianism that serves as their basis and with which they have been associated time and again in recent decades under the (voluntarily) confusing label of degrowth.
The ‘green’ offensive against meat and dairy products
The emissions case
One only has to take a look at the offer of audiovisual content of large platforms in order to find all kinds of sensationalist documentaries and reports against fishing, industrial livestock farming or dairy consumption. They all end up being linked to the discourse of the climate emergency and advocate for the universal adoption of the vegan-vegetarian diet. They are the agitprop of current dietary policy.
Coincidentally, the message coincides with the goal governments have set for themselves in order to revive agrarian accumulation: to forcibly change farming technologies, even at the cost of drastically reducing for the vast majority the consumption of quality proteins.
The propaganda of this dietary policy works. At least in the USA. There, for example, cow's milk consumption has decreased by 40 percent since 1975 and 20,000 dairy farms were closed in the last decade.
There is a boom in Vegan milk products despite the fact that they are harmful nutritionally speaking, many of them with less than 4% of their supposed main component and more sugar than what is nutritionally recommended. The few that manage to be a real nutritional alternative to real milk do so only partially and on the basis of additives and supplements whose elaboration, if they were to be scaled up to fully replace milk consumption, would make them prohibitively expensive. The same goes for the production of supposed alternatives to all sources of high quality protein.
According to Le Monde 68% of French people now believe that too much meat is consumed. 32% of those surveyed have reduced their consumption. Vegan propaganda has convinced at least 56% of them to do so. The same report acknowledges, however, that the impact of vegan, vegetarian and flexitarian diets is concentrated among the university-educated petite bourgeoisie. This segment of the middle class is the most sensitized to climate change. And the need to combat climate change is the first argument that the vegetarian and vegan proselytizing of today bases itself on, which in turn wants to present vegetarianism as the dietary policy necessary to facilitate the green transition.
The reality is that the promotion of a new, supposedly ‘low-emission’ dietary policy has nothing to do with methane emissions or their effect on the climate, but rather with the need to recapitalize agricultural production.
At the end of the day, if we take into account the fact that in order for Iberian ham to be considered truly Iberian, the pigs need to live in a plot with at least 1.25 hectares of dehesa, thus producing negative emissions. And although studies are lacking, other forms of extensive livestock farming are not very different.
Furthermore, in any case, would it not be more a question of eliminating industrial, transport and construction emissions, which account for almost 90% of the total and by compensating, by planting trees for example, those linked to agriculture and livestock farming while also improving animal feed and the conditions of intensive livestock farming?
The heath case
It is clear as day that one of the ways that people attempt to reinforce the vegetarianist discourse is by clumsily equating all meat with US industrial ultra-processed foods (another very Malthusian aberration) and they can thus draw the erroneous conclusion that regular consumption of red meat causes cancer. Which according to the WHO is purely and simply false: not only are there not enough and insufficiently specific studies, but even in those that seem to indicate this correlation for colorectal cancer, the actual correlation is so close to the studies' margin of error that “other explanations for the observations (technically termed chance, bias or confounding) cannot be ruled out”.
If there are indeed grounds to suspect that these studies are not reflecting anything other than what is claimed, it is partly because countries such as Argentina or Uruguay, which have had much higher beef consumption than Europeans or even Americans, do not show a higher prevalence of this particular type of cancer, whose distribution by country is in fact very uneven.
In reality, both the discourses on livestock emissions and those linking red meat and cancer are instrumental. If they were not, they would not be used in order to make invisible the nutritional needs of millions of children who are denied a diet that allows them to develop to their full potential.
Conclusions
No good can come from artificially creating scarcity, let alone from doing so with something as fundamental as the diet of an omnivorous species.
The old dietary policies of pre-industrial religions today continue to serve their original function in many places: to entrench clerical control by establishing dietary control as a way of demonstrating and gaining group membership and access to its institutions. The good news is that in most parts of the world - with notable exceptions such as India and not a few Muslim countries - such control is no longer universal.
Paradoxically, it is in the secularized world where dietary politics thrive. But, though many may not see it, vegetarianism and veganism are not solely and fundamentally individual choices or simple alternatives in the supermarket.
They are puritanical Malthusian ideologies. For this reason alone they are immoral for being anti-human, even if they cynically dress themselves up as sensitive. These are ideologies that are postulated as dietary policy and which, if imposed globally, would unnecessarily worsen the lives of millions of people, thus making them anti-human and therefore immoral.