Vegetarian Myth

The Bible Christians came to the United States as a largely working-class group, drawn toward a meatless diet in cities like Liverpool and Manchester because of its affordability. While the group advocated for dietary reform while in England, it did little to reach out beyond its own small community. However, once in the United States and under Metcalfe’s guidance, Bible Christians began to branch outward. While many of the church’s original settlers left Bible Christianism aft er arriving in Philadelphia, the group’s reform-oriented ethos appealed to sectors of the city’s growing middle class.  

Spurred by Metcalfe’s growing visibility, and despite the group’s avowed antisectarian principles, the Bible Christians began to formalize their organization. In May 1823, they purchased a plot of land in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood on the north side of the city. On December 21, the Bible Christian Church opened its doors for the first time on North Third Street and Girard Avenue. With a new, more visible presence the group continued to grow, welcoming in a combination of converts and recently arrived British Bible Christian migrants. In 1830, the group was formally incorporated by the Pennsylvania state legislature. As the Bible Christians’ constitution specified, “none can be members . . . but those who conform to the rules, regulations, and discipline of said Church; which rules require abstinence from animal food.”  

Metcalfe’s increasing public presence helped spread the vegetable diet gospel outside the walls of the Bible Christian Church, introducing the notion to a general public that was becoming increasingly interested in reform. With its evangelical, reformist tradition, Philadelphia was the perfect city for the Bible Christians to attempt their experiment in meatless living. Knowledge of the Bible Christians’ creed continued to grow, even beyond Philadelphia.

Asenath Nicholson—an abolitionist, writer, and former teacher— opened her first Graham boardinghouse in New York City at 118 Williams Street in 1835, following it up three years later with another home at 21 Beekman Street. The so-called Temperance Boarding House offered Grahamites the basics of boardinghouse living—a place to sleep, three meals a day, and social interaction—with the added supplies necessary to live a Graham-endorsed life. A vegetable diet was offered; and breakfast, dinner, and supper were served in a communal dining area to encourage interaction among the faithful. Cold baths, hard mattresses, and Graham bread were mandated in order to encourage health, circulation, and proper digestion. 

Located in an area filled with reform organizations—the American Anti-Slavery Society’s offi ces were down the block at 48 Beekman— Nicholson’s temperance boardinghouse served as a meeting place for New York’s reform-minded citizens. While dietetics may have been a central fi xation of the home’s residents, an all-encompassing attitude toward social reform prevailed. According to William Tyler, a professor of Latin and Greek at Amherst College and a resident of the Graham House on William Street, “the Boarders in this establishment are not only Grahamites but Garrisonites—not only reformers in diet, but radicalists in Politics. Such a knot of Abolitionists I never before fell in with.”

Most important, the boardinghouse ensured interaction between Grahamites, who shared experiences, meals, and ideologies. Grahamites were no longer content to share their dietary theories solely in lecture halls. Reformers also desired to live in communities of like-minded individuals within the urban landscape. The boardinghouse provided inhabitants meatless fare and the opportunity to discuss the important issues of the day—dietetics, slavery, suff rage, and temperance.  

Sylvester Graham himself was not directly involved in the day-to-day operations of the boardinghouses he inspired. As much as Graham was responsible for the spreading of early proto-vegetarianism, practitioners morphed the ideology into a variety of life experiences. As Nicholson noted, while Graham served as an inspiration, his lectures and writings were merely “a starting point to be enlarged and improved as practice might suggest.” Graham’s dietary principles served as the backbone for boardinghouse life; how these ideals were enacted depended on a variety of local forces including geography, economics, and demographics. Despite this disconnect, during the 1830s and 1840s proto-vegetarians were largely labeled Grahamites, by themselves and others, because of Graham’s prominent public persona.  

But why the need for Grahamite boardinghouses in cities rather than the private practice of a Grahamite lifestyle? Urban areas, stricken with perceived vice and degradation, were seen as both morally and physically dangerous by reformers. New York City, with its commercial sex districts and visible brothels, was seen as particularly threatening to young, middle-class men living on their own, renting rooms throughout the city. One publication remarked on the Beekman Street home’s demographics, finding it “truly surprising to see how many temporary sojourners in the city, from different parts of the country, take lodgings at the Graham House, in order to be accommodated with the plain mode of living they practise at home.”  

Nicholson recognized the existence of these threats, believing that a Graham lifestyle provided moral clarity to her boarders and encouraged positive dietary habits by creating a small community of Grahamite practitioners.  Noting that “flesh-eating produces a moral obtuseness and irritableness of spirit,” Nicholson offered Graham bread, fresh vegetables, and cold baths in order to produce a “firmness of nerve, and clearness of intellect” to better prepare her residents for the dangers of city life. The proof of the diet’s success, Nicholson pointed out, was in the level of health of the houses’ residents, who exhibited “not a shadow of cholera . . . and the prevailing influenza, which has taken the lives of many.” With a proper, natural diet and a little exercise and fresh air, boardinghouse residents were able to overcome any illnesses that might appear. 

All boardinghouses had house rules prescribing meal times, visitor policies, and cost. Nicholson’s Grahamite home was guided by a litany of regulations, thirteen principles of the natural life inspired by Graham and his lectures. Visitors agreed to abide by these rules in order to remain in good standing as residents of the boardinghouse. Democratic principles allowed for some amendment of the regulations, relying on boarder votes to change prescribed dinner and supper times. Feather mattresses were banned, as Graham lectured that soft beds diminished “physiological powers.”  Exercise was mandated for residents, either a thirty-to-sixty-minute walk or a slow horse ride, though guidelines encouraged residents to avoid “all violence and excess” in their efforts. Lastly, during a time when regular bathing was rare, residents were required to take a daily sponge bath and at least one full bath per week.

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In 1835, Nicholson authored the first American vegetarian cookbook, Nature's Own Book.[5] Nicholson stated that "good bread, pure water, ripe fruit, and vegetables are my meat and drink exclusively." The book utilized some recipes with dairy, but Nicholson personally advocated against its use.[6]

Nicholson also authored, Kitchen Philosophy for Vegetarians.[7] The book was published by William Horsell in 1849. A review in the Vegetarian Advocate, noted that "butter and eggs are excluded" from the recipes.[8] The Vegan Society have cited the book as the first vegan cookbook.[9]

Similar rules prevailed at Boston’s first Grahamite boardinghouse, though without the flexibility of democratic decision making for meal times. The home opened at 23 Brattle Street near Harvard Square in April 1837.  The Boston Grahamite home was run by David Cambell, an abolitionist who in 1840 spread the gospel of Graham to reform-minded students at Oberlin College in Ohio. Students embraced the lifestyle, and the college briefly banned meat from all of its dining halls.  Boston’s Grahamite boardinghouse purportedly drew a mixed crowd as well, ranging from “the most laborious to the most sedentary,” and from the permanent to the “transient or occasional.” The home reported housing between twenty and thirty permanent boarders at a time, consistently throughout the year. Advocates for the Boston house emphasized that it sought to draw healthy, vigorous individuals already acclimated to the Graham diet, rather than “invalids” who were “pale and sickly.” Homes that drew unhealthy boarders had another name, one that Grahamites wanted to avoid being connected with: hospitals.  Boston’s Grahamite boardinghouse was also utilized as a meeting place for dietary and social reformers.  

Animal flesh was barred from the New York Grahamite home, as were other poisons such as caffeine and alcohol. Toasted, stale Graham bread brewed with water was off ered to those who craved a cup of morning coffee.  The simple meals furnished centered on vegetables and whole grains. Breakfast consisted of the omnipresent Graham bread, along with a variety of fresh fruits, including apples, peaches, cherries, and strawberries.  

Interestingly, eggs were allowed at the breakfast table, and were even considered an important component of Grahamite diets, despite being animal-based. Eggs were not directly connected to death or suffering. As a result, Grahamites found them to be acceptable for consumption. Dinner— served in the afternoon and the largest meal of the day—consisted primarily of hominy, rice, porridge, and a variety of seasonal vegetables including beets, potatoes, carrots, turnips, and squash. Supper was a simpler, lighter meal and included Graham bread, milk, oatmeal, hominy, barley gruel, or mashed cornmeal. 

Grahamites represented a cross-section of moral and scientific reformers in the United States. The group’s message eventually reached as far as the South and West, as evidenced by letters and articles that appeared in group’s publication, the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity.  Grahamism, however, was most organized and popular in the Northeast, where Grahamite boardinghouses proliferated.  

The houses drew a mix of urban middle-class reformers. Similar to abolitionists of the period, Grahamites were primarily skilled artisans or trade workers, including housewrights, piano makers, grocers, merchants, bookbinders, and cabinetmakers. These were individuals with respectable occupations, and the boardinghouses provided structure and moral guidance. Residents were often interested in the total reform ideology associated with Grahamism. The boardinghouse on Beekman Street, for example, housed at various times such well-known New York reformers as New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, pacifist Henry Clarke Wright, abolitionists Lewis Tappan and Theodore Weld, and future president of the American Anti-Slavery Society Arthur Tappan. Transcendentalist author Ralph Waldo Emerson— though not a Grahamite—did visit once to dine with Greeley and utopian socialist Albert Brisbane in March 1842.

The Graham Journal , in contrast, focused on dietetics as a vehicle for healthy living rather than as a product of a better lifestyle. At the center of the Grahamite journal was a structured reform regimen that hinged on avoiding meat. With the absorption of the Graham Journal , Library of Health shifted from a generalized physiological journal to one focused on meatless dietary reform. Library of Health supported the continued growth of a meatless, proto-vegetarian community, in the process pushing meat abstention further away from the sole terrain of Grahamites.  

The new focus on meat abstention was quickly and readily apparent by 1840. The year’s first issue advocated for the use of a vegetable diet for children. The article opened with a conversion story, relaying the life of “J. B.,” a three-year-old boy afflicted with large scabs all over his face. With the adoption of a vegetable diet, the author wrote, “a great change was manifest in the appearance of the child,” and the scabs “entirely disappeared.” The long-term benefi ts of dietary change were even more impressive, as the child seemed “to have known nothing about sickness or pain” since adopting the meat-free diet. This development was all the more remarkable given that J. B. had been “living, for the last year, in a region of the West, where, for months, almost all others were sick and dying.” The child enjoyed better teeth, smoother skin, and a general increase in mental capabilities.

  In another article, the author tackled the difficulties faced in challenging meat culture and the lack of thought average Americans gave to their dietary choices. The writer argued that the majority of the population believed “that flesh-meat is not only the kind of food on which they were intended principally to subsist, but . . . it is indispensably necessary to preserve their strength, and to enable them to perform their various avocations in life.” In order to gain converts it was essential to impress on the public that a “vegetable diet . . . by its mild but nutritive qualities, keeps the circulation in the human system regular and cool.” The legacy of the need to keep the humoral body in balance was clearly still apparent. When properly executed, a meatless diet prepared the body to “become an appropriate temple of the mind, and leads man to a more perfect mode of being.” Throughout 1840 the journal increased its coverage of dietary issues, even reprinting William Beaumont’s digestive experiments that had appeared in the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity. Library of Health made the connection between dietary choice and scientifi c discovery explicit.  

By the middle of 1840, Library of Health started featuring vegetable diet stories at the beginning of each issue, proof that the publication’s conversion to a natural dietetic journal was complete. The first volume of the year featured an article titled “Nutritive Properties of Various Kinds of Food,” where vegetables, grains, and fruits were presented as easily digestible and nutritious, whereas meat was difficult to assimilate into the bloodstream and thus of little dietary value. Of the fifty most nutritive food products listed, forty were vegetables, grains, or fruits. By including flesh foods on the list—though farther down in the rankings—the journal hoped to illustrate its scientific accuracy and rigor, advocating for a vegetable diet through study and observation.  The same issue advocated for the use of vegetable foods to ensure productive work, relaying the story of a young laborer who gained mental and physical strength from his dietary change. With the new meatless diet, the article claimed, it was possible to work “on an average, twelve hours a day at hard labor.” Physical labor had previously made the worker unable to “relish for close study” because his “mind would shrink from it.” However, with the support of a meatless diet, the young man reported becoming “perfectly calm, my mind clear, and delighted with close study and patient thought.” Dietary conversion made him not only a better worker but also a sharper, more complete citizen, a model of the republican self-made man.

"Nismes (Gard) 4th Aug., 1853.

"Sir,—I have read with much interest the second edition of your precepts, based upon chemistry, for the diminution of obesity, and have carefully examined every statement you have so clearly set forth. The result is, that I am anxious to follow your advice, and to place myself under your course of treatment. I am a doctor of philosophy and professor in the Imperial Lyceum at Nismes. During my whole life I have struggled against this terrible obesity, but almost always in vain. Nevertheless I have succeeded upon two occasions: the first, about twenty years ago, by travelling on foot for three months among the forests and mountains of the north of Europe; the second time, about twelve years ago, by dint of continued and intense intellectual labour. Owing to the sedentary nature of my duties, obesity has since returned in a more threatening manner, and is no doubt the exciting cause of many ailments to which I am now subject, such as accumulation of mucus in the air passages, giving rise to cough, more especially troublesome because I am obliged to talk during the greater part of the day; cold feet, with swelling of the legs and ankles, &c., so that I am no longer able to perform the duties upon which my daily bread depends. My medical attendant can do nothing for me. He has prescribed purgatives and a vegetable diet, without any good result. I have taken thousands of Morrison's pills, and am worse rather than better, and now my mind is made up to make a trial of your plan of treatment, in full confidence that a cure may yet be accomplished.

"Doctor Halberg,
"Professor at the Imperial Lyceum of Nismes."

On the 8th of June Dr. Halberg wrote:

"I find myself infinitely better, my breathing is easy, and I am considerably reduced in size. My great desire is that the swelling in my legs may wholly disappear.

"Dr. Halberg."