On this day in vegan history · February 23, 1904
Helen Nearing Is Born
The woman who would talk half a generation of city dwellers into growing their own vegetables started out a vegetarian violinist from New Jersey.
The facts
- Born
- February 23, 1904, Ridgewood, New Jersey
- Living the Good Life
- co-written with Scott Nearing, published 1954
- Simple Food for the Good Life
- her vegetarian cookbook, published 1980
- Died
- September 17, 1995, Harborside, Maine
Helen Knothe was born in Ridgewood, New Jersey, on February 23, 1904, into a comfortable theosophist family, and stayed a vegetarian her entire life. She later married the radical economist Scott Nearing, and together they left the city for a Vermont farm, an experiment in self-sufficiency they turned into the 1954 book Living the Good Life. The book found an audience of young Americans who wanted out of the postwar consumer economy, and it helped seed the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 70s. In 1980 she published her own plain, no-nonsense vegetarian cookbook, Simple Food for the Good Life.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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a far-from-enthusiastic and qualified cook
Helen Nearing, describing herself in Simple Food for the Good Life (1980)
Source: Wikipedia -
mother of the back to the land movement
Mother Earth News, 1994
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Living the Good Life gave a generation permission to opt out of the meat-and-consumption default and grow their own food instead, a template a lot of the modern homesteading and plant-based-living world is still quietly running.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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