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History List
Detractors argued that Graham was antiscientific, a proud, vain, and demagogic speaker who offered exaggeration and blustery language rather than empirical proof. To his followers, Graham was a prophet who gave practical advice for improved health, spirit, and intellect.
A Defence of the Graham System of Living
January 1, 1835
The Minnesota Farmers’ Institute’s Annual reported on the differences between Graham and white bread, recommending “the use of some graham bread in families of growing children,” though warning that the bran in the bread could be “irritating to a delicate digestive system.”
Minnesota Farmers' Institute Annual
January 1, 1835
Sylvester Graham uses the cholera epidemic as a way to gain religious believers, arguing that overstimulation through meat and alcohol caused the epidemic. He also arged that the physiology of humans matched herbivores, that it wasn't about animal rights and that the goal of a meatless diet was a “more healthy, vigorous and long-lived” life, allowing for a “more active and powerful” intellect able to develop the most “moral faculties . . . rendered by suitable cultivation.”
A Lecture on Epidemic Diseases Generally, and Particularly the Spasmodic Cholera by Sylvester Graham - 1838
June 1, 1832
By the spring of 1831, Graham began delivering a series of lectures at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on what he labeled “the Science of Human Life,” including instruction on meat-free living, temperance, and the dangers of masturbation.
Lectures on the Science of Human Life by Sylvester Graham
April 1, 1831
Reverend Metcalfe began to try to get his message across by publishing his religious ideas. "The words of the Bible, Bible Christians believed, clearly called for the abstinence from the flesh of animals as food, intoxicating liquors as beverages, as well as war, capital punishment, and slavery."
THE RURAL MAGAZINE, AND LITERARY EVENING FIRE-SIDE
January 1, 1820
Joseph Brotherton replaces the late Cowherd as minister and preaches the values of vegetarianism. His wife publishes the first cookcook called Vegetable Cookery dedicated to ovo-lacto vegetarian meals, although they had copious amounts of butter.
Vegetable Cookery: With an Introduction, Recommending Abstinence from Animal Food and Intoxicating Liquors
January 1, 1812
On Sunday 29 January 1809, the Reverend William Cowherd stepped into the pulpit of his Salford church to issue his sermon and changed the world forever. "Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat."
The Vegetarian Crusade
January 29, 1809
The Bushmen: "I gathered that the magic of the steenbuck(small deer) was that of the innocent, the gentle and the beautiful combined in one. It was a creature – or a person, as he called it – too beautiful to be aware of imperfection, too innocent to know fear, too gentle to suspect violence."
The Heart of the Hunter
January 10, 1961
The Bushmen talk about the star in the Great Dipper "that star, he said, was a great hunter who hunted in far away dangerous places in the shape of a lion." Whereas upon Sirius "Could I not see how fat it was, how heavily it sat there in the midst of plenty in the sky?"
The Heart of the Hunter
January 9, 1961
The Bushmen "went straight on to skinning and cutting up the animals with skill and dispatch" and "kept up a wonderful murmur of thanksgiving which swelled at moments in their emotion to break on a firm phrase of a song of sheer deliverance. How cold, inhuman, and barbarous a civilized butcher’s shop appeared in comparison!"
The Heart of the Hunter
January 5, 1961
A traveling band of Bushman of the Kalahari Desert in Africa ask for help while thirsty and starving and describe how they were walking towards the lightning but were afraid to approach the Land-Rovers because the police had arrested someone for hunting a giraffe.
The Heart of the Hunter
January 2, 1961
Richard Baxter, a priest born in 1615, wrote about the sin of gluttony and says the causes are both excess and "Or else it may be an excess in the delicious quantity, when more regard is had to the delight and sweetness than is fit."
Directions for Governing the Appetite Or, Directions against Gluttony
January 1, 1673
Hamilton describes how the Cheyennes hunt buffalo, drying and turn the meat and tallow into pemmican, being 5 times as energy dense as fresh meat. He also describes the practice of using dupuyer - a long fatty strip of flesh along the buffalo backbone that is cherished above all else.
My sixty years on the plains, trapping, trading, and Indian fighting by William Thomas Hamilton
May 1, 1842
The Bison of North America are described. "And it also requires experience to enable him choose a fat animal the best looking Buffaloe is not always the fattest and a hunter by constant practice may lay down rules for selecting the fattest when on foot which would be no guide to him when running upon horseback for he is then placed in a different position and one which requires different rules for choosing. The cows are fattest in Octr and the Bulls in July."
Journal of a Trapper
January 4, 1843
"When the band is first located the hunters keep at some distance behind to avoid dispersing them and to frighten them the more a continual noise is kept up by hallooing and shooting over them which causes immediate confusion and collision of the band and the weakest Elk soon begin to drop on the ground exhausted"
Journal of a Trapper
January 3, 1843
The trapper describes a Christmas dinner feast at the end of his book with Snake Indians and other foreigners. The feast included stewed elk meat, boiled deer meat, boiled flour pudding prepared with dried fruit, 4 quarts of sour berry and sugar juice, cakes and sweetened coffee.
Journal of a Trapper
December 25, 1842
The trappers live a good life surviving off of the fat animals they are able to hunt. They "began to slay and eat but we slayed so much faster than we eat that our meat scaffolds groaned under the weight of fat buffaloe meat." Mountaineers couldn't rely on civilized food for long, showing that the carnivore diet was a necessity in these lands.
Journal of a Trapper
February 28, 1836
Various quotes from Dr John Latham's book about the decade after learning about Dr John Rollo's all-meat diet to treat diabetes and other malladies. These are some of the first case reports on the Carnivore Diet, they didn't all end well, but some did.
Facts and Opinions Concerning Diabetes
January 1, 1805
Bernard Moncriff, who wrote a book about the all-meat carnivore diet, commits suicide at the age of 37. In his suicide letter - he remarks "my heart is broken. Now you will know the secret of my miserable diet and why I was sitting in a room without fire, dispensing even with milk and tea, subsisting mainly on bread, potatoes, and sugar water, a diet which has so often plauged me with dysentery, and which has all but ruined by constitution."
Deaths and Inquests
December 28, 1859
Due to a lack of game, the trapper has to "live chiefly upon roots for ten days" whereupon two fat grizzly bear were brought into camp and quickly turned into bear stew. "All pronounced it the best meal they had ever eaten as a matter of course where men had been starving."
Journal of a Trapper
April 11, 1834
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