On this day in vegan history · August 6, 1798
William Alcott Writes America's First Vegetarian Cookbook
A Connecticut schoolteacher who built better desks for his students grew up to write the book that put a meatless table into American print for the first time.
The facts
- Born
- August 6, 1798, Wolcott, Connecticut
- Vegetable Diet published
- 1838, expanded second edition 1849
- American Vegetarian Society founded
- May 15, 1850, with Sylvester Graham and William Metcalfe
- Died
- March 29, 1859, Auburndale, Massachusetts
William Andrus Alcott was born August 6, 1798, in Wolcott, Connecticut, to farmer Obedience Alcox and Anna Andrus, and trained at Yale School of Medicine after nine years of teaching. In 1838 he published Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men and By Experience in All Ages, a book historian Andrew F. Smith later credited as America's first vegetarian cookbook; Alcott expanded it with more recipes and medical testimony in 1849. On May 15, 1850, he joined Sylvester Graham and William Metcalfe to found the American Vegetarian Society and became its first president. He was second cousin to Amos Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott, and kept working until the day before he died of a lung infection in 1859.
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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America's first vegetarian cookbook
Historian Andrew F. Smith, in Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, describing Alcott's Vegetable Diet
Source: Wikipedia -
Indeed there is a sense in which nearly everything Alcott wrote and did is attributable to William
Scholar Odell Shepard, writing on the influence William Alcott had over his second cousin Amos Bronson Alcott
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Alcott gave the meatless diet a cookbook and, two years before his death, an organization, turning a scattered set of personal convictions into an American vegetarian movement with a name and an address.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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