1854 / Walden

Civil Abstinence

Tags:: civilians,; cooking,; farming,; hunting,; natural resources

It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination, but this, I think, is to be fed when we feed the body; they should both sit down at the same table. Yet perhaps this may be done. The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery. Most men would feel shame if caught preparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by others. Yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women. This certainly suggests what change is to be made. It may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not. Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way—as anyone who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn—and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

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Published In

Food

About the Author

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden. At the age of twenty-seven in 1845, the poet and essayist left his family’s pencil business and built a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond. A year later Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax and willingly went to prison for a night. He explained his actions in a lecture delivered at the Concord Lyceum in 1848, publishing it one year later as “Resistance to Civil Government,” posthumously retitled “Civil Disobedience.”

American table manners are, if anything, a more advanced form of civilized behavior than the Europeans, because they are more complicated and further removed from the practical result, always a sign of refinement.