Toward an Enlightened Way of Eating
The Age of Enlightenment during Europe’s eighteenth century saw an upsurge in interest in vegetarianism following hundreds of years in which diet was dictated by need; after all, during periods of famine and disease, one eats whatever one can get. But by the eighteenth century, medicine had curtailed many of the more widespread diseases, and Europeans had discovered a number of delicious New World vegetables like potatoes, cauliflower, and corn. The intellectuals of the time—including the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who started thinking about loftier issues than mere survival—began to reappraise man’s place in the order of things. For the first time, arguments were put forth that animals were intelligent, feeling creatures and that it was immoral to kill or mistreat them.
During the eighteenth century, painters like Oudry and Delacroix made artworks that showed animals as individuals with personalities rather than just beasts to be used and slaughtered for human convenience. During this time, the treatment of animals was often horrific; beating one’s horse wasn’t considered reprehensible, neither were cockfights, bear baiting, or the
setting of bulldogs against bears for sport.
Pigs were beaten to death with knotted ropes in the belief that it would make for more tender meat; in Paris, the slaughter of animals was done in the alleys next to the city’s butcher shops, and this led to public outcry against the horrible sounds of slaughter, the blood in the streets, and the stench of rotting flesh. When Napoleon took control of Paris in 1799, he began a program of extensive city works that included construction of sewers and slaughterhouses on the outskirts of the city. The methods used to butcher animals remained the same, but at least people no longer had to witness the slaughter as they walked down the city streets; thus began the tradition of mass killing of animals for meat behind closed doors that continues to this day.
The 1800s saw the emergence of a number of religious and educational communities which advocated vegetarian diets. In 1807, Reverend William Cowherd broke with the Church of England and established the Bible Christian Church; it was founded on a literal interpretation of the scriptures. Cowherd believed that the Bible prohibited the eating of meat—a view that was not shared by leaders of the Church of England—and he quickly developed a large congregation.
His timing was perfect; he capitalized on a widespread backlash to the industrial revolution that inspired a more romanticized view of nature and animals. Cowherd’s flock abstained from consuming meat, coffee, tea, tobacco, and alcohol, and many also eschewed dairy products and eggs. The Bible Christian Church handed out free bowls of vegetable soup to the poor, and it is often credited with coining the term “vegetarian.”
In 1817, a disciple of Cowherd’s named William Metcalfe sailed for America with forty-one church members and formed a small but influential Philadelphia congregation. Among Metcalfe’s followers was a Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham, a raw foods enthusiast and inventor of the graham cracker. Graham toured the United States, giving lectures on temperance (abstinence from alcohol) and the importance of proper diet to sustain good health. Through his lectures and his writings in the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, he counseled that certain foods, such as white bread and alcohol, and activities, such as the wearing of tight pants, were unhealthy because of their “stimulating” qualities.
He was a tireless advocate of the vegetarian diet and founded the American Vegetarian Society in 1850; he compared human physiology to that of orangutans, concluding that vegetarian food was optimal for all primates. He lectured extensively on the connection between diet and disease, stating that New York residents had weakened their resistance to epidemics through their unhealthy eating habits. He promoted the use of whole grains, denouncing the increasingly popular use of refined flour in baked foods and pointing out that while bakers were able to turn out more loaves of bread due to the faster baking techniques, the nutritional value of the bread was lost.
Among those that Metcalfe and Graham influenced was Amos Bronson Alcott, father of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott. A writer, philosopher, and educator, Alcott was a proponent of transcendentalism, which began as a reform movement within the Unitarian Church and proposed that the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains. In 1843, he and educational reformer Charles Lane established Fruitlands, an ambitious utopian community in Massachusetts. Gathering together a small but eager group of disaffected intellectuals, Alcott advocated an austere vegan lifestyle, stating, “The entrance to paradise is still through the straight and narrow gate of self-denial. Eden’s avenue is yet guarded by the fiery-armed cherubim, and humility and charity are the credentials for admission.” The diet at Fruitland consisted of fruit, grains, beans, and peas. All animal flesh and by-products were forbidden due to their corrupting nature, and tea, coffee, rice, molasses, and sugar were off-limits because they were produced by slave labor.
The community’s goal was to produce only what they needed; they believed that the acquisition of material goods inhibits spirituality. For a time, Alcott admired the self-supporting activities of the Shaker community but ultimately condemned them for indulging in production and trade with the outside world. As well-intentioned as Fruitland’s goals were, successful communal living required more than a well-tended vegetable garden and discussions of philosophy; Alcott’s experiment lasted just seven months. Louisa May Alcott wrote of her experience at Fruitland in Transcendental Wild Oats; Fruitland stands today as a museum.