The Compassionate Contrarians The Compassionate Contrarians A history of vegetarians in Aotearoa New Zealand Catherine Amey Anti-Copyright 2014 May not be reproduced for the purposes of profit. Published by Rebel Press P.O. Box 9263 Marion Square 6141 Te Whanganui a Tara (Wellington) Aotearoa (New Zealand) [email protected] www.rebelpress.org.nz National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Amey, Catherine. The compassionate contrarians: a history of vegetarians in Aotearoa New Zealand / Catherine Amey. ISBN 978-0-473-27440-5 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-0-473-27441-2 (PDF) 1. Vegetarians—New Zealand—History. 2. Animal rights activists—New Zealand—History. 3. Political activists—New Zealand— History. I. Title. 613.2620922093—dc 23 Cover design: Kate Logan Bound with a hatred for the State infused into every page Set in 10.5pt Minion Pro. Titles in Futura Std Heavy 18pt Contents Foreword i Introduction 1 1. A fig for the vegetarians! 5 2. Perils of the flesh: 31 Seventh Day Adventists and pure foods 3. Is meat-eating a necessity? 51 women’s rights, temperance, and vegetarianism 4. The kinship of all living beings: 75 peace, vegetarianism and animal rights 5. Spuds, parsnips, and swedes: 99 vegetarian conscientious objectors in detention, from the Second World War to the Korean War 6. ‘Glorious is the crusade for humaneness’: 121 theosophy, vegetarianism and animal rights 7. Flavours and recipes from many traditions 143 8. Diet and the revolution: 169 vegetarianism in the counterculture 1960s—1980s 9. Chickens, pigs, cows, and the planet 193 1980s—2000s Looking backwards, looking forward 211 Endnotes 217 Index 267 Foreword The rat was white and very clean, with a sensitive, twitching nose and a gentle expression. I looked at her in the cage, and she looked at me. In- stantly I realised that it was quite wrong to kill her simply so that I could grind up her liver and measure the levels of her liver enzymes—an ex- periment that had been performed by thousands of biochemistry students before me on thousands of rats. Sadly for this particular rat, a tutor was standing right next to me. He pulled the rat out of the cage, twisted her neck, and handed her warm body to me. He looked at me sympathetically. ‘I don’t like this either,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m switching to botany.’ There I was with the dead rat and a scalpel. Eventually I cut a gulf into her limp stomach, exposing the miniature, human-like organs packed into her warm belly. She smelled of fresh butcher’s mince. I felt nauseated and guilty. Not long afterwards, I read Peter Singer’sAnimal Liberation, and decided not to kill any more rats, and also to stop eating meat. Laboratory experiments and satisfying my taste buds both seemed trivial and inade- quate reasons to take away a life. At the time, I knew few other vegetarians. I joined the New Zealand Anti-Vivisection Society and marched through the Wellington streets to protest against animal experiments. I was too timid to become actively involved, however. Later, while I was working for an environmental group at Wellington’s Peace and Environment Centre in Cuba Street, I gradually realised there were lots of other veggies and vegans around—in Peace Movement Aotearoa, the Wellington Rainforest Action Group, the anarchist Committee for the Establishment of Civilisa- ii The Compassionate Contrarians tion, Save Animals from Exploitation, Wellington Animal Action and the Vegetarian Society. I became involved in animal rights, and joined the an- archa-feminist Katipo Collective, which included many vegans. Over time I began to wonder about the history of vegetarianism and animal rights in this country. I had a vague idea of hippies in the 1960s eating lentils and not much else. In 2001 I went to an animal rights conference and met Mar- garet Jones, then in her seventies, and an inspiringly energetic anti-vivi- sectionist and Marxist. She had been campaigning against animal experi- ments since the 1930s, and remembered the vegetarian socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw staying at her house when she was a teenager. Quite a long time later I read David Grant’s Out in the Cold, a history of consci- entious objectors during the Second World War. Grant described Norman Bell, a leader of the No More War Movement in Christchurch: A scholar with first-class honours degrees from Canterbury, London, and Cambridge Universities, Bell had been barred from teaching and standing as a Labour candidate in the 1919 election because of his stand against the First World War. He lived, often precariously, as an outside examination tutor for Canterbury University students, and as a private teacher of Esperanto, German, Greek, Hebrew, and Maori. In many ways an otherworldly figure and a man before his time, his refusal to wear leather shoes as a protest against the killing of animals for food, was more than a little strange to observers in a conformist 1930s society.1 And so this book began. I would like to thank more people than I could possibly mention here. I’m particularly grateful to Christine Dann, for long-term support, advice, and the correction of many errors and to Rebel Press for bringing this project to fruition. Many thanks are also due to Ja- nine McVeigh, and the 2009 Northland Polytechnic class, Ryan Bodman, Nicky Hager, Mary Murray, Lorraine Weston-Webb, Eric Doornekamp, Kevin Hague, Ann M., Hans Kriek, Ranjna Patel, Valerie Morse, Megan Seawright, Lyn Spencer, Ross Gardiner, Tanya Chebotarev, Sian Robin- son, Michael Morris, Tanya Tintner, Peter McLuskie, Debra Schulze, Katy Brown, Eric Wolff, Margaret Jones, the research librarians at the National Library of New Zealand and many others. Words can’t express how grate- ful I am to Mark Dunick for his support and love. Introduction The compassionate contrarians The miseries…[in the world] do not come to us by chance, but by a system of utterly false relations of people to one another and towards the animal creation. —Jessie Mackay1 On a rainy Friday evening in July 1885, an unnamed country gentleman ventured through the mud to a community concert at the Stratford Town Hall. Arriving slightly late, he walked into the hall to hear a singer praising sauerkraut over roast beef and plum pudding. The mere suggestion that vegetables could be preferred to meat was offensive, and he sat down to write a piece for the Taranaki Herald, complaining: ‘I should like to ask this gentleman if he considers it the part of a patriot to take advantage of a public platform, with the eyes of the world upon him, to disseminate the pernicious doctrine of vegetarianism? What is to become of Taranaki if beef goes out of fashion?’2 For a hundred and fifty years New Zealand’s economy has largely -de pended on the bodies and infant milk of animals.3 Historian James Belich characterises meat in colonial society as ‘the essence of food, representing the rest…it symbolised human domination of nature, and was a marker of prosperity and status.’4 The ‘mystique’ of grassland farming is part of our national identity, shaping our lives, our diets and the land around us.5 2 The Compassionate Contrarians Nineteenth century European colonists settled in rural areas, clearing the forests to create pastures for sheep and cattle.6 With so much food on the hoof around them, they turned to a diet laden with meat, alcohol, and bread.7 Early New Zealand was ‘a place of plain home cooking, heavy on meat dishes and sweetened by cakes, with little time for “foreign muck.”’8 Yet there have long been idealists who disagreed with the meat-eating majority. Even though New Zealand kills millions of animals every year, there is also a significant history of concern for animal suffering—the first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was formed in Canter- bury in 1872.9 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, ethical vegetar- ians have drawn attention to the contradiction between petting animals, and chewing on them. Their arguments challenge us at a very basic level, questioning what we put on our plates, and why. Just as conscientious objectors (some of whom did not eat meat) refused to participate in the wars of the twentieth century, ethical vegetarians refuse to be complicit in the slaughter of millions of animals. They remind us that the tidy, plastic- wrapped packets of flesh that we buy from the supermarket were once warm with life, and they point out that different and perhaps more com- passionate choices are available to us. Vegetarianism has a long history in Aotearoa, dating back to early Māori communities. For example, according to the oral literature of Ngāti Awa in the Eastern Bay of Plenty Region, the ancestor Toi-kai-rākau (Toi the wood-eater) ate vegetable foods.10 In the nineteenth century, early Brit- ish colonists explored meatless diets. Mary Richmond arrived in Taranaki from England in the 1850s, joining her husband’s family in a small farm- ing community, which raised pigs and cows for meat and milk. Mary be- lieved that ‘no apparent law of the universe or design of the creator can make it right to destroy life.’11 Several decades later, young Harold Williams stopped eating meat in imitation of Tolstoy. The idealistic Christchurch teenager argued that ‘it is wrong to kill animals for food, not only on the 12 animal’s account but also on the slaughterer’s.’ The late nineteenth century was a time of upheaval, of questioning the status quo, of experimenting with natural diets and imagining uto- pias.13 The early vegetarians in this book were courageous and unconven- tional, cherishing ideals that were heroic and occasionally eccentric.