James Fenimore Cooper was born on 15 September 1789 in Burlington, New Jersey, and died on 14 September 1851 in, Cooperstown, New York. While there is no evidence that Cooper adopted a plant-based diet, he writes in The American Democrat (1828) about the problems of the American diet, expressing sympathy with the "vegetable diet" as it was then known. He is very critical of the food that he describes as typically "heavy, coarse, ill prepared and indigestible," not least because of "the predominance of grease in the American kitchen." National character and national morality are linked significantly to food and also to alcohol abuse, as well as the wastefulness that elsewhere Cooper explores in relation to unsustainable and morally indefensible practices of environmental and animal exploitation, such as the species extinction of the passenger pigeon criticized in The Pioneers (1823) as a "vicious bloodletting" and "moral wrong."

 

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