SIR,—The manners and mentality of the official who presided at the public roasting of an ox at Barking seem to belong to some bygone era. He referred to you, we read, as “the man from the London Vegetarian Society,” and said that he would rather be carving you than the ox. I venture to go a step further, and to suggest that if our modern laws did not prohibit, he would have preferred to be eating you to the ox. We know from the evidence of travellers that the taste of human flesh is agreeable; and I cannot help suspecting that to have lived in an age when cannibalism was a civic practice would have suited the Mayor of Barking fairly well. If you, Mr. Editor, had met him in those prehistoric times, I fear you would have had to be on your guard.
Yours faithfully,
HENRY S. SALT
Brighton
14th October, 1935.
The Vegetarian News, Vol. XV No. 179, November 1935, p. 316