What Gandhi learned about vegetarianism in a London restaurant

St Bride’s Street in London is now a construction site. A huge foundation is being dug, possibly for a new corporate headquarters, similar to those of Deloitte and Goldman Sachs nearby. But any trace of the restaurant at 16 St Bride’s Street, which played such a key role in India’s history, has long vanished.

This was the Central Vegetarian Restaurant, where a young Mohandas Gandhi ate while studying to become a barrister in the Inns of Court close by. Gandhi had little interest in politics then. His main aim had been to make it to London, despite opposition from many in his community who thought he would start eating meat. To prove them wrong, he was resolute about vegetarianism.

But it wasn’t easy. On the long sea voyage, another passenger helped him strike a deal with the Indian sailors to supply him with their own food. In London, his landlady’s vegetarian food was limited to bread, butter, and jam. So, when he found this restaurant, it was truly providential. It didn’t just offer a more varied diet but also the company of British vegetarians who would be crucial to his personal development.

Victorian Britain was a meaty place. Rising prosperity had made meat affordable even for poorer people, whose earlier diet had been substantially plant-based. Eating meat was aspirational, so opting against it put one in radical company. British vegetarianism at that time brought together enthusiasts for alternative causes like animal rights, feminism, sexual liberation, and, crucially for Gandhi and India, anti-imperialism.

Gandhi was fascinated. His vegetarianism was due to his community’s practice, but there were people arguing an intellectual case for it. Soon he was meeting them, gaining invaluable experience in interacting with, and even debating, British people on equal terms. The small world of British vegetarians at the Central was where his activism began. When he moved to South Africa, his visiting card declared that he was a barrister and representative of the London Vegetarian Society.

Gandhi would find London’s vegetarian world much improved today. Plant-based milk is available at every cafe and corner shop. The ‘traditional Sunday roast’ menu at the Shaftesbury Tavern starts with meat but includes “roasted jackfruit seasoned with traditional English garden herbs.” Rock Sole, a 24/7 fish-and-chips shop, now advertises vegan fish burgers, calamari, and scampi alongside its regular fried fish options.

But fried chicken shops are also now ubiquitous on British streets. Fried chicken barely existed in Gandhi’s London era. With some exceptions raised for the rich, most chickens were kept for eggs and then, once they stopped laying, were stewed. Fried chicken only became common in the 1950s, with the development of broiler farming—bringing with it immense cruelties and health issues from the overuse of antibiotics required to produce tender, cheap chicken.

Today’s vegetarian activists target this kind of factory farming. What would Gandhi have made of their occasionally very confrontational tactics? On the one hand, they are a form of the civil disobedience he pioneered. But Gandhi also knew that protest had to be coupled with persuasion. In 1930-31, when he came to London for the Round Table Conference on India’s future, he took time to give a speech to the Vegetarian Society, where he counselled against the dogmatic attitudes he remembered from vegetarian debates all those years ago: “I found also that health was by no means the monopoly of vegetarians…”

Gandhi’s point was that rather than setting up divisive and potentially disprovable arguments, it was better to help people arrive at the moral basis for an argument. It also helps when, as in London today, the change is made easy with delicious, affordable vegetarian food.

Perhaps when the new building at St Bride’s Street is built, an entrepreneur could open such a restaurant there to commemorate what Gandhi learned at that location.