Vegetable Cookery (1812)

AUTHOR: Brotherton, Martha

KEYWORDS: animals, food, environment, pacifism, race, religion, Temperance

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen)

Martha Brotherton was English, but she and her husband moved to Philadelphia and started the Bible Christian Church (or the Society of Bible Christians). The cookbook was published in England, prior to her move and, in the Introduction, Brotherton sets out explicitly the Society’s ethical and health based beliefs in vegetarianism.

From the first sentence, the cookbook explicitly sets out its intention to show that eating animal flesh is unnecessary and that a vegetable diet is better for health and well-being. She offers (class-biassed) examples of Highland and Irish farmers who live entirely on vegetable food and possess great strength, linking to meat diets common contemporary diseases like scurvy, gout, and consumption that have been cured by vegetarian diets. She concludes that “Animal food, therefore, must always be more or less dangerous” (3):

If, then, we would enjoy health ourselves, and avoid laying the foundation of disease in our offspring, we must cease to degrade and bestialize our bodies by making them the burial-places for the carcasses of innocent brute animals, some healthy, some diseased, and all violently murdered (3).

She proposes that individual temperament is causally related to food: carnivorous animals are “savage, ferocious creatures” (4) while herbivorous creatures “wander tranquilly” and “manifest their innocence by various playful sports with each other” (4). Carnivorous nations, such as the Tartars, “possess a degree of ferocity of mind and fierceness of character which forms the leading feature of all carnivorous animals” (4). But herbivorous nations, like Brahmins and Gentoo, are characterized by “a mildness of feeling directly the reverse of the former” (4). Brotherton implicitly links humans and animals as displaying the same behavior based on their food choices, adding that killing for food causes a loss of humanity. The heart is “implanted by the DEITY, [and] should be considered as a guide to human conduct” (5). She poses the rhetorical question: did God intend for his creations to eat every meal with regret and sadness? In response, she notes that if humans were forced to kill their own food, they would stop eating meat. In her discussion of human anatomy she argues that humans were intended to be frugivorous animals and developed meat-eating out of an “acquired habit” (5): “If, then, men have degenerated from their original simplicity and innocence, is it to be contended that custom is a sufficient proof that their conduct is now right?” (6).

If land use were reformed so that the land devoted to raising animals was used to produce crops then many more people could be fed. In answer to the question what would happen to the cattle if humans stopped eating them, Brotherton observes that they are being unnaturally promoted by farmers and if the meat industry ended they would eventually die off. Due to breeding, killing and eating animals does not reduce their numbers.

Brotherton makes an explicit connection between religion and vegetarianism: “Some persons adopt the system on account of health, or from motives of compassion to the brute creation; but they cannot see how the mode of living, as to food, can have anything to do with religion” (8). She cites Scripture showing God’s rules on food: Gen 1. 29 (“every herb bearing seed...”); “Thou shalt not kill” (“Who dare limit the precept to the killing of human beings, when God has said, ‘Ye shall neither add to the law nor diminish aught form it?’” ... “’Flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat: neither shall ye eat any manner of FAT of ox, or of sheep, or of goat, in any of your dwellings’” (9). Judith xi. 12: “eating of animal food was what God had forbidden by his laws”; “Israelites were with manna for forty years in the wilderness, altough they had much cattle” (8). Brotherton debunks common passages of scripture used to argue in favor of eating meat. Explaining the various meanings of the word “fish” in the age of Jesus, Brotherton concludes that there is no evidence to conclude definitively that Jesus and the apostles and the fishermen really did eat fish (13):

Thus we have endeavoured, as far as our limits will allow, to state the grounds on which the members of the Society of Bible-Christians abstain from animal food, which is done, not only in obedience to the Divine command, but because it is an observance which, if more generally adopted, would prevent much cruelty, luxury, disease, besides many other evils which cause misery in society. It would be productive of much good by promoting health, long life, and happiness; - and thus be a most effectual means of reforming mankind. It would entirely abolish that greatest of all curses, War; for those who are so conscientious as not to kill animals will never murder human beings. On all these accounts, the system cannot be too much recommended (14).

“It is in opposition to a practice [meat-eating] manifestly brutal and savage; a practice which cannot answer any ends but those of luxury, disease, cruelty, and oppression - ends of all others the most opposed to the true principles of CHRISTIANITY” (15). Linked to this is Brotherton's promotion of Temperance; she lists the negative effects of alcohol on society -- drunkenness leads to murder, family breakdown, violence, loss of members of the workforce, etc. (15-16) -- and calls on Ministers of religion to step in and prevent the consumption of alcohol (17). The benefits of drinking water include benefits to the humors because water keeps the phlegmatic humors running smoothly (18-19).

For Brotherton, an end to animal exploitation and specifically meat-eating could lead to a kind of utopia: “It is evident that, by imitating those of the golden age, we should be free and happy. There would be fewer diseases, less crime, no wars, no slavery; but universal peace and good will would be established among men” (8).

Last updated on May 23rd, 2024

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