History remembers Percy Bysshe Shelley as a fiery champion of political liberty and a master of Romantic verse. Yet his most radical crusade took place at the dinner table rather than on the steps of parliament or in the pages of political tracts. In the early nineteenth century, Shelley was among the most militant vegetarians in Britain, devoting his intellect and his poetry to a dietary revolution. To Shelley, the consumption of animal flesh was the single greatest disaster in human history, the literal source of all physical disease and moral corruption. He believed that the ancient stories of humanity falling from grace represented medical histories of a species that had abandoned its natural diet, rather than abstract spiritual allegories.
In his influential 1813 essay, A Vindication of Natural Diet, Shelley took aim at the founding myths of Western civilization. He began with Prometheus, the titan who famously stole fire from the gods to aid humanity. While classical tradition celebrated Prometheus as a heroic benefactor, Shelley saw his gift of fire as a curse. Fire enabled human beings to apply heat to culinary purposes, allowing them to cook and consume animal flesh. Before this culinary innovation, humans lived in peaceful harmony with nature, eating only fruits and grains. Once they began to roast meat, they introduced violence and decay into their bodies. Shelley argued that the vulture eternally tearing at the liver of Prometheus was actually a chilling metaphor for the painful diseases, from gout to cancer, that consumed the internal organs of meat-eating humans.
Shelley applied this same striking logic to the biblical narrative of Genesis. In his view, the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was a dietary metaphor. Adam and Eve brought death into the world through the slaughter of animals and the consumption of meat rather than the simple act of eating an apple. By abandoning their natural herbivorous diet, they initiated the Fall of humanity, triggering a cascade of crime, war, and physical deterioration. For Shelley, the transition to carnism was a physical and spiritual poison that severed the bond of sympathy between humans and other living things.
His arguments were grounded in the scientific and physiological debates of his era. Working with contemporary medical advocates, Shelley pointed out that the human body bears no resemblance to carnivorous predators. Humans have no sharp talons to tear flesh, no pointed fangs, and no highly acidic digestive tracts designed to process raw meat. To make animal flesh palatable, humans must first soften, disguise, and season it through cooking. This biological mismatch convinced Shelley that humanity is naturally frugivorous. He maintained that a return to a plant-based diet of grains, vegetables, and fruits could eradicate nearly all human disease, except for hereditary ailments passed down from generations of meat-eating ancestors.
This passionate dietary philosophy did more than fill his essays. It shaped his household and inspired his poetry. In his radical poem Queen Mab, Shelley painted a vivid picture of a utopian future where the earth is no longer a slaughterhouse and humans no longer devour the mangled flesh of lambs. His wife, Mary Shelley, lived alongside this intense activism, weaving her husband’s ideas directly into her writing. In her landmark novel Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein acts as a modern Prometheus, suffering physical and moral decay as he robs graves and slaughterhouses to animate his creation. Conversely, the creature he creates begins life as a peaceful vegetarian. Seeking refuge in the wilderness, the creature subsists on acorns and berries, explicitly rejecting the violent, cooked diet of human society and pleading for a peaceful life of natural innocence.
Ultimately, Percy Shelley saw the dinner plate as the battlefield for the soul of humanity. He challenged his readers to recognize that the violence we inflict on other species inevitably breeds violence among ourselves. By reimagining the theft of fire as a culinary tragedy, he urged the world to abandon the cooking hearths of carnism and return to the gentle, bloodless bounty of the earth.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Vegetarianism and Science Fiction
- Subtitle: A History of Utopian Animal Ethics
- Author: Joshua Bulleid
- Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (Imprint of Springer Nature Switzerland AG)
- Publication Year: 2023
- Edition: 1st Edition
- ISBN: 978-3-031-38346-5 (Hardcover); 978-3-031-38347-2 (eBook)
- Series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (Series Editors: Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, John Miller)
- Historical Period Covered: Early 19th Century (Romanticism) to the First Decades of the 21st Century (with classical/antiquity background)
- Main Subject Areas: Literary Criticism, Science Fiction and Utopian Studies, Critical Animal Studies, Vegan Studies, Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities
(Chapter 2, p. 33)