On this day in vegan history · July 12, 1817
Henry David Thoreau Is Born
The author of Walden kept a fish on his line and a doubt in his head about eating it.
The facts
- Born
- July 12, 1817, Concord, Massachusetts
- Known for
- Walden (1854) and the essay Civil Disobedience
- On diet
- Not a strict vegetarian, but preferred and advocated a meat-free diet as self-improvement
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817. He is remembered for Walden and for a life built around living deliberately, and among the things he examined closely was what he ate. Thoreau was not a strict vegetarian, and he said so plainly. He fished and he ate meat, yet he wrote that he preferred a simpler diet and treated it as a form of self-improvement, part of the same discipline that took him to the pond. His hesitation, put on the page rather than resolved, is why he keeps turning up in the history of the meat-free argument.
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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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.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, quoted on Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Thoreau gave the meat-free case a durable literary voice that argued from conscience and simplicity rather than doctrine. His honesty about his own inconsistency is part of why it still reads well.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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