Religion; Natural and Revealed (1844)

AUTHOR: Fowler, Orson Squire

Fowler explicitly argues that eating meat is immoral and that only a vegan diet is ethical. It is also the healthiest diet. In fact, from a phrenological perspective, veganism is ethical because it is healthy. Conversely, meat-eating is immoral because it is detrimental to our physical well-being.

The book expounds Fowler's phrenological approach to religion and morality, including an account of nutrition and correct diet. Fowler holds that “bread and fruit are the two main supporters of animal life, or at least, the best. Bread is emphatically the staff of life – the very best article of diet that our earth produces. Fruit is most wholesome, besides being so very delicious. But it is the two united which constitutes the diet for man” (134). He also refers the reader to and quotes extensively from his own Education and Self-Improvement on the topic of killing animals. For “to kill animals,” he writes, “without wounding benevolence [one of the phrenological organs of the brain] … is utterly impossible” (137). Consequently, Fowler thinks that “meat as an article of diet conflicts with the nature of man” (137). Since for Fowler “physical health is indispensable to moral purity,” a prominent “cause of that widely extended depravity of our race is to be looked for in the diet and physical habits of mankind – in the enormous quantities of ardent spirits, ale, beer, flesh, cucumbers, hot bread and butter, &c. &c., consumed” (165). Indeed, Fowler is explicit in his “regard [of] flesh as highly corrupting to the blood, as highly inflammatory, and thereby, as directly calculated to inflame the base of the brain; thereby producing moral impurity” (165).