Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias

5. Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys: Debates over Meatless Diets in Nineteenth-Century Shaker Communities

5. Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys Debates over Meatless Diets in Nineteenth -Century Shaker Communities Margaret Puskar-Pasewicz In the mid-1850s Freegift Wells, an Elder at the Shaker village in Watervliet , New York, reported the “fanatical” and disturbing demonstrations of a fellow Believer, Ephraim Prentiss. Wells recalled a specific event when Prentiss found a small piece of pork in a dish of beans during dinner. He responded to the discovery with surprising anger and theatrics: he removed the threatening item from the dish, processed through the village with it, and finished by ceremoniously burying the scrap of meat.1 Prentiss’s actions and their role in Wells’s writings against food restrictions suggest that the consumption of meat symbolized a critical division in the community. For Prentiss, an adamant food reformer, pork represented a physical threat to the health of the boys under his care and a political threat to his religious authority in the village . In contrast, Wells argued vehemently throughout his tenure as a Shaker Elder that rules against the use of tea, coffee, and pork produced significant confusion and disunion among Shakers. The United Society of Believers, also known as the Shakers, remains one of the longest-running utopian communal societies in American history. The society’s founder, Ann Lee, emigrated from England to New York in 1774 with a small group of believers. Celibacy, industriousness , and simple living as means of Christian sanctification and separation from “worldly” practices represented enduring tenets of Shakerism from the days of Mother Ann. Vegetarianism among the Shakers started 109 110 Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys in the 1820s and 1830s, when popular interest in health reform began to emerge in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century Shakers promoted (and opposed) dietary restrictions as an important means of strengthening the communal principle as well as the spiritual development of individual Shakers through greater self-denial. In the tradition of Shaker organization, nonetheless, leaders often accepted laxness in obeying proposed restrictions on food and drink. The Shakers, similar to other Americans, pursued diet reform because of its implications for controlling unhealthy and immoral impulses .2 The notion that abstention from specific foods such as alcohol, condiments, or meat made it easier to withstand the temptations of the flesh was particularly attractive to the Shakers. In addition, Shakers sometimes explained physical sickness and disease as outward signs of a Believer’s inner turmoil or moral decline.3 Prominent leaders, such as Seth Wells at New Lebanon, New York, argued that indulgences in “worldly” foods and practices threatened both the physical well-being of Believers and their effectiveness as witnesses to the outside world.4 For the Shakers as well as nineteenth-century Americans more generally , experimentation with vegetarianism embodied the quest for physical and moral perfection through diet and health.5 Previous explanations of Shaker diet reform have emphasized the in- fluence of Sylvester Graham—the prominent antebellum health reformer who advocated abstention from a variety of foods, including meat, alcohol, tea, and coffee—at the expense of identifying ways in which food practices also represented issues that were Shaker in and of themselves . The tendency to idealize Shaker life explains, in part, this trend to depict the Shakers’ adoption of diet reform as a generally peaceful transition. Closer analysis of Shaker food practices and consumption reveals a much more contentious narrative. While Shakers favorable to reform claimed that abstention from specific foods distinguished the Believers from the outside world and ensured the society’s spiritual and corporeal health, members opposed to restrictions argued that the changes too closely resembled “worldly” practices. Rather than another example of Believers’ uncontested acceptance of outside influences, vegetarianism—introduced formally by the Central Ministry as early as Puskar-Pasewicz 111 1820—became a battleground for broader disputes.6 Like other utopian groups, the Shakers adopted meatless diets to encourage spiritual purity , to promote simple living and frugality, and to uphold the communal principle, especially among youth and women. Recent scholarship on the connections among food, spirituality, and identity also prompts further examination of food practices and consumption within utopian religious communities.7 In particular, these works demonstrate how historical analysis of food enriches scholarly interpretations of the tensions between “spirituality as preached” and “spirituality as lived.”8 The adoption of vegetarianism by nineteenthcentury utopian groups represented a widespread attempt in American society to implement moral, physiological, and...