Towards an Enlightened Way of Eating
The Age of Enlightenment during Europe’s 18th 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 18th 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 were now able to think 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 mistreat them.
During the 18th 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 out of line, nor were cock fights or bear-baiting, the setting of bulldogs against bears as sport. Pigs were beaten to death with knotted ropes in the belief that it would make for more tender meat and, in Paris, the slaughter of animals was done in the alleys next to the city’s many, many butcher shops, which led to public outcry against the horrible sounds of slaughter, the blood in the streets and the stench of rotting flesh. When Napoléon took control of Paris in 1799, he began a program of extensive city works that including sewers, and slaughterhouses located on the outskirts of the city. The methods used to butcher animals were made no less humane, but at least people no longer had to witness the slaughter as they walked down the city streets – beginning a tradition of killing mass quantities of animals for meat behind closed doors that continues to this day.
The 1800s saw a number of religious and educational communities spring up which advocated vegetarian diets. In 1807, the Reverend William Cowherd broke with the Church of England and established the Bible Christian Church, 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, capitalizing 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 are often credited with coining the term "vegetarian."
In 1817, a disciple of Cowherd’s named William Metcalfe sailed for America with 41 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 (abstention from alcohol) and the importance of proper diet to good health. Through his lectures and his writings in the "Graham Journal of Health and Longevity," he counseled that certain foods and activities were unhealthy because of their "stimulating" qualities, including white bread, alcohol and the wearing of tight pants. He was a tireless advocate of the vegetarian diet – he compared human physiology to that of orangutans, concluding that vegetarian food was optimal for all primates – and founded the American Vegetarian Society in 1850. But Graham’s two greatest legacies are health related – he lectured extensively on the connections between diet and disease (stating that New York residents had weakened their resistance to epidemics through their unhealthy eating habits) and promoted the use of whole grains, denouncing the increasingly popular use of refined flour in baked goods, pointing out that while bakers were able to turn out more loaves of bread due to the faster baking times, 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, writing, "The entrance to paradise is still through the strait and narrow gate of self-denial. Eden’s avenue is yet guarded by the fiery-sworded cherubim, and humility and charity are the credentials for admission." The diet at Fruitlands 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, believing that the acquisition of material goods inhibits spirituality. For a time, Alcott admired the self-supporting activities of the nearby Shaker community, but ultimately condemned them for indulging in production and trade with the outside world. As well-intentioned as Fruitlands’ goals were, it didn’t take long to discover that successful communal living requires 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 Fruitlands in "Transcendental Wild Oats," and Fruitlands stands today as a museum.
