The Home-book of Life and Health (1858)

AUTHOR: Alcott, William Andrus

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

This volume collects William Alcott's “lectures on hygiene, or the laws of health” (iii). In the two lectures on “The Laws of Digestion” and “Food and Cookery” Alcott promotes ethical veganism primarily for health reasons, but he also makes clear that health is closely tied to ethics and religion. Food and its preparation are ethical issues. The book also advocates for dress reform.

For Alcott, the question what to eat concerns “what is right for us” and is thus “indispensable to the formation of Christian character” and “assumes a religious aspect. It becomes, as it ought, a matter of conscience – of duty – a matter between us and God our Creator” (317). Health is very much a religious or “semi-religious” (317) question. Hence, food choices and the appropriate means of food preparation constitute Alcott's primary concerns. He promotes a vegan diet for a variety of reasons: vegetables are “less liable to disease” compared to animal food (86); “[s]ome of the preparations of animal food […] are peculiarly liable to be poisonous” (90); “too much animal food” is one of the causes of dyspepsia and other illnesses like “[l]iver complaint” (104); vegetable food “is richest in nutrition” (96). Nutritional value, digestibility, and palatability are Alcott's main criteria (317). He thus discusses at length the relative merits of individual items of food like rice, potatoes, fruits, types of grain, nuts, beans, etc. Alcott finds that animal food and animal products are “slower of chymification” (486); that is, they take longer to digest than plant food. He notes that “[f]at meats” in particular are “very difficult of digestion” (96) and strongly advises against particular ways of preparing food, whether animal or vegetable, most notably frying (366).

Those who cannot or are unwilling to adhere to a vegan diet – “if we must continue,” as Alcott writes, “to bespread our table in such a way that it resembles more the dungeon of Bunyan's Doubting Castle than the table of a Christian” – should at least strive to “make [themselves] as acceptable monarchs and tyrants as [they] can” (364). Alcott strongly discourages the use of stimulants such as alcohol, opium, arsenic, coffee, salt, and tobacco (372-374, 135-138). Interspersed with his advice on food and diet are a series of anecdotes showing the advantages of  a plain, plant food diet. Likewise, he provides a number of accounts intended to emphasize the unhealthy nature of animal food and animal products.

Along with his suggestions regarding diet and nutrition, Alcott advocates for dress reform. Clothes, including shoes and boots, should not be too tight (116, 180) and must allow for sufficient ventilation (225-226). “Everything should sit loosely” (309), Alcott writes. He discusses the advantages and disadvantages of various fabrics and, echoing the views of the Free Produce Movement (also the practice of his cousin A. Bronson Alcott at Fruitlands), he remarks that cotton's “cheapness is a temptation which even some of the friends of free labor know not how to overcome” (309).