Becoming What You Eat: Anna Kingsford's Vegetarian Posthuman

Abstract

By situating Anna Kingsford's vegetarian writings within the paired context of late-Victorian dietetic discourse and modern posthuman philosophy, this article demonstrates both the Victorian association between diet and evolution and the contemporary applications of late-nineteenth-century dietary ethics. Kingsford was a leading scientist, antivivisector, feminist, and mystic who helped shape the Victorian vegetarian movement. Her influential rhetoric emphasized that vegetarianism would nourish interspecies relations and allow Victorians to materialize novel forms of subjectivity, kinship, community, and responsibility appropriate for the post-Darwinian landscape. This article reads her foundational vegetarian treatise, The Perfect Way in Diet (1881), along with her published lectures on vegetarianism through the overlapping lenses of posthumanism and new materialism, illuminating the congruence between Kingsford's call to embody ethics and the contemporary posthuman call to become an ecologically situated self. I argue that by framing vegetarianism as a generative, affirmative kin-making practice, grounded in the shared materiality and interests of humans and nonhumans, Kingsford articulates a posthuman dietary ethics.