The Ethics of Diet

Howard Williams (1837–1931) was an English writer and humanitarian. He adopted vegetarianism in 1872 and later became an opponent of vivisection. Educated at St John's College, Cambridge, he supported himself through private means and occasional tutoring, and wrote on literary and ethical subjects.^[1]

Williams compiled The Ethics of Diet as a chronological collection of writers who opposed meat-eating. The book includes material from classical antiquity to the 19th century, with biographical notices, extracts, and commentary on arguments for abstaining from flesh.^[2]

The Ethics of Diet has been described as a contribution to the growth of the vegetarian movement in late Victorian England.^[3] Beyond that, the book also influenced individuals such as Henry S. Salt, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Tolstoyan writer Jaime de Magalhães Lima.^[4][5]

Gandhi later noted the book in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth:^[6]

My faith in vegetarianism grew on me from day to day. Salt's book Plea for Vegetarianism whetted my appetite for dietetic studies. I went in for all books available on vegetarianism and read them. One of these, Howard Williams' The Ethics of Diet, was a 'biographical history of the literature of humane dietetics from the earliest period to the present day'.

Tolstoy wrote favourably of the book in Essays and Letters.^[7]: 83 He wrote that the reason for abstinence from animal food as the first act of fasting and moral life was "admirably explained" in The Ethics of Diet.^{[7]: 91–92}

Salt praised the book in Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress as "by far the most scholarly and exhaustive" of recent works on animal rights.^[8] Lima drew on Williams' work in his 1912 lecture O Vegetarismo e a Moralidade das Raças ("Vegetarianism and the Morality of the Races").^[5]

The Ethics of Diet was first published in serial form between 1878 and 1883 in The Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger, the monthly journal of the Vegetarian Society.^[9][10] It was first issued in book form in 1883 by F. Pitman in London and John Heywood in Manchester.^[11]

A revised and enlarged edition appeared in 1896 under the title The Ethics of Diet: A Biographical History of the Literature of Human Dietetics, From the Earliest Period to the Present Day.^[9] This edition included additional chapters on figures such as Ashoka, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry David Thoreau, Richard Wagner, and Anna Kingsford.^[12] In 1907, Albert Broadbent published an abridged version.^[13]

Translations were also published. A Russian edition appeared in 1892, with a foreword by Leo Tolstoy titled "The First Step".^[9] A Swedish translation by Victor Pfeiff was published in Stockholm in 1900.^[14]

Over time, the book became difficult to obtain and was held by only a small number of libraries, according to the University of Illinois Press.^[15] In 2003, the University of Illinois Press published a new edition edited by Carol J. Adams.^[16] In her introduction, Adams wrote that Williams' work "reinstates vegetarianism as an ethical imperative within history by giving it a history".^[17]

• Animal ethics
• Bibliography of veganism and vegetarianism
• Ethics of eating meat
• History of animal rights
• History of vegetarianism
• Vegetarianism in the Victorian era
• A Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays – 1886 book by Henry S. Salt
• The Logic of Vegetarianism – 1899 book by Henry S. Salt
• Fifty Years of Food Reform – 1898 book by Charles W. Forward