A fire crackles in the hearth. The smell of roasting meat drifts through the room. For most of human history, this is the smell of civilization itself, of warmth and safety, of human ingenuity triumphant over raw nature.
Percy Bysshe Shelley would have recognized it as the smell of catastrophe.
In the radical intellectual circles of the early 1810s, a small and fiercely committed group of thinkers was developing a vision of human history that turned the standard story entirely on its head. For these Romantic vegetarians, the cooking fire marked the beginning of a very long fall rather than humanity’s crowning achievement. They believed the ancient Greeks had preserved the perfect myth to illuminate that catastrophe.
The Radical Circle
Through her father William Godwin’s home, the young Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley moved among some of the most unusual reformers of her age. There was John Frank Newton, author of *The Return to Nature; or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen*. There was the fiery antiquarian Joseph Ritson, who visited Paris in 1791 and styled himself “Citizen Ritson” in solidarity with the French Republic. There was publisher Sir Richard Phillips, who traced his own vegetarianism to a childhood encounter with the “barbarities of a London slaughter-house” that left him unable to eat meat again. And of course there was Percy Shelley himself, already the author of *A Vindication of Natural Diet* and the visionary vegetarian epic *Queen Mab*.
These were not mild health reformers quietly swapping recipes. As historian James Turner observed, “Radical politics and other unorthodox notions went hand-in-glove with their vegetarianism.” Historian Keith Thomas confirmed that in the 1790s, “vegetarianism had markedly radical overtones.” One clergyman, upbraiding a young man named Thomas Jefferson Hogg for adopting a vegetable diet, put the stakes with unintentional clarity. This new system of eating vegetables, he warned, was “a sort of indication that your determination was to deviate from all the old established ways of the world.”
He was right about that, at least.
The Romantic vegetarians believed that the question of what you put in your mouth was inseparable from the question of what kind of civilization you built around you. Joseph Ritson suggested that human slavery might be traced back to the practice of slaughtering animals for food. Percy Shelley argued that a vegetarian populace would never have “lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre.” In their view, meat eating marked humanity’s original moral corruption, from which every subsequent corruption of human society flowed.
A Different Prometheus
Most people know the Greek myth. Prometheus steals fire from the gods, gives it to humanity, and is chained to a rock as punishment, condemned to have his liver gnawed by an eagle each day, the organ regenerating every night so the torment never ends. The standard Romantic reading treated Prometheus as a hero, a rebel against divine tyranny who suffered for the sake of human progress.
The Romantic vegetarians had read their Pliny. In his *Natural History*, the Roman scholar had written plainly that “Prometheus first taught the use of animal food.” His Latin said *Primus bovem occidit Prometheus*, which translates as “Prometheus first killed the ox.” If fire and flesh-eating arrived together in human history, then the myth encoded something far more disturbing than a story about heroic rebellion against the gods.
Percy Shelley made the connection explicit. “Prometheus (who represents the human race),” he wrote, “effected some great change in the condition of his nature, and applied fire to culinary purposes; thus inventing an expedient for screening from his disgust the horrors of the shambles. From this moment his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease.”
Sit with that for a moment. The eagle consuming Prometheus’s liver becomes, in this reading, a biological consequence rather than an act of divine revenge. Fire made the slaughterhouse possible. The slaughterhouse made meat eating normal. Meat eating made humans sick. The eternal, regenerating torment follows as the natural result of a catastrophic choice humanity made for itself.
John Frank Newton pressed the same argument through a different ancient text. In The Return to Nature, he reread the Garden of Eden story as a parable about diet. The two trees in the Garden represented two kinds of available food, vegetable and animal. The penalty for eating from the wrong tree became, in his interpretation, premature, diseased death brought about by consuming the wrong foods rather than a mysterious supernatural curse. For Newton, Genesis and Greek mythology were, at their deepest level, telling the same story twice over.
The Architecture of Forgetting
Raw meat, Shelley and his circle argued, would be viscerally repellent to any creature whose natural appetites ran toward fruits, nuts, and berries. Blood, smell, texture: The body’s instinctive reactions would serve as a moral compass, pointing away from the act of killing and consuming animals. Cooking disabled that compass entirely.
Fire transformed a corpse into something palatable. Herbs, spices, and rich sauces completed the work. By the time a piece of slaughtered animal arrived at the table, fragrant and garnished, surrounded by the civilized warmth of a kitchen, every trace of what it had originally been had been deliberately obscured. The horror of the slaughterhouse, which stood at the origin of every such meal, had been rendered invisible by art and technique.
This is what scholars of food ethics have come to describe as the logic of the “absent referent.” The animal who was killed disappears from the language and experience of eating. The living lamb becomes, through the transformative alchemy of fire and seasoning, a dish. The connection between the creature and the cuisine is severed physically, linguistically, and psychologically. Seen through this lens, culinary sophistication becomes a sophisticated system of organized forgetting.
The Romantic vegetarians held up Ovid’s Golden Age as the counter-image. In *Metamorphoses*, Ovid describes a humanity “content with food which nature freely bred,” living on wildings and strawberries, on cornels and brambleberries, on “falling acorns” that “furnished out a feast.” No transformation, no disguise. The food was what it appeared to be, and the eater knew exactly what they were consuming. There was no gap between the thing on the plate and the diner’s awareness of its origins.
This contrast runs directly through Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein*, a novel saturated in the vegetarian thinking of her circle. When the Creature announces its dietary principles to Victor Frankenstein, it speaks in precisely these terms. “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.” The echo of Ovid is deliberate. When the Creature encounters a fire left by wandering beggars and discovers roasted offal among the embers, it tastes the scraps, notes that they are more “savoury” than raw berries, and then makes a quietly remarkable decision. It uses the fire to improve its vegetable food, cooking nuts and roots, and leaves the meat behind entirely. Prometheus’s gift is received and its original purpose flatly refused.
What the Fire Still Hides
The Romantic vegetarians argued that humanity had constructed an elaborate architecture of culinary transformation to avoid a moral confrontation. Each layer added to that architecture, each application of fire and spice and artful presentation, placed more distance between the act of killing and its consequences.
That critique has not aged. The clean fluorescent aisles of supermarkets, the pastoral imagery on food packaging, the careful language of “humanely raised” and “ethically sourced” are, in their own way, extensions of the same project that Promethean fire began. They are, in Shelley’s own phrase, expedients for screening from our disgust the horrors of the shambles.
Strip away those layers, and the question the Romantic vegetarians posed becomes unavoidable. The meal ceases to be an anonymous object and becomes the remains of a living creature. Preparation gives way to a prior question: what had to happen before cooking, seasoning, and presentation could begin?
Shelley and Newton would have recognized our world instantly. The techniques of disguise have grown more refined and the architecture of forgetting has become a global industry. But the fire at the center of it all is the same one Prometheus lit. And it burns, as it always has, to make the unacceptable look like dinner.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: The Sexual Politics of Meat
- Subtitle: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
- Author: Carol J. Adams
- Publisher: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. (New York & London)
- Publication Year: 2010 (Twentieth Anniversary Edition; original edition published in 1990)
- Edition: 20th Anniversary Edition
- ISBN: 978-1-4411-7328-7
- Historical Period Covered: Late 18th century (the 1790s) to the early 21st century, with primary emphasis on the Victorian era, the World War I period, and the late-20th-century feminist/environmentalist movements.
- Main Subject Areas: Feminist Theory, Animal Defense/Rights Theory, Critical Theory, Ecofeminism, Food Studies, Cultural and Literary Studies, Sociology of Oppression.
The Promethean Fire: Why Romantic Vegetarians Saw Cooking as a Catastrophe (Supporting Chapter: 6; Pages: 154–155).