The Perfect Way in Diet

The Perfect Way in Diet: A Treatise Advocating a Return to the Natural and Ancient Food of Our Race is an 1881 treatise by the English physician, vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist and women's rights activist Anna Kingsford. Published in London by Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., it was based on Kingsford's medical thesis, L'Alimentation Vegetale de l'Homme. The book argues that a vegetarian diet is natural to humans and connects diet with health, morality, spiritual development and opposition to cruelty to animals. The book circulated within organised vegetarianism and went through several editions by the 1890s.

Anna Kingsford (1846–1888) was a vice-president of the Vegetarian Society and was active in the late Victorian, spiritualism, vegetarian and anti-vivisection movements.^[1] Natasha Rebry Coulthard writes that Kingsford credited her "vegetable and milk regimen" with preserving her health and helping her complete her medical studies.^[2]

The Perfect Way in Diet was based on Kingsford's medical thesis, L'Alimentation Vegetale de l'Homme. According to Daniel Breeze, the thesis was rejected by the examiners at the Paris Medical School because it included moral arguments; these were removed from the thesis and later restored in the published English version.^[3] Coulthard describes the book as a revised version of Kingsford's doctorate of medicine thesis, and states that it became a Vegetarian Society "manifesto" and helped make Kingsford the late 19th century's "leading scientific advocate of vegetarianism".^[2]

The book was published in London in 1881 by Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co..^[4] The fifth edition was published in 1892 by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.^[5] A sixth edition was advertised in the American periodical The Vegetarian in 1895.^[6]

The title linked the book with Kingsford and Edward Maitland's later esoteric work The Perfect Way; or, The Finding of Christ (1882). In a letter quoted by Alan Pert, Kingsford described The Perfect Way in Diet as a "forerunner" of the later book and as giving the physical basis for its spiritual teaching.^[7]

In The Perfect Way in Diet, Kingsford argues that vegetarianism is the diet best suited to human physiology, morality and spiritual development. Coulthard writes that the book combines spirituality with dietetics, chemistry and evolutionary argument, and that Kingsford used it to describe vegetarianism as a means of changing relations between humans, animals and the environment.^[2]

Kingsford rejects the view that meat-eating is natural to humans. She argues from comparative anatomy that the human body is adapted to a fruit- and grain-based diet, and describes flesh-eating as a departure from the "natural and ancient food" of humanity.^[4] Her argument also connects diet with character. Coulthard writes that Kingsford treated food as shaping identity and disposition, so that diet could affect the individual body and society.^[2]

The book criticises slaughter, butchery and vivisection. Kingsford connects vegetarianism with opposition to cruelty to animals and with moral reform. Coulthard states that Kingsford's vegetarian writing was shaped by her belief that humans and nonhuman animals were materially and spiritually related, although it also retained hierarchical assumptions about humanity and moral progress.^[2]

The book circulated within organised vegetarianism. Coulthard notes that The Dietetic Reformer, the Vegetarian Society's official publication, promoted The Perfect Way in Diet in October 1885 as fundamental to the society's cause and praised it in September 1883 for proposing a badge or symbol for vegetarians.^[2] It was listed for sale by the Vegetarian Society in The Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger in 1883.^[8]

Coulthard places the book within late Victorian debates over "the proper food of Man", in which diet was used to discuss humanity, social order and the relation between humans and animals. She argues that Kingsford's vegetarian theory anticipated later post-anthropocentric approaches to diet by treating food choice as a practice involving animal ethics, embodiment and environmental responsibility.^[2]

• History of vegetarianism
• Vegetarianism in the Victorian era
• Vegetarianism and religion
• Vegetarian nutrition
• Women and vegetarianism and veganism advocacy

• The Perfect Way in Diet at the Internet Archive