A Vindication of Natural Diet

Percy Bysshe Shelley's Vindication of Natural Diet is a fervent, wide-ranging defense of vegetarianism that joins science, moral argument, and visionary idealism. Framed by an editor's account of the pamphlet's rarity and significance, the work reveals Shelley as a committed vegetarian for much of his life and a thinker who saw diet as inseparable from health, ethics, and social reform. He argues that the human body is naturally suited to a simple vegetable diet, and that meat-eating, alcohol, and other "civilized" appetites distort both physical well-being and moral character. Shelley extends this case through myth and history, tracing disease, vice, inequality, and tyranny to humanity's abandonment of natural living, and recasting Prometheus as a symbol of the fatal invention of flesh-eating. The pamphlet is enlivened by quotations from Shelley's poetry, which imagine a future free of bloodshed and cruelty, where humans and animals live in harmony. Historical examples, religious references, and personal testimony reinforce the claim that vegetarianism offers longevity, vigor, and a more humane society. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

Percy Bysshe Shelley est né en Angleterre en 1792.Suite à la publication d'écrits révolutionnaires, il fuit son pays en 1818. Il s'installe alors en Italie, où il écrira ses plus belles oeuvres. Il meurt en 1822 dans le naufrage de son voilier.