VegUtopia

The future's bright, the future's green!

The BBC's movie set in a vegan future, Carnage: Swallowing the Past (directed by Simon Amstell, and featuring Grime MC JME) adds to a rich history of vegan Utopias. Not least HG Wells's debut novel, The Time Machine.

Here's a piece I wrote about it in The Victorian Vegan:

The Victorian Vegan Time Machine

First published in 1895, the novella epitomises the Victorian age. Our hero explains time travel to a bemused audience through a mixture of scientific theory and spiritualism. He returns the following week to recount his experiences. The dishevelled Time Traveller describes a Utopian society in the year 802,701, populated by the peaceful, vegetarian people, the Eloi. “Fruit, bye the bye, was all their diet,” he says. “These people of the remote future were strict vegetarians... I found afterwards that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into extinction.”

However, the Time Traveller discovers the Eloi are predated upon the subterranean Morlocks, who farm them like cattle. While he watches the Eloi at play, he muses on their unfortunate plight: “Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.”

As much as The Time Machine can be read as a novel about science, social class, or as a ripping adventure story, it is also a vegan text; a fruitarian Utopia in which the Victorian Time Traveller falls in love with the Eloi, his revulsion of the ethics of meat farming and his plain hatred of its perpetrators, the Morlocks. The Time Traveller craves meat on his return to Victorian London, which in turn highlights the savage within Victorian society – one which history and evolution would eventually tame.

One person's Utopia is another Dystopia?