Ethical Eating

Challenging esh eating, according to Adams, required challenging what one feminist historian has referred to as meat-and-potatoes history: that is, a malecentered, Cartesian historiography that privileges the political and public over the domestic and private, as well as the mindThe Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating Howard WilliamsIntroduction by Carol J. AdamsChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003xxxiii + 396 pp. $24.95 (paper)The Pornography of Meat Carol J. AdamsNew York and London: Continuum, 2003192 pp. $24.95 (cloth)In april 1891, shortly upon returning to Russia after a stay in England, where he had become acquainted with the progressive work being done by the Humanitarian League, Vladimir Grigorievich Chertkov sent Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoyhis closest friend, soul mate, and business partner in the Tolstoyan publishing enterprise, Posrednik Pressa copy of The Ethics of Diet (1883) by the British vegetarian Howard Williams. [...]The Pornography of Meat, as we learn in the epilogue (p.183), is based upon (and was transformed from) a popular slide show that Adams has been presenting on college campuses across the country since 1995. The slides in that traveling slide show, we are told on page 182, were themselves made from images that originally appeared in two of Adamss earlier books, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990) and Neither Man nor Beast (1994).