Walden (1854)

AUTHOR: Thoreau, Henry David

Thoreau explicitly identifies himself as a "Pythagorean" (a contemporary term for "vegan"), though he occasionally eats salted pork or whatever fish (233) or woodchuck (76-77) he can hunt. Largely, though, he relies on wild fruits, farmed vegetables, and corn meal purchased from the village: “I learned from my two years’ experiment that … man may use as simple diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner … simply off a dish of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted” (78, 79). He also speaks of the frequent question he receives from neighbors who inquire about his vegetarian lifestyle. Thoreau uses the trope of the gluttonous man to signify a gluttonous capitalist nation; other Abolitionists, like Lydia Maria Child and Frederick Douglass, use the trope of gluttony to describe slave-owning.

KEYWORDS: food, animals, land usage, education, nature, morality, imagination, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, Aïcha Bouchelaghem & Deborah Madsen):

Thoreau describes his project as essentially educative; he learns what are the true necessities of life and what are not. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (118) and finds that most human enterprises -- from railroads to newspapers and postage -- are a waste of time.  

He advises that the advice of those who argue that vegetarianism is not healthy should be ignored, and points out the lack of logic of one such person: “One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones, walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle” (10). Later, he reports: “There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions, as if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once, -- for the root is faith, -- I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say” (83-84).

Thoreau proposes that the only necessity of life is “to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us,” referring to food as fuel. There is no necessity to steal birds’ feathers for beds and “Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food is generally more various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary” (15-16).

The primary reasons for a vegan diet are hygiene, nutrition, cost, and aesthetics (or, in Transcendentalist terms, "imagination"):

The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and, besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, &c.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects; and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind (284).

Thoreau explores the economic argument in favor of a vegan diet: reduced costs and thus reduced amount of work. “I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them” (272). The simplicity of a vegan diet has the additional advantage of requiring no hired or enslaved labor, whether human or other-than-human: “I learned . . . that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plough it, . . . he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand ... and thus ... not be tied to an ox, or horse, or pig, as at present” (71-72). Land can be used more efficiently and, a further and profound benefit of raising his own vegetable foods, is that Thoreau can cultivate a much more profound relation with the natural world: “As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual” (207).

However, moral and aesthetic reasons dominate his thinking about veganism: “Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live . . . by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way, -- as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn, -- and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet” (286). He returns to the hygienic argument that promotes veganism as "clean" and carnism as "unclean": “Besides, there is something essentially unclean about this diet, and all flesh” (283); “It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination” (285).

Ultimately, Thoreau argues, veganism is integral to the progress of humanity: “Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized” (286).

 

Last updated on March 8th, 2024

SNSF project 100015_204481

@VLS@veganism.social | VeganLiteraryStudies | @veganliterarystudies |