"'My friends, if it was wrong of you to kill and eat your fellow-men, it
is wrong also to kill and eat fish, flesh, and fowl. Birds, beasts, and
fishes, have as full a right to live as long as they can unmolested by
man, as man has to live unmolested by his neighbours. ...'
The old prophet had allowed the use of eggs and milk, but his disciples
decided that to eat a fresh egg was to destroy a potential chicken, and
that this came to much the same as murdering a live one. ...
About six or seven hundred years, however, after the death of the old
prophet, a philosopher appeared ... The conclusion he drew, or pretended
to draw, was that if it was sinful to kill and eat animals, it was not
less sinful to do the like by vegetables, or their seeds.
... after several hundred years of wandering in the wilderness of
philosophy, the country reached the conclusions that common sense had
long since arrived at. Even the Puritans after a vain attempt to subsist
on a kind of jam made of apples and yellow cabbage leaves, succumbed to
the inevitable, and resigned themselves to a diet of roast beef and
mutton, with all the usual adjuncts of a modern dinner-table."
-- Samuel Butler, Erewhon or Over the Range, 1901, Chap. 27, passim,
available at
http://www.planetpdf.com/ebookarticle.asp?ContentID=6137.