The Sin of Eating Meat

This chapter analyses the negative perception of meat-eating and the positive sense of meat abstention shown by the propagandas of three ferocious European dictatorships: the Italian Regency of Fiume, Italian fascism and Nazism. In relation to the topic of this book, what is interesting is that the disease linked to dietary change, here, is not physical illness. Rather, it is a moral form of disease. In fact, these propagandas related eating meat to their enemies, especially in the Fiume and in the Nazi cases. In the languages of these propagandas, eating meat meant impurity, inability to reach the highest level of knowledge and wisdom and, finally, how all dictatorships refer to their enemies, which is, inferiority. That is why I have termed this kind of vegetarianism as ‘sacred’, because, in the intention of the propaganda, it conferred a label of ‘sacrality’ on those who professed it, in contrast with those who did not.