Becoming What You Eat: Anna Kingsford's Vegetarian Posthuman

Abstract

By situating Anna Kingsford's vegetarian writings within the paired context of late-Victorian dietetic discourse and modern posthuman philosophy, this article demonstrates both the Victorian association between diet and evolution and the contemporary applications of late-nineteenth-century dietary ethics. Kingsford was a leading scientist, antivivisector, feminist, and mystic who helped shape the Victorian vegetarian movement. Her influential rhetoric emphasized that vegetarianism would nourish interspecies relations and allow Victorians to materialize novel forms of subjectivity, kinship, community, and responsibility appropriate for the post-Darwinian landscape. This article reads her foundational vegetarian treatise, The Perfect Way in Diet (1881), along with her published lectures on vegetarianism through the overlapping lenses of posthumanism and new materialism, illuminating the congruence between Kingsford's call to embody ethics and the contemporary posthuman call to become an ecologically situated self. I argue that by framing vegetarianism as a generative, affirmative kin-making practice, grounded in the shared materiality and interests of humans and nonhumans, Kingsford articulates a posthuman dietary ethics.

Dr. Anna Bonus Kingsford's popular vegetarian treatise, The Perfect Way in Diet (1881), promised Victorians a “Utopia” where humans, animals, and environment were physically and spiritually connected.¹ A revision of her doctorate of medicine thesis, the text became a Vegetarian Society² “manifesto” and paved the way for Kingsford to become the late nineteenth century's “leading scientific advocate of vegetarianism.”³ She was also a prominent antivivisector, feminist, and mystic, aptly described by W. T. Stead as “one of the most interesting and fascinating . . . women of the Victorian era”—a “strange creature” with a “silver tongue.”⁴ Through an influential rhetoric combining spirituality with science, Kingsford emphasized that vegetarianism would nourish interspecies relations and allow Victorians to materialize novel forms of subjectivity, kinship, and responsibility appropriate for the post-Darwinian landscape. An examination of her advocacy offers us an interesting window into late-Victorian nutritional studies, where debates over “the proper food of Man” reveal dietary advice's importance for Victorian conceptualizations of self, species, and society.⁵ Diet became one key to decoding the evolutionary past and unlocking the future potential of civilization, and dietetic discourses encapsulate a range of Victorian attitudes toward humankind's place in nature. By proposing that vegetarianism would foster egalitarian, responsible relations between humans and nonhuman Others, Kingsford's theory represents an important antecedent to twenty-first-century postanthropocentric philosophy and contemporary discussions of vegetarianism as an affirmative kin-making and environmentally conscientious practice.⁶ Thus, if one goal of this article is to interrogate late-Victorian dietetic discourses for the ways in which dietary advice reified the concept of humanity for Victorians, another goal is to examine Kingsford's vegetarian dietetics for the ways in which it anticipates current nonanthropocentric dietary ethics.

In nineteenth-century Britain, a modern Western vegetarian subject emerged, conscientiously refraining from consuming animals because of rights, welfare, and/or relations. The Vegetarian Society (established in 1847) popularized the term vegetarian throughout the latter half of the century,⁷ drawing Victorians to the meatless diet for various reasons such as health, economy, and religion. By the end of the nineteenth century, animal welfare was one of the most popular motives to become a vegetarian, and as James Gregory notes, anticruelty, antiviolence, and antipain messaging became especially powerful means to convert Victorians to the bloodless diet.⁸ In their efforts to feed both “body and mind,”⁹ Victorian vegetarians experimented with many types of personal and social reform,¹⁰ so their advocacy linked food to issues of health, morality, ideology, culture, and politics. With a known “passion for reform,”¹¹ reverence for animals, and magnetic persona, Anna Kingsford emerged as an important figure in the Victorian vegetarian movement, acting as a Vegetarian Society vice president and inspiring vegetarian movements across England and abroad.¹² Kingsford was a committed vegetarian who credited her “vegetable and milk regimen” for her “life,” “health,” “vital force,” and professional success (Perfect Way, 90), as she maintained that it cured her end-stage tubercular consumption,¹³ improved her “temperament,” and enabled her to overcome “many obstacles and trials, physical and moral” during her difficult doctoral studies (Perfect Way, 90–91). She undertook medicine “to rescue the animals from cruelty and injustice,”¹⁴ denouncing practices like vivisection and meat-eating while challenging scientific authority and social conventions in the process. For her, vegetarianism was “the perfect way” for Victorians to cultivate and sustain a better future for humans and nonhumans alike.

Throughout The Perfect Way in Diet and her other works, Kingsford insisted that food shaped identity and dispositions while connecting the individual body to its larger social, political, spiritual, and environmental systems so that through diet, one could evolve both self and society. Her hybrid discourse of Theosophy, chemistry, and dietetics (or regimented eating) demonstrates a serious attempt to rethink the nature of human being, to redraw the lines of human community, and to redefine the limits of human responsibility in response to Darwinism and industrialization. Indeed, by emphasizing the shared materiality and interests of humans and nonhumans along with the generative power of diet, Kingsford contributed to what Liam Young characterizes as a rebellious, feminist “tactical intervention into late-Victorian biopolitics,”¹⁵ making the body and its nourishment “a site of resistance to the . . . control and commodification of life” associated with biomedical experimentation and industrialized farming practices.¹⁶ However, Kingsford also framed humankind as morally superior to other creatures and promoted “pure diet” through a rhetoric of transcendence and perfectibility. To engage her work is to be struck by hybridity and contradictions, if not outright confusion.¹⁷ At this intersection of Theosophy, feminism, and science, I find Kingsford's work most convoluted yet most fruitful for articulating a nonanthropocentric—indeed, posthuman—dietary ethics. The vision of a malleable subjectivity and porous embodiment entangled in a web of nonhuman entities is common to both Kingsford and certain strands of contemporary posthuman critical theory. In reading Kingsford's vegetarian writings alongside posthumanism and interrelated postanthropocentric theories like new materialism and corporeal feminism, I hope to demonstrate that Kingsford's rhetorical admixture of nutrition, metaphysics, and ethics under the frame of relations and responsibility represents a posthumanist strand of dietetic discourse that remains popular today.

Posthumanism offers a nuanced method for interpreting the affirmative nonanthropocentric relations and embodied ethics that Kingsford advocates.¹⁸ The theorizations of humanity, community, and responsibility in her vegetarian writings reflect the shared posthumanist and new materialist commitment to reveal the interdependence of humans, nonhumans, and environment and the obligations that follow. Although posthumanism often evokes an engagement with technological discourses and techno-human hybridity (most famously in Donna Haraway's cyborg), it is a diverse theoretical mode for deconstructing and dismantling humanist ideologies and discourses. In my reading, I apply the critical posthumanism of scholars like Cary Wolfe and Rosi Braidotti, treating the theory as a “generative tool” for rethinking “the human” outside of the confines of humanist Man and his assumed masculine, rational, cultured, heterosexed, domineering, European nature.¹⁹ As Karen Barad outlines, posthumanism is no grand celebration of the death of Man, nor is it “an uncritical embrace of the cyborg” as a savior; rather, “it is about taking issue with human exceptionalism while being accountable for the role we play in the differential constitution and differential positioning of the human among other creatures.”²⁰ Posthumanists and their allied new materialists and corporeal feminists challenge humanist models of self that separate the human from nature, elevate it over the nonhuman, and hierarchize the mind over body, instead emphasizing the interconnections between humans, nonhumans, and environment along with body and mind. New materialists and corporeal feminists particularly highlight the inherent vitality of matter, invest it with the agency to affect human sociocultural and political structures, and make the body the “very ‘stuff’ of subjectivity.”²¹ Collectively, these theories call the human to responsibility and prompt us to develop responsible relationships with the nonhuman entities with whom we live and depend on.

Extending the work of critics like Jill Galvan and Suzanne Ashworth, who have located the posthuman in nineteenth-century spiritualist technologies and mediumship practices, I suggest that posthumanism has special relevance for Victorian studies for the ways in which it helps address the extensive scientific and philosophical reconceptualizations of human being that Victorians witnessed. Of particular interest for this paper are the new forms of materiality, subjectivity, and kinship revealed by evolutionary theory and organic chemistry as reflected in dietetic discourse. After briefly outlining the Victorian fixation on food, I trace the development of late-Victorian nutritive science with a focus on the revamping of dietetics as scientific, evolutionary eating. I then discuss Kingsford's framing of vegetarianism as a tool for ethical, spiritual, and physiological evolution, which I define as gastro-ethical becoming-with and link more specifically to posthumanist and related new materialist and corporeal feminist critical theory. Finally, I will end by briefly discussing the congruence between Kingsford's vegetarian rhetoric and posthuman discourse so as to endorse her future-thinking dietary ethic's relevance for twenty-first-century attitudes and practices.

1. “Man Is What He Eats”: Victorian Dietetics

As studies of food reveal, cuisines demarcate cultures and constitute communal identities.²² For Victorians, gastronomy was fundamental to how they construed and constructed themselves as British subjects and more extensively as human beings. Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of food for Victorians. Malthusian fears of population explosion coupled with rapid scientific advances into nutrition and digestion prompted myriad inquiries into the British national dietary, making food a matter of national, political, medical, philosophical, and aesthetic importance. Scientists and social reformers debated food quality, production, and supply both at home and abroad,²³ while cookbooks and other food-focused writings became popular Victorian consumables. Critics working in the interdisciplinary field of nineteenth-century food studies have examined such issues along with the ways that food symbolized national,²⁴ class,²⁵ and gendered identity in Victorian writing and literature,²⁶ revealing that, as Daly and Forman put it, “the way to Victorian studies’ heart is through its stomach.”²⁷ While scholars have demonstrated that the study of food is crucial for understanding Victorian culture and thought, dietetic discourses and the accompanying scientific framing of edibles’ evolutionary and constitutive powers remain to be more thoroughly explored. Many scientists believed that food could shape bodies, dispositions, and nations in complex, intermingled ways, at times suggesting that Victorians could consume and embody the sociocultural and ideological values ascribed to particular foods and food practices.²⁸ As nineteenth-century figures like French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach stressed, “Man is what he eats,”²⁹ and Victorian scientists viewed diet as the key to unlocking the past and future progress of the British.

In their enthusiasm for food and nutrition, Victorian scientists declared the late nineteenth century “[t]he day of Dietetics,”³⁰ resurging the ancient practice of artful, regimented eating. Dietetics was popular during antiquity and early modern England,³¹ famously described by Foucault as a “technology of the self” whereby individuals use diet and exercise to “stylize” their bodies and mold their identities according to sociocultural “rules of conduct” regarding morality, health, and discipline.³² In theory and practice, dietetics rests upon a view of diet as both a lens illuminating people's character and a tool for securing or modifying it. Put more simply, dietetic theory posits that you are what you eat. Although they can be distinguished by their unique conceptualizations of embodiment, incorporation, and morality,³³ dietetic discourses from various times and places generally suggest that diet can be used strategically to “eat our way into” particular communities, networks, and “social formation[s].”³⁴ Dietetic guides became increasingly popular toward the end of the nineteenth century, and the standard debates over the “proper food of Man” reveal evolutionary theory's influence on nutritive science. While the general view developed in Victorian dietary advice was that “man” was “impelled by a carnivorous instinct,” making it “natural that [he] should seek to feed on flesh,”³⁵ Victorian vegetarians took a different perspective, arguing instead that “the human animal” was a “frugivorous” one.³⁶ As Elsa Richardson highlights, the relationship between meat-eating and evolutionary theory became “a point of fierce contention” amongst Victorians, with vegetarians emerging as some of the most creative interpreters of Darwinism.³⁷

Meat-eating, of course, has been one of the most prized and contested alimentary practices, linked to strong sociocultural proscriptions and prohibitions, and meat's power to symbolize masculinity, power, and mastery over other creatures and the natural world has been well established by critics.³⁸ Derrida describes this “sacrificial structure” of hegemonic Western subjectivity as “carnophallogocentrism,” illuminating the appealing image of dominance that practices like meat-eating symbolize.³⁹ As Derrida asks, “Who can be made to believe that our cultures are carnivorous because animal proteins are irreplaceable?”⁴⁰ In Animal Estate, Harriet Ritvo notes this image of carnivorous Man resonated with many Victorians, for whom meat-eating demonstrated the authority and dominance of the British Empire. Leading German chemist Justus von Liebig's influential work in organic chemistry helped popularize meat as the “perfect” “food of man,” containing a number of “remarkable substances” that not only increased his strength and courage but also maintained his muscle by providing materials “which are identical, or nearly identical, with the albumen of blood.”⁴¹ Yet, in following Liebig and claiming that “the animal substance which to-day may be beef, mutton, or pork, may to-morrow be human substance, part and parcel of man, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh,”⁴² Victorian scientists framed “the human body—and human being—[as] nothing more than metabolized stuff”⁴³ and ultimately mechanical.⁴⁴ Organic chemistry's revelation of the shared materiality (or chemical constituents) of human and nonhuman bodies thus seemed to strengthen Darwinism's “painful” deconstruction of human exceptionality for Victorians.⁴⁵ Dietetics became increasingly popular for the British at a time when science was questioning the integrity of the individual human body and the distinction of the human species; my examination of this discourse reveals that responses to these questions were surfaced in and navigated through dietary advice so that dietetics—whether for omnivores or frugivores—became crucial to defining and extending the limits of human being.

Through a rhetoric pairing nutrition with social Darwinism, mainstream dietetic discourse restored and revitalized an exceptional Man who could take control of his mechanical, animal nature and dominate his fellow creatures and peoples. Frequent associations drawn between omnivorousness, human exceptionality, and European superiority augmented the standard advice to eat a well-balanced mixed diet rich in animal foods. The mixed diet emerged as a key element in “the survival of the fittest,”⁴⁶ “[elevating] man . . . above . . . beings which are destitute of reason”⁴⁷ and enabling him “to fulfil his destiny” to dominate, control, and consume “inferior animals.”⁴⁸ Omnivorousness demarcated an alleged ontological distinction between Europeans and non-Europeans, coded as civilized/primitive and human/animal. Some claimed that “Whatever man may have been originally, he is now in Europe an omnivorous eater” with an advanced “brain, . . . nervous system, . . . [and] stomach” best adapted to animal food, whereas “Orientals,”⁴⁹ “savages and semi-savages” could live on vegetables, cereals, and fruits because they “are themselves but little removed from the common animal stock from which they are derived.”⁵⁰ The idealized British diet of “bread and beef” was praised for sustaining British “beefiness,” or the esteemed strength and “stolidity of English character,”⁵¹ allowing “the well-fed English” to subjugate,⁵² conquer, and “master” other nations as the “exterminator of aborigines.”⁵³ Contrastingly, vegetarianism was frequently blamed for “the downfall of dynasties and . . . the enslavement of peoples,”⁵⁴ and foods like rice, beans, and lentils were described as more appropriate for “livestock” than humans.⁵⁵ Scientists depicted civilized man's omnivorousness as the result of a reasoned, concerted attempt at self-improvement,⁵⁶ and stressed that “in those parts of the world in which [man] reaches the highest degree of development and civilization and culture we find him a mixed feeder,”⁵⁷ so humans are “compelled to become to a certain extent meat eaters” if they want “to attain the highest state of physical development and intellectual vigor.”⁵⁸ Thus, mainstream Victorian dietetic discourse emphasized that healthy humans were omnivorous, dominant, and sovereign, and that all others were more akin to beasts, leading readers to believe that despite great variation in people's diets, only certain diets were indeed “human.”

Therefore, the challenge vegetarians like Anna Kingsford and her peers in the Vegetarian Society faced was not necessarily to convince Victorians that vegetarianism was healthy; indeed, Liebig himself provided the most compelling evidence that vegetables were sufficiently nutritious to maintain human health since the results of organic chemistry revealed that plants and animals were chemically indistinct. As Young highlights using Derrida's work on carnophallogocentrism, “vegetarianism could not be proven or refuted on science alone” since “men do not eat meat for nutritional or scientific reasons” per se (71). Kingsford's challenge was thus to convince “post-Darwinian humans” that “‘man’ is not who he thinks he is” and consequently must adjust his perceptions of and relationships to other creatures (Young, 70). Her starting point was to contest both the widespread belief that humans were naturally omnivorous and the common conclusion that meat-eating had been the catalyst for civilized man. Turning to physiology and evolutionary theory, she argued that our teeth, brain, and digestive organs revealed humans to be frugivores, which was the only class of animal capable of evolving into civilized subjects: fruit-eating—not meat-eating—made man Man (Kingsford, Addresses, 120, 151). Through artificial means, humans had adapted themselves to a mixed diet, but chemical analysis demonstrated that meat was an unnatural and unhealthy food, transferring inassimilable matter, such as waste or “ash” as well as “sewage,” “decomposition,” “impurities and degenerate products” to every “kreophagist [corpse-eater], be he never so fastidious, careful, or delicately served” (Kingsford, Addresses, 82–83). Despite her provocative framing of meat-eaters as dirty corpse-eating subhumans, Kingsford was careful to balance emotion with evidence, promoting vegetarianism as a “scientific diet” based in evolutionary theory and organic chemistry (Addresses, 104).

If evolutionary theory and organic chemistry revealed humanity's frugivorous nature, then they also revealed the fundamental connections between organic life-forms, which Kingsford was careful to exploit in her discourse. Evolutionary theory, especially Darwinism, indicated humankind's shared ancestry with and similar nature to nonhuman animals, while organic chemistry demonstrated that at the chemical level, humans were no different than the nonhuman animals and plants that they consumed for food. Kingsford embraced this ambiguity and maintained, “From the scientific point of view we all arise out of differentiation from one common stock” (Addresses, 119), different in degree rather than kind (Perfect Way, 4), even if it went “against our pride” to acknowledge it (Addresses, 113). For her, denying our relations to fellow creatures and the larger environment resulted in immoral, unjust practices like vivisection and meat-eating; vegetarianism (or the “Pythagorean system of diet” as she sometimes called it), by contrast, would sustain respectful interspecies relations.⁵⁹ She held great reverence for and ruminated deeply on our shared materiality and thus vulnerability with other creatures; at times, she even put herself in the position of hunted, killed, eaten, and vivisected animals in an attempt to view the world from their “the point of view,” asking “how I should like to be served so myself” and dreaming of vivisected animals metamorphizing into humans.⁶⁰ Such reminders reflect the Victorian vegetarian trend to highlight the cannibalistic implications of meat-eating following from Darwin's insights;⁶¹ moreover, they point to the indistinction of meat and collective vulnerability of fleshly “fellow creatures,”⁶² which might be said to disrupt the epistemological distinctions between human and animal that privilege particular subjects over others and designate certain groups (such as beasts, animals, or brutes) as “‘legitimately’ exploitable.”⁶³

However, it would be false to claim that Kingsford did not frame human being as both exceptional and ideal. While she was keen to check human hubris and challenge orthodox definitions of humanity, she also believed that “Man was something more than a monkey or a machine; he was a moral being,” which “was the stronghold of Vegetarianism.”⁶⁴ In her works, she argued that “the glory of humanity does not lie in its physical form” (Addresses, 110) but rather in the sentiments of “honour, love, justice, generosity,” which distinguished and thus elevated “the human being from the brute, [and] the civilized man from the savage and the criminal” (Perfect Way, 117). Her repeated denigration of “carnivorous tribes” as the lowest form of life (for humans and nonhumans alike) reveals her hierarchical view of species at the top of which she places the vegetarian, who follows the evolutionary pull “Upwards and onwards!” toward “perfection” (Addresses, 118). In Kingsford's works, Man and vegetarian function as “ascendant terms,”⁶⁵ elevating human above animal—and vegetarian above carnivore. By glorifying humans and vegetarians, Kingsford upholds the kinds of hierarchies that postanthropocentric theory seeks to challenge. Yet, given her claims that other creatures were not created for our use or our consumption (Addresses, 133), it seems possible that she strategically deployed arguments like “Man is master of the world and can do with it as he pleases” as a way to erode hegemony from within, using humanist logic to promote nonanthropocentric responsibility (Perfect Way, ix). Kingsford even explicitly aligned herself with nonhumans, declaring that “I do not love men and women. . . . They seem to be my natural enemies. It is not for them that I am taking up medicine and science, not to cure their ailments; but for the animals and for knowledge generally.”⁶⁶

In what follows, I argue that despite instances of speciesism and elitism, Kingsford's vegetarianism offered profound opportunities to extend the ethical community beyond species lines and to reshape humanity via diet. Through a blend of Theosophy, dietetics, and chemistry, Kingsford promoted vegetarianism as gastro-ethical becoming-with whereby one could generate respectful multispecies kinships and alternative nonanthropocentric identities, promising (to use Eva Giraud's terms) material and symbolic changes to human being. Turning more specifically to the theories of posthumanism, new materialism, and corporeal feminism for the remainder of the essay, I argue that Kingsford's vegetarian subject can be read as a form of the posthuman and that her complicated vision of dietary “becoming” and embodied morality illuminates—and perhaps even helps us to answer—the “equally knotty questions about corporeality,”⁶⁷ transcendence, dietary ethics, and Zoe or “the non-human, vital force of Life” being debated within contemporary posthumanism and its sister discourses (Braidotti, 60).

2. “We Are That Which We Eat”: Kingsford's Gastro-Ethical Becoming-With

Postanthropocentric conceptions of embodiment, which challenge Cartesian dualism and emphasize the nonhuman, porous, transitory, and embedded nature of human being, set the mise en place for my analysis of Kingsford's vegetarian gastro-ethics. Posthumanists emphasize that the lines between the synthetic or the cultural and the natural are arbitrary, and therefore, “the boundaries of the human subject are constructed rather than given.”⁶⁸ A differently conceptualized human than Man, the posthuman is conceived as a liminal creature “inhabiting the boundary between the human and the almost-human” whose “boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.”⁶⁹ Posthumans exist “between-between” dualities and binaries—a type of “becoming” in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense of a “creative involution,” resulting from symbioses, contagions, “transversal communications,” and other miscellaneous or multispecies alliances that challenge kinships restricted to “filiation.”⁷⁰ “Posthuman bodies,” as Judith (Jack) Halberstam and Ira Livingston describe them, are thus “bodies-in-process”: heterogeneous and always becoming something else through their involvements with other creatures, things, and environments.⁷¹ Corporeal feminists and new materialists promote a similarly “active and productive,”⁷² ecologically and culturally situated embodiment, whereby humans, nonhumans, and the environment are intimately connected through the “porous” “boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of the world we are of and in,”⁷³ which Stacy Alaimo describes as “trans-corporeality.” Significantly, food is the “most palpable trans-corporeal substance” as it enmeshes the human body with the “more-than-human world”⁷⁴ and contains a nonhuman “vital force” that works “inside and alongside” human beings “in an agentic assemblage . . . [of] metabolism, cognition, and moral sensibility” (Bennett, 39, 51). For the more sanguine strands of postanthropocentric theory, humans and the food we eat are embedded in complex, intermixed, and multi-operational sociocultural and environmental forces, and diet offers ethical possibilities to “become-with each other,” embodying and navigating the “unexpected collaborations and combinations” of multispecies kinships.⁷⁵

To understand how Kingsford develops her vegetarian dietetics as a praxis for becoming-with others, we must examine her complex notions of nourishment, nature, and materiality. Her vegetarianism combines dietetic associations between diet and character with new materialist interpretations of food as a nonhuman “actant” co-forming human sociocultural landscapes (Bennett, 9). Against the common advice that meat nourished civility and supremacy, Kingsford argued that animal viands do not really strengthen and elevate the human but rather “stimulate and excite” the nervous system, “intoxicate” the subject, and “engender” immoral habits such as “alcoholism [and] unchastity” (Perfect Way, 52). This “stimulating diet” “fostered and encouraged” a “savage desire to kill and shed blood” that will “greatly retard the progress and enlightenment of our race” (Addresses, 139, 138–39). “The food of the Golden Age—the food of Eden,” such as “barley bread, oatcake, and oil” (Addresses, 122–23), “inspired the magnificent courage of the Spartan patriots,” “filled” the conquerors of Salamis and Marathon “with indomitable valour and enthusiasm” (Perfect Way, 19), and sustained the most “superb monuments, . . . glorious records” and “profoun[d]” and “pur[e] thought” of the highest nations and civilizations (Perfect Way, 18). In her descriptions of active, activating sustenance, Kingsford repeatedly evokes Bennett's “vital materialist” framing of food's inherent “productive power” that extends beyond physicality (e.g., size and shape) to act as “an inducer-producer of salient, public effects,” shaping both personal and cultural dispositions (Bennett, 40, 39). In postanthropocentric theory, food, as an “actant,” is neither inert matter nor fuel for a mechanical body, but a crucial contributor to the constitution of human bodies, minds, moods, spirits, politics, and cultures.

A postanthropocentric theoretical view of food suggests that edibles are an assemblage of not only nutrients like proteins and vitamins but also the principles, sentiments, and characteristics of the workers and environments that cultivate them. Contemporary “eco-dietetic” discourses like Slow Food advise eaters that they consume “the values, norms, and attributes of their environment,”⁷⁶ including toxic elements such as “suffering” and “greed” (Bennett, 51). Foods thus absorb just as they imbue values, connecting consumers to systems of food production, transportation, and preparation, and nonanthropocentric dietary ethics rest upon respectfully negotiating this circuitous interplay between various human and nonhuman elements. In line with these ethics, Kingsford maintained,

the culture, harvesting, and preparation of all vegetable produce are alike in harmony with the interests of morality, of individual and public health, of social and private economy, and of that love of beauty, virtue, and consistent philosophy which dominates the nature of all gentle and civilised humanity. (Perfect Way, 15–16)

Consistently “from the scientific, the hygienic, the aesthetic, and the spiritual point of view, the Best Food for Man is that which does no violence to his nature, physical or moral, and which involves none to other creatures at hand” (Addresses, 112). Vegetarian foods are ideal because they “have been bought at no cost of suffering, terror, despair, or degradation to man or beast” so that “the aroma of fields, of vineyards, of orchards, accompanies the beautiful repast . . . [whereas] over the banquet of the eater of dead flesh hangs the filthy smell of the shambles” (Addresses, 96). To Kingsford, vegetarianism was healthy not only because it provided eaters with the best nutrients (e.g., Perfect Way, 40; Addresses, 82–86, 105–6), but also because it elicited ethical, social, and environmental action that would eliminate the dehumanizing profession of butchery (Perfect Way, 62; Addresses, 61–62); eradicate the widespread abuse and suffering of nonhuman animals used for research, clothing, and food (e.g., Perfect Way, 65–71, 105–12); and reduce the toxic “odours of blood and death” of the slaughterhouse that “pollute the air” and soil (Addresses, 96).

Nourishing the spiritual self was an important component to Kingsford's dietetics, and her commentary on vegetarianism's transcendental possibilities illuminates her sometimes confusing views on corporeality and, with this, the occasionally competing narratives of human embodiment informing posthuman theory. As Ashworth notes, “the posthuman re-ignites an enduring philosophical fascination with the immaterial self,”⁷⁷ and celebrations of humans evolving into cyborgs, uploading consciousness into AI, and escaping into cyberspace have trickled into certain strands of posthuman theory while being heavily criticized by others as “fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy inherited from humanism.”⁷⁸ Similar to those posthumanists transfixed on “the freedoms of disembodied subjectivity” who treat the body as a disposable or malleable prosthesis (sometimes distinguished as transhumanists),⁷⁹ Kingsford promised mystical, “disembodied liberties” via diet.⁸⁰ Known as a highly sensitive visionary, she sustained her “strongly” and “strangely developed” “dreaming faculty” with a steady diet of science, literature, and vegetables,⁸¹ believing that her “pure diet” cleansed her body to receive dream messages from a pantheon of pagan deities and to commune with her “Genii,” or celestial guide (Addresses, 22–24).⁸² Using a planchette and automatic writing practices, Kingsford, like other nineteenth-century spiritualists, turned her body into “a technology” or machine for receiving otherworldly messages, thus revealing an “odd tension . . . between a hope of spiritual transcendence and an intense investment in the physical self.”⁸³ Edward Maitland, her longtime friend and colleague, linked vegetarianism to heightened sympathies, improved cognition, and spiritual visions, citing multiple instances of vegetarian-induced telepathy between himself and Kingsford. He maintained that kreophagy dulled the spiritual faculties and obscured the “immaterial and essential part of us,” whereas vegetarianism lifted the “barrier” between the material and spiritual realms to reveal the “celestial” world (Addresses, 15, 21).

While Kingsford's and Maitland's vegetarian visions at times evoke the humanist quest to escape the body and hierarchize mind or spirit above it, her dietetics was an embodied practice, grounded in her belief that matter was active, malleable, and interwoven with mind and spirit. She promoted what corporeal feminist Elizabeth Grosz describes as a Möbius strip model of consciousness and embodiment, which emphasizes how the psyche produces the body (“inside out”) while the body produces the psyche (“outside in”), thus problematizing distinctions between inside and outside (and, in this case, mind or spirit and body).⁸⁴ Kingsford neither reduced human being to mind or spirit nor subordinated the body to mind. Rather, she denied such dualism, focusing instead on the circuitous interactions between spirit, mind, and matter, which become one and the same; for Kingsford, body and mind “are inseparable . . . so intimately welded together, that neither good nor harm can be done to the one without affecting the other” (Addresses, 106). She believed that “the body makes the soul” just as she believed “A man's physical organism is made by his Spirit” (Addresses, 7, 152). There was an “absolute dependence of Mind upon Matter” so that “We are that which we eat; our food is converted into our blood, our blood nourishes our brains,” which are the “foci and centres of our thoughts,” with “our whole mental status [resting] upon our bodily condition. If we feed purely and wisely, we shall be pure and wise in spirit” (Addresses, 125; emphasis original). In turn, “bodies inhabited and controlled by higher and more advanced spirits” can no longer assimilate “gross materials” like meat into their bodies (Addresses, 152). Much like Bennett, Kingsford underscored that food “enters into what we become” (Bennett, 51), shaping attitude and action as it corporealizes worldview, character, and morality.⁸⁵

Theosophy provided the paradigm through which Kingsford conceptualized the vitality, malleability, and mutuality of matter. Gauri Viswanathan situates Theosophy at the intersection of science and religion—a “posthuman” alternative spirituality that “build[s] political rationales into its philosophical premises,” which challenged “species differentiations,” promoted “gender parity,” and redefined the relationship between matter, mind, and/or spirit.⁸⁶ Theosophists like Kingsford accepted Pythagorean transmigration, or the “interchange of souls . . . between men and animals,” which she found “in accordance with the tenets of evolution.”⁸⁷ Her call was to recognize that all living creatures are united through the “living souls” they share, challenging “the foolish popular notion that man only has a ‘soul,’ while other animals have not” (Addresses, 150, 97), since “[Man] is flesh of their flesh physiologically and essentially” (“Animal Souls,” 242). She denied scientific views of mechanical, lifeless matter, describing the materialist as a “dead man” for whom “all Nature is but a corpse in whose arteries no Divine pulse-beats thrill.”⁸⁸ Following Spinoza's belief that all materialities are variations of the common substance “Deus sive Natura” (“God or Nature,” often one in the same),⁸⁹ she defined the divine as “the source and centre of all the manifold expressions of existence” and the “soul” as “that principle in virtue of which organic life subsists” (“Animal Souls,” 237), thus incorporating “divinity” into biology in a way that equalized all matter (Viswanathan, 441, 445). Despite her positioning of the human as the apex of evolution (“Animal Souls,” 241), she foregrounded “the solidarity of the universe” and interconnection of all “living beings” (“Animal Souls,” 242): “we must look upon the human race, not as a thing apart from the rest of creation, but as being in brotherhood and solidarity with the whole of those living forms with which we are surrounded. . . . we all arise out of differentiation from one common stock” (Addresses, 119).

In combining the Theosophical view that the soul or vitality of life materializes animals and humans alike with the organic chemical view of embodiment and nutrition as processes of transmissions, incorporations, and recorporealizations, Kingsford presents a posthuman, new materialistic view of human being as heterogeneous, always in transition, and fundamentally connected to the larger world in which the human is embedded. Organic chemists maintained that the human body was an assemblage of various chemicals and materials continually in flux, always in motion with parts/tissues/cells constantly regenerating and moving so that alimentary substances like albumen, fibrin, and casein became bodily substances like protein through “a process of transformation” enacted by heat and alkalies (Kingsford, Addresses, 79). This heterogeneous and mutational view of embodiment was reflected in Theosophy's transmigration of souls, which blurred “sexual and other biological differences” and provided a foundation for Kingsford's envisioned equality between men and women, humans and animals (Viswanathan, 445–46). As Maitland explains it, Kingsford's philosophy was that there was no “no hard-and-fast line between masculine and feminine, human and animal, or even between animal and plant. . . . everything that lived was humanity, only in different stages of its unfoldment. Even the flowers were persons for her.”⁹⁰ New materialists like Alaimo and Barad posit that a view of the body-in-motion coupled with an “understanding [of] the substances of one's self as interconnected with the wider environment marks a profound shift in subjectivity,”⁹¹ demonstrating that humans and nonhumans are mutually constituted as integral parts “of the world . . . part of the world in its differential becomings” (Barad, 185; emphasis original). Ethics radically shifts “from the vantage point of constitutive entanglements,” forcing us to recognize that our “very existence” and “very embodiment” are “integrally entangled with the [nonhuman]” (Barad, 158), and by recognizing this interdependence, we can “reorient our own experience of eating” and use diet to “animate a more ecologically sustainable” and ethically aware public (Bennett, 51).

By guiding Victorians to foods and food practices that nourished and respected our interdependence with nonhumans and environment, Kingsford's vegetarian dietetics illustrates the new materialist call that it matters how we matter.⁹² Barad's complex theory of agential realism (derived from quantum physics) challenges the “prior existence of independent entities or relata” (139), the “metaphysics of individualism” (128), and the belief that agency is “an attribute” (141). Her concept of “intra-action” or “intra-activity” replaces the traditional “interaction,” shifting understandings of individuality and agency to one of mutuality and dependence. While interaction assumes that preestablished entities act with one another, intra-action denotes “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (33), assuming that specific materialities and agencies emerge through relationships (more formally, quantum entanglements). Intra-activity demonstrates that all matter is “in-the-process-of-becoming . . . iteratively enfolded into . . . ongoing differential materializations” and that “‘human’ bodies are not inherently different from ‘nonhuman’ ones” (234, 153). As Barad explains, “Matter's dynamism is inexhaustible, exuberant, . . . prolific,” and “generative” so that the ways in which entities entangle with other entities engenders “an ongoing reconfiguring of the world” (170; emphasis original). If “relata do not preexist relations” but rather emerge from “specific intra-actions” (140), then our particular intra-actions through which we are “co-constituted and entangled” with “others” draw us into particular relationships—certain ways of living and being that come with contextual responsibilities (178–79). This is not an issue of human agency, though, but rather one of responsibility, “an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of self and other” (394), calling us to act on of our obligations to those we depend on.

Kingsford thus models a gastro-ethical becoming-with: a way to “become with” fellow creatures, generate multispecies kinships, and materialize novel, environmentally embedded subjectivities through ethical food choices. As Haraway explains, we can “become-with each other” in the present by being “situated, . . . entangled and worldly,” and “in thick correspondence” with fellow creatures, mindful of our shared needs and susceptibilities.⁹³ Becoming is a unique evolution, one that does not necessarily progress or regress in a series or rely on ancestry but rather generates novel assemblages and alliances, which for Deleuze and Guattari are necessarily “minoritarian” against “majoritarian” Man.⁹⁴ That is, becomings shift subjectivities away from the restrictive self/other dichotomies and the politics of dominance associated with humanism to open up innovative opportunities for identity, kinship, and community. While Kingsford framed the kinship of humans, animals, and plants under the rubric of “humanity,” her attempt to give voice to the voiceless and bring other creatures and the environment into the fold of subjectivity produces a not-so-subtle but also potentially necessary form of anthropomorphism, which Bennett argues might be a viable tactic for “cultivating the ability to discern the vitality of matter,” thus bridging the ontological gap between subject and object by defining animals and things in familiar terms (119–20). Kingsford's attempts to extend subjectivity beyond the human to include other creatures toward an enlarged sense of community demonstrate the difficulties for developing an effective vocabulary to articulate a nonanthropocentric egalitarian dietary ethics, which I address in the final section.

3. “It Matters Who Eats Whom and How”: Inconclusions

Although it is difficult to arrive at a holistic interpretation of Kingsford's messages regarding diet, ethics, being, embodiment, and community, reading Kingsford through posthumanism illuminates and perhaps helps to address some lingering challenges for developing and describing a nonanthropocentric dietary ethics, challenges that have prevailed since the late nineteenth century. Debates over the ethical and transformative power of vegetarian/vegan consumption have taken center stage in many contemporary discussions of improved nonhuman animal and environmental relations. Critics from food studies, critical animal studies, posthumanism, and new materialism alike have framed the meatless diet as a crucial means of challenging the humanist attitudes demarcating nonhumans as killable and the exploitative practices that follow. For example, Chloë Taylor posits vegetarian dietetics as a strategy for developing the animal liberation movement and describes vegetarianism as a productive “aesthetics and ethics of the self”: a style of tactical, self-reflective eating designed for self-fashioning so that an eater can quite literally incorporate her morals and values.⁹⁵ Similar work by Helena Pedersen, Richard Twine, Carey Wolfe, Greta Gaard, and Eva Giraud emphasizes the disruptive potential of veganism/vegetarianism to craft a postanthropocentric, posthumanist ethics as an “affirmative biopolitics” challenging the “dispositifs that render animals exploitable” (Giraud, 51).⁹⁶ This line of critique suggests that diet offers unique opportunities to resist dominant attitudes and practices, turn the body itself into a site of resistance, and (perhaps more importantly) to craft alternative models of the human—as embedded, interrelated, vitally material, and ethically aware—that work to extend our notions of community and responsibility beyond a narrow vision of self.

Yet questions of how to extend and define the ethical community beyond the human and of how to decide the parameters of acceptable/unacceptable killing of nonhuman animals remain challenging. As Giraud notes, the difficulties in answering these questions lie in how to avoid inadvertently reinstating harmful anthropocentric views (67). Much as Kingsford struggled to relinquish an image of superior Man as the apex of creation or to find a nonanthropocentric language to express the circuitous, networked nature of matter and being, contemporary vegetarian/vegan advocates have struggled to articulate a dietary ethics that enacts real social and political power without relying on neohumanist arguments in favor of extending human privileges to nonhuman animals. To some, veganism seems to be derived from the same ethical frameworks criticized by posthumanist scholars. Rights-based arguments (i.e., the premise that we should avoid eating animals because of their right to life, security, nonsuffering, etc.) are especially prone to the charge of neohumanism for the ways they maintain humanist universals, such as inviolable rights and indisputable ethics, and “[reinforce] the subject/object dualism that maps onto human/animal dichotomies” (Giraud, 55–56) by positioning the vegan/critic as “all-knowing observer of an objective reality.”⁹⁷ Similarly, vegetarian promotions touting “spiritual enlightenment” or “mastery of the human appetite” often end up reinstating a humanist transcendentalism in framing the vegetarian as “superhuman.”⁹⁸ The tension between liberal humanist values like freedom and choice and posthumanist, postanthropocentric values for an extended, interconnected community and environmentally embedded, embodied subjectivities suggests the difficulty (or perhaps impossibility) of fully abandoning humanism in the quest to develop novel and representative forms of human being. As Wolfe, Katherine Hayles, and Elaine Graham all stress, posthumanism need not deny the humanism that informs it; rather, the ethical possibilities for posthumanism (represented here in the form of a meatless diet) lie in the tensions and contradictions of humanism, which, when deconstructed, open up spaces for critique, diversity, and resistance.

I contend that it is possible to conceptualize an affirmative gastro-ethics grounded in relations and resistance through Kingsford's theories. Her view of “one common stock” reflects Cora Diamond's concept of “fellow creatures,” which focuses on the shared embodiment, vulnerability, and mortality of humans and nonhuman animals and, as Wolfe argues, shifts the conversation about eating animals away from “the more traditional markers of ethical considerations . . . that have traditionally created an ethical divide between Homo sapiens and everything (or everyone) else.”⁹⁹ While it might be easy to dismiss Kingsford's claims of an intuitive morality as illustrative of human exceptionality, her theory of an embodied ethics that can be secured by diet demonstrates the potential value of affect for developing a gastro-ethics with real-world social, political value. Her supposition that our innate disgust at blood and carrion can be steered toward ethical food choices reflects the transformative dietary ethics noted by Bennett, Taylor, and Wolfe (Perfect Way, 15, 63), illustrating what Young describes as the “cultivation of a moral and affective community . . . that feels and tastes the world differently” based on its recognition of “our embeddedness in, rather than transcendence from,” animal life (72, 73; emphasis added). Kingsford repeatedly prefigures Irigaray's notion of the body “as the threshold of transcendence,”¹⁰⁰ which unites divinity with the body's liminal, transitory, and fluid nature.¹⁰¹ Graham argues that Irigaray's “divine”—much like Spinoza's—does not necessarily represent God but rather “a horizon of incompleteness and becoming” that “beckons us beyond the ontological hygiene of fixed essences into realising new, as yet unarticulated possibilities for identity and community.”¹⁰² By embracing diet as a means to “become with” other creatures and the environment—connecting humans to nonhumans and the larger ecological, political, social, and cultural systems organizing them—Kingsford's gastro-ethical becoming-with offers a posthumanist paradigm for the “ongoing reconfiguring of the world” in search of renewed ethical practices (Barad, 170; emphasis original).

Kingsford's vegetarian writings offer us an important window into the post-Darwinian world of the late-Victorian period and the shifting perceptions of human being that defined it. Furthermore, her advocacy reveals the Victorian reverence for dietetics as an evolutionary practice capable of extending the limits of humanity. By approaching her work through the lenses of posthumanism, I hope to have demonstrated that her vision of gastro-ethical subjectivity reflects the postanthropocentric ethical subject at the heart of contemporary posthuman and new materialist theories along with the importance of nineteenth-century thought for engaging contemporary issues. Kingsford's theory of a common, divinely infused matter mutually constituting humans, nonhumans, and environment gestures toward the neo-Spinozist monism underpinning myriad eco-feminist, material-feminist, new materialist, eco-critical, and posthumanist redefinitions of subjectivity and matter. Moreover, in linking organic chemistry and dietetics with Theosophy, Kingsford compelled her fellow Victorians to embody their ethics towards the Zoe-centered egalitarianism promoted by Braidotti—an affirmative, materially grounded, and nonanthropocentric-oriented resistance “to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life” associated with biopolitics (60). Although Kingsford's vision of an alternative human subjectivity did not completely void it of the exceptionalism posthumanism challenges, her call to expand the ethical community is based on “an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others” (190), which Braidotti classes as crucial to developing a sustainable contemporary ethics grounded in Zoe, or “the non-human, vital force of Life” connecting all creatures and the environment (60).¹⁰³

Kingsford's visionary, future-thinking gastro-ethics reflect the forward-thinking call of posthumanist scholars, who view ethics with an eye to the future in order to prompt better living in the present; indeed, Braidotti insists that “this is not a leap of faith, but an active transposition, a transformation at the in-depth level . . . necessary . . . to secure an affirmative hold over the present, as the launching pad for sustainable becoming or qualitative transformation of the negativity and the injustices of the present, which honours our obligations to the generations to come” (192). Or, as Kingsford puts it, “We trust—we who live in the future . . . —that the dawn of a better day is about to rise upon our world” (Addresses, 108). As Braidotti claims, this forward-thinking ethics helps us “to be ‘worthy of the present’ and thus be part of contemporary culture, embodying and embedding the subject of this particular world” (189, emphasis original); I believe something similar can be said about Kingsford, who, along with her Vegetarian Society companions, called on Victorians to embody their ethics and develop a subjectivity worthy of their present in pursuit of a better future, reflecting the impact of evolutionary theory on Victorians. Victorians were among the first modern ethical vegetarians, conscientiously abstaining from animal foods “for the animals” and identifying the damaging emotional and environmental impact of industrialized farming and globalized consumerism. Kingsford and her fellow vegetarians knew wholeheartedly that, as Haraway puts it, “it matters who eats whom and how.”¹⁰⁴ By returning to the Victorians with an eye to our present and future moments, we can learn to enlarge our sense of community and nourish responsible relationships with the larger world around us.