Upton Sinclair on Vegetarianism

Those familiar with Upton Sinclair as the author of The Jungle will probably not be too surprised to learn of his "experimenting with vegetarianism." However, his use of that phrase in his study of organized religion The Profits of Religion makes clear that the "experiment" was behind him--and that his historical researches were not encouraging in his attempt to be a vegetarian. As he tells us, in those days he "sought earnestly for evidence of a non-meat-eating race; but candor compelled me to admit that man was like the monkey and the pig and the bear--he was vegetarian when he could not help it." Indeed, he found "that all men crave meat, all struggle for it," and the privileged "get it" as the unprivileged do not, a situation exemplified by "the subject classes living in the midst of animals which they tend, but whose flesh they rarely taste" to be found the world over--and exemplified, too, by the prominence of sacrifices of meat (essentially, the giving of meat up to priests) within religious teaching likely "go[ing] back to the days of the cave-man." Indeed, especially in olden times it seemed to Sinclair that "a taboo upon meat" was an important part of the "mighty fortress of Graft" the priests built on the foundation of human fears and human needs, with the words in which he summed this up worth citing: "Confess your own ignorance and your own impotence, abandon yourself utterly, and then we, the sacred Caste, the Keepers of the Holy Secrets, will secure you pardon and respite . . . in exchange for fresh meat" (emphasis added).