A historian comments...
On today's 'Long Read' in The Guardian, which is on fruitarians and controversies and feuds within the fruitarian community.
We heaved a sigh, but were not exactly surprised, when this particular manifestation is dated to, ooooh, the 70s.
Except, you know, not: goes back a lot further. {Though this is one of the areas I shall have to investigate for the New Project).
Wikipedia mentions that eminent Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps was a vegetarian, but I have been led to believe that he was a fruitarian, or at least, anti-cooking, though the tale of his going on a trade mission to the USSR in winter and still expecting a nice plateful of chopped raw vegetable matter to his meals may be apocryphal.
Goldring in his account of the 1917 Club in The Nineteen-Twenties mentions that there were those among its membership who would not maltreat a vegetable by cooking it.
Am away from my books and in particular Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska's Managing the Body, which might shed further light.
The whole emphasis on purity in the contemporary manifestations makes me think back even further and have vague recollections of C19th religious sects which were probably all about this too (though not, probably, the raw durian fruit). This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2194074.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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