Education and Self-improvement (1844)

AUTHOR: Fowler, Orson Squire

Fowler explicitly advocates for a vegan diet as a means of both physical and mental well-being and self-improvement: “Men must learn to eat and drink first – must govern their appetites, must avoid flesh and condiments, and live mainly on fruit and farinaceous food, before they can expect to be more virtuous, or, consequently, more happy” (110). For Fowler, “eating improper kinds, and enormous quantities, of food, and [...] drinking unwholesome drink” is the “one cause of diversified and aggravated depravity greater than any other” (196). The consumption of meat, in particular, is “one prolific cause of the prevalence of vice in our carcass-eating age and nation” (197). It is “injurious; because it [...] is highly stimulating, and calculated to inflame the nervous system” (89). Fowler also lists “[t]ea, coffee condiments, spices, candies, green corn, green fruit, bakers' trash, sourcrout, pickles, cucumbers” as similarly detrimental to health and morality (197). “Gluttony” and “over eating, or the enormous stuffing and gormandizing” are at least as dangerous: “They all degrade man, animalize his nature, fill our prisons, penitentiaries, and mad houses, and spread their baneful influences over all classes, especially the higher” (197).

Fowler also points out that the “cruelties practised upon our animals that are slaughtered for the meat market, are sickening, and incredible” (241). He provides the following description:

See the poor calves, sheep, &c, tumbled together into the smallest possible space; their limbs tied; unfed, bellowing continually, and in a most piteous tone, their eyes rolled up in agony, taken to the slaughter-house, and whipped, or rather pelted by the hour with a most torturing instrument, and then strung up by the hind legs, a vein opened, and they dying by inches from the gradual loss of blood, the unnatural suspension, and the cruel pelting – and all to make their meat white and tender (241-242).

“To kill animals outright, is horrible,” Fowler concludes, “but words are inadequate to express the enormity of the refined cruelty now generally practiced upon helpless dumb beasts by these murderers of the brute creation” (242). He equally inveighs against “shooting birds,” which he deems particularly immoral: “To kill them suddenly by a shot, is not particularly barbarous, because they suffer little, and only lose the pleasure of living; but to kill them from the love of killing, must harden the heart” (242).