FOOD & FAITH

Trudy Eden

In the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a number of Protestant sects arose that had deep roots in mysticism and the hermetic tradition and shallower roots in the thoughts and practices of Emanuel Swedenborg and spiritualism. Although these sects varied significantly, they gathered under the general term New Thought. They believed in a united universe in which the Spirit, or Mind, constituted the complete reality of human existence. This Spirit was omnipresent and good. To adherents of New Thought, the body—and the evil, pain, suffering, illness, and mortality connected with it—were really only erroneous but correctable beliefs. The New Thought movement counted among its many adherents Mary Baker Eddy and her Church of Christ, Scientist, based in Boston; the Hopkins Metaphysical Association based in Chicago, the Church of Divine Science in San Francisco, Religious Science in New York, and the Society of Silent Unity in Kansas City, which became the Kansas City Unity Society of Practical Christianity in 1903 and later the Unity Church of Christianity. Today it is known as the Unity movement. The role of Christ and Christian principles varied among these sects and changed over time. In all of them, however, Christ served at the very least as a role model and reminder of the ability of all humans to reject the wrong thinking that centered on materiality and to claim their rightful place within the Divine Mind.¹

The extension of this basic New Thought tenet led to the belief that the relief of pain and suffering and the eradication of illness could be accomplished mentally. The most prominent historical practitioner of this belief was Mary Baker Eddy, who had been a student of Boston healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. Others, some of whom were students or followers of Eddy, were Warren Felt Evans, Julius Dresser and Annetta Seabury Dresser, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Mary Plunkett, H. Emilie Cady, Charles Fillmore, and Myrtle Fillmore.² From the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, mental healing attracted tens, hundreds, even thousands of new members to New Thought churches. It was a dominant activity of church leaders and staff. Newsletters, books, personal correspondence, and personal appearances helped to spread the New Thought philosophy as, of course, did successful cures.

Despite their heavy emphasis on metaphysics, some New Thought advocates paid close attention to the body and its care and feeding. The Unity Society of Practical Christianity, founded by Charles Fillmore and Myrtle Fillmore, was one of those groups. In what seems to be a flat contradiction to the basic tenet that the mind could correct all, Unity did not insist, but strongly advocated, that its followers practice vegetarianism. Was this belief and advocacy of vegetarianism a conflict in philosophy? After all, if the proper thinking could transcend all earthly woes, why did it matter what one ate or how one lived one’s life? As the chapters in this volume make clear, food has been a useful tool for Christians since the Middle Ages: the uses to which it has been put are many. Three of those uses practiced by the Fillmores are evangelization, the use of the commensal power of food for group coherence, and the sacramental use of food to achieve spiritual regeneration. Compared to Christians in centuries before them, the Fillmores had a modern approach and styled these common elements of Christianity to their own liking. The practicalities of vegetarian eating in the early twentieth century—the acquisition of special food items and the preparation of meatless meals—attracted many people to Unity and held them there. The commensality of the shared meals at the Unity Inn and the common philosophical beliefs attached to those meals bound the faithful together as a group and gave them an identity.³ In addition, Unity founders embraced vegetarianism because they believed itenhanced rather than undermined their metaphysics, which included a strong belief in an all-pervasive life force. Meatless meals mattered because they enabled spiritual growth in a way that meat-filled meals simply could not. More importantly, the Fillmores’ vegetarianism bridged the divide between traditional Christian, even Catholic, practices and the still developing modern Christianity. The structure of that bridge was the most fundamental Christian belief, the taking of the sacrament, which assisted believers in their journey toward spiritual redemption. The style and the substance of the bridge, however, were Unity’s own. Whereas earlier Christians might consider the bridge to be assistance from Christ, Charles Fillmore felt it was assimilation to “Christ Consciousness.”

Charles Fillmore and Myrtle Fillmore, who founded the Society of Silent Unity in 1889, are excellent examples of how right thinking could turn personal suffering into health and wealth. Born in northern Minnesota in 1854, Charles fell while ice skating at age ten and broke his hip. Infections from the injury and numerous unsuccessful medical procedures to heal it left him with a right leg several inches shorter than his left and with what doctors believed was a fatal case of osteotuberculosis. By adulthood his health had improved, although he walked with a brace. Myrtle, born in Ohio in 1845, contracted tuberculosis at some point in her adult life and had struggled with it as well as stomach troubles and hemorrhoids for years. In 1877–78 she met Charles in Dennison, Texas, while seeking a tuberculosis cure. He lived there with his mother and worked as a railroad clerk. Charles and Myrtle married three years later and lived in Colorado and Omaha, Nebraska. They moved to Kansas City in 1885 where Charles became quite successful in real estate. By that time they had had three sons.⁴

In 1886 Myrtle and Charles attended a short course on Christian Science practice. Myrtle felt it changed her life. She applied what she had learned to her own illness, teaching her body that it was “full of vigor and energy,” “energetic, strong and intelligent,” and “no longer infested with ignorant ideas of disease, put there by [her]self and by doctors.” She became convinced that her body was “all athrill with the sweet, pure, wholesome energy of God.” It worked. Her achievement of curing her own, considerable, health problems led Myrtle to the conclusion that her mission in life was to become a spiritual healer. Myrtle’s practice and success spurred Charles to his own exploration of New Thought beliefs. By the end of the decade, after much study, prayer, and meditation, he, too, accepted the divine internal presence.⁵ As he worked out his ideas carefully through speaking and writing, he came to believe that “God is Spirit, the Universal Mind in whom we ‘live, move and have our being.’ This Mind is Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent.”⁶ It presided within all humans, giving them divine potential, and those who became conscious of it would be happy, healthy, and prosperous. Those who did not succumbed to evil, unhappiness, and ill health. Charles referred to this consciousness as “Christ Consciousness” because he believed that Jesus was the only human who had fully utilized his divinity through conscious thought.⁷

Between the two of them, Charles and Myrtle developed and led a circle of like-minded individuals. Their adherents soon numbered enough to be a church, and by the early 1890s they employed others to help with their important work. In addition, Charles edited periodicals as well as running the company that published them. He also founded the Unity Book Company and the Unity Tract Society, creating a correspondence course and then a regular school. By 1909 the Fillmores headed a worldwide movement with a staff that included their three sons, Lowell, Rickert, and Royal, and numerous employees.⁸

Charles Fillmore and Myrtle Fillmore converted to vegetarianism in the 1890s and incorporated their belief in it into their religious activities. So strongly did they believe in the benefits of vegetarianism, they started a vegetarian cafeteria in their church in 1906, the Unity Inn, and followed it with a store, the Unity Pure Food Company, from which anyone could purchase hard-to-get foods. In 1920 the church built a new Unity Inn, at the time one of the largest vegetarian cafeterias in the world, serving as many as ten thousand meals a week and offering free round-trip transportation to workers in downtown Kansas City between the inn and their workplaces. Although the Unity Inn has moved, it is still in existence at Unity Village in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. As early as 1903, Charles published an article on metaphysics and meat eating in Unity Magazine. In 1906 and 1907 the magazine offered a column on diet written by Lowell Fillmore and on October 25, 1911, Royal Fillmore began a column, “The Vegetarian,” in the newspaper Weekly Unity, which he authored until his death in 1923 under the pseudonym Veg.⁹

One would expect a successful real estate developer to be a skilled promoter of a church he founded, but Charles Fillmore’s energy and creativity were entrepreneurial if not exemplary. In its early years, the Unity Society occupied a building in Kansas City. The Fillmores and some of the staff were vegetarian, and they cooked and ate their lunches at the church office. The idea of the Unity Inn grew out of this practice and the natural human tendency to offer food to visitors and friends. In 1906 Unity completed the construction of its first building and its first restaurant space. Diners gave freewill offerings for their meals, except for the Sunday dinner, which in 1909 cost thirty-five cents. Built in the Italianate architectural style, the building was bordered by terraces and enclosed by a hedge. The central dining room had a large fountain, red tile floors, and bay trees, with French doors opening onto the terraces. The first floor, which housed the cafeteria, seated two hundred diners and had a soda fountain. The second floor accommodated banquets. It had a fabricdraped ceiling, elaborate chandeliers, and a formal stage.¹⁰

The Unity Pure Food Company furnished customers foodstuffs unavailable in grocery stores or markets, including Millennium Extract, a vegetarian extract that tasted like beef; Kaola and Konut, coconut butters; cotton seed oil, sold as “Wesson’s Snowdrift Oil”; Unity brand peanut butter; and coffee substitutes.¹¹

The Fillmores followed up their food sales efforts with plenty of written promotional pieces. The Unity Tract Society published its first vegetarian cookbook in late 1909. An earlier advertisement stated that it would “surpass any cook book of this kind … in size, number of recipes, convenience, beauty and novelty.” Designed to hang on the wall, each of its recipe pages had “a motto in red beside terse understandable recipes in large type.”¹² Unity’s strongest written promotions were the little notations Royal Fillmore included in his weekly columns, particularly those fleeting mentions of the Unity Inn cook, Mrs. Walmsley, whose recipes and menu suggestions, including recipes, appear in the column throughout the years. On February 7, 1912, she recommended her “exceptionally fine” recipe for “Macaroni and Millennium.” On May 22, 1912, she suggested the novel idea of combining fresh strawberries, lemon juice, and vegetable gelatin for a “treat.” The society also published the menus of their banquets on holidays and other occasions. They solicited menus from their readers and answered the questions on cooking they received.

All of these food-related activities emphasized the commensal benefits of Unity’s food agenda, an aspect that must have been especially comforting to members living within and outside of Kansas City who found themselves not only practicing a nonconforming faith but a nonconforming diet as well. Every week Royal’s columns spoke to readers as if they were all sitting in a room together. The descriptions of the banquets suggested that readers would have been there had something not prevented them. The dietary recommendations themselves, while separating Unity members from the larger society, united members by association in the small, tightly knit group.¹³ Any time people share a similar diet, or even dine at the same meal, a connection forms between them. Christian churches have used this fact in their efforts to isolate their adherents from the larger society and identify them as part of a special group as well as to create a bond between them. Dietary restrictions such as meatless Fridays or Lenten restrictions, festivals, church suppers, and even foods raised or processed by Christian groups have all served this purpose.

With their foray into the arena of nutrition advice and advocacy, the Fillmores, in addition to participating in a new Protestant wave, joined a group of what can only be described as formidable health reformers. Their vitas matched those of their colleagues. Experiencing histories of illness caused by an injury, bad habits, or weak constitutions, they renounced their self-indulgence, searched for and found the ideas and practices that rewarded them with health, and began to publish their ideas. They were, after all, at the height of the Progressive period in American history, that time when no speck of dirt was too small to ignore and no industrial morass too large to tackle because a clean environment and a healthy populace offered nothing less than utopian rewards. Already by the time the Fillmores began their publications, John Kellogg had become famous with his sanitarium and his breakfast cereal, Horace Fletcher was extolling the benefits of careful chewing, and scientists at universities large and small were working to develop the science of nutrition and literally change the shape of the nation forever. Moreover, the Fillmores’s Unity philosophy aligns with what historian James C. Whorton has defined as a hygienic ideology. All such ideologies rest on the belief that nature is good and should be trusted. Because most people do not do so, they cannot enjoy the degree of vitality and longevity of which they are naturally capable. The illnesses they suffer, therefore, are unnatural but can be reversed through proper action. Once achieved, physical health results in mental and moral perfection in individuals as well as in societies when it is practiced en masse. Finally, because personal and social purity are achievable, to refuse or fail to do so is moral failure.¹⁴

By the first decade of the twentieth century, many people advocated and practiced vegetarianism. Their rationale for doing so combined traditional justifications—some centuries old—with modern scientific ideas. Like all food philosophies, vegetarian thought dwelt on the food itself, the eater, and the physiological effects of any particular food once it was digested. In regard to the food, vegetarians offered a two-pronged argument. One prong attacked meat, the other uplifted vegetables. Criticisms against meat rested on economics, morals, and health concerns. Meat was and always had been a more costly foodstuff than vegetables, although, at different times and places, certain cuts of meat may have been less expensive than certain vegetables. The United States at the turn of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth did not break that tradition. Advocates of meatless living offered numerous scenarios and economic comparisons to support their arguments, although basic common sense would have done just as well.

Their moral arguments required more finesse, even though those discussions, too, represented a long tradition. A few advocates combined economics and ethics to question the justness of a relatively small percentage of the world’s population commandeering resources to raise animals for food when a much larger proportion of the world starved. In a United States that at the time offered free land for homesteading and perceived itself to be a breadbasket of the world, that argument was not compelling. However, the killing of animals as well as the brutality with which it was often performed, did garner the attention of meat eaters and vegetarians alike. Some vegetarians joined forces with antivivisectionists to attempt to abate animal cruelty of all kinds. To those reasons, advocates added the unhealthy and cruel conditions in which livestock were forced to live.¹⁵

The ethics of the treatment of animals elided into health concerns when contemporaries discussed the issue of meat’s cleanliness. At the dawn of the discovery of germs and with the simultaneous publication of Upton Sinclair’s famous exposé of the packinghouse industry, The Jungle, all eaters concerned themselves with the cleanliness of slaughterhouses. Their attitudes toward cleanliness had strong tones of purity and pollution that went beyond mere dirt. Many vegetarians believed that even meat from animals raised and processed hygienically polluted the body because of its very nature and/or because, from the moment the animal was killed, it began to rot. They believed that neither chemicals nor refrigeration could completely forestall that corruption and that decayed meat caused diseases. Closely related to the theme of corruption was the idea, existing as early as the ancient Greeks, that the animal nature of meat prompted animal behavior in humans, particularly violence, lust, and anger as well as physical diseases.¹⁶

A meatless diet eliminated all ethical concerns. Most vegetarians insisted, in addition, that vegetables, even those pulled from the soil, possessed an innate purity unattainable by meat, had more vitality, and decomposed much more slowly. These qualities made plant foods easily digestible. Because advocates considered vegetables to be more nutritious than meat, they thought vegetables took longer to digest, which they believed to be an asset rather than a detriment.¹⁷ Proponents of meatless living insisted that the design of the human digestive system, including the teeth, indicated that man’s natural diet was plants, particularly grains. Although meat eaters argued that vegetables lacked the ability to provide eaters with the stamina, strength, and body warmth associated with the perceived “innate heat” of meat, vegetarians offered numerous testimonials and studies, some by prominent scientists, that concluded otherwise.¹⁸

Unity publications from 1903 to 1916 explain numerous reasons why what you ate and how you lived your life were important in a mentally constructed world in which sin, evil, illness, and even death could be eliminated through thought. Some justifications, particularly those written by Charles Fillmore, grapple head-on with the tough problem of metaphysics and meatless meals. Others, such as morality, filth and purity, animal cruelty, the Bible, and history, constituted the stock-in-trade of their vegetarian heritage, to which Royal Fillmore added a package of the popular science of digestion, health, endurance, and nutrition all loosely tied with metaphysical string. Recognizing the difficulty of converting from a meaty to a meatless diet in the early twentieth century (in one of the slaughterhouse capitals of the United States, no less), he also offered moral support and, always, a wide array of recipes.¹⁹

Veg began writing his column, “The Vegetarian,” in Weekly Unity at age twenty-two. He was a likely and an unlikely candidate for the task. Having grown up in Unity, he certainly was familiar with its philosophies and practices. As early as age ten he wrote a piece for Wee Wisdom, the children’s magazine founded by his mother Myrtle. A few years later he had his own column in the periodical and he took over its editorship in 1912. Contemporaries described him as the Fillmore son who would most likely have succeeded his mother and father at the helm of the movement, had he not died in 1923, because of his charisma and his strong determination to implement the teachings of Jesus in everyday life. The image of Royal Fillmore on paper, however, did not fit that of the flesh. He was obese since childhood. At age seven he weighed one hundred pounds, earning him the schoolyard nickname of “Baby Elephant.” By the time he reached college, he weighed three hundred pounds. He died at age thirtyfour of complications arising from hypertension and arteriosclerosis.²⁰

The strong, lively character of Royal Fillmore drives “The Vegetarian.” At times sophisticated, at times melodramatic, he hammered home the joys and imperatives of vegetarianism. Sometimes he relied on ancient wisdom, as when he published “Plutarch’s Morals of Eating Flesh.”²¹ Other times he featured the works of contemporary authors, as when he presented the philosophy of Alfred McCann, a contemporary nutritionist and journalist.²² Most of the weekly columns, though, came straight from Royal’s pen. His recurring themes of morality, hygiene, economics, character development, Christianity, love, and personal spirituality intertwined with each other in numerous ways.

In its vivid prose and direct questioning, few modern essays have surpassed Plutarch’s on the morality of eating flesh. Unity Weekly’s translation asks readers how the first man to eat meat endured the “blood of the slaughtered, flayed and mangled bodies.” How could this “nastiness” not “offend his taste while [he] chewed the sores of others, and participated in the saps and juices of deadly wounds?”²³ For Plutarch, as for Royal Fillmore, the taking of an animal’s life was the primary moral concern of meat eating. Royal often repeated stories about the companionship, love, and service animals offered humans to highlight the treachery involved in the eating of meat. The following story is representative. Royal met a “very refined and cultured woman” who showed a great deal of interest in “the law of Love,” although she approved the killing of animals for “food and fur.” She laughingly told him of her friend who, having acquired some chicks, raised them “to love her, to come at her call, to eat from her hand, and jump on her shoulder to caress her.” One day, when the chickens were grown, the friend received unexpected company and, having nothing else to serve them, slaughtered her chickens. As she lifted the hatchet, she proclaimed, “This is enough to make me a vegetarian.” But, of course, it wasn’t. To Royal, that was the saddest part. He wrote: “Each of the pets put its trusting head upon the block and laid down its life that the perverted taste of some thoughtless guests might be pampered. … I did not smile. I was thinking, and my mind connected unconsciously the act of severing those three innocent heads with the pages of our daily papers, filled with accounts of heartless murders and atrocious crimes.”²⁴ Animals, he believed, at the very least were God’s creatures and at the very most our brothers and sisters with souls less developed than ours. To kill them to eat, when our planet provides us with more than enough plants, was immoral.²⁵

Joined to this theme of immorality is that of love. Royal believed that the most commendable vegetarians were those who did so out of love. He defined it as the “unified feeling that we are all God’s children, and therefore should share equally the great bounties which he has bestowed upon us.”²⁶ A basic tenet of the Unity philosophy was that of the interconnectedness of the universe and the necessity of love. It “oiled” every “delicately fitted part” of life, it “eliminate[d] vermin, diminishe[d] friction and heat” and was the “remedy for every social and moral evil.” To talk about love was not enough. It had to be demonstrated, and killing our “earthmates” did not do so. Although Unity members did not accept the divinity of Jesus Christ, they did believe he had, through his thoughts and actions, achieved perfection and was a person to emulate. This “Christ Ideal” was “the road of Love, away from all struggle and pain, away from the stain of blood.”²⁷

The Bible caused Royal to express some degree of consternation. Frustrated with those people who misquoted it (“The devil can cite scripture for his purposes”), he insisted that Unity faith followed the spirit of the law and the principles of Christ’s teachings, not simply isolated passages.²⁸ Having said that, however, he did resort to explicit passages himself on occasion. Citing Genesis 1:27–30, he concluded that God’s plan was for mankind not to eat flesh. Genesis 9:4–5, he thought, indicated that, if the Bible became law, packinghouses would have to go out of business.²⁹ Quoting a modern translation of Romans 14:19–22, he encouraged his readers to “not undo God’s work for the sake of what [they] eat, for if [they] put a stumbling block in the way of others,” they were doing wrong. The “stumbling block,” here, is death and “brothers,” fellow creatures.³⁰

Related to the issues of morality, love, and the Bible were those of character and spiritual development, especially of children. Good character came from living and acting in accordance with one’s moral beliefs. One could not profess the doctrine of love while, at the same time, encouraging, indeed paying for, murder at the meat market. Such hypocrisy was not consistent with good character. In this area, meat eating had another dimension. As already stated, many people believed that meat fostered negative emotions in humans.³¹ “Meat steals away our love, our affections, our spiritual instincts and leaves in their place a passion, a lust, a restlessness which drives us on and on,” wrote Royal on January 1, 1913.³² Along with these negative emotions went certain vices. He was not alone in his belief that meat eating caused alcoholism and cautioned his readers to avoid meat for the sake of their own lives and those of their children. Parents, he cautioned, who would do anything to prevent their children from “taking up vice” or “being alcoholics pave their way to these ends with the meats they serve.”³³

Like other vegetarians of and before his time, Royal also justified meatless meals with arguments about hygiene, laced heavily with themes of purity and pollution. Barnyard hogs with “dirty snouts” that ate anything “from manure to ashes,” and slaughterhouses that echoed with squeals of terror and flowed rivers of blood, in some ways, were not as bad as the meat-filled table and the eaters seated around it.³⁴ From that perspective, the local butcher was an assassin and the eaters hypocrites and accomplices to murder. He wrote: “We attend church, pray for love, mercy, peace and good-will, then go home to feed upon the fruit of carnage. We ask a blessing on our food and sink our teeth into the body of some poor animal. We smack our lips and remark on the state of decay that has rendered the flesh tender and rich in flavor.”³⁵

In contrast to the filth and pollution of meat, “The Vegetarian” offered the purity of vegetable foods. In addition, vegetables pacified the mind and gave strength to the body without any transfer of undesirable characteristics. When eaten in combination, they provided all the essential nutrients needed for health, strength, and long life.³⁶

Alongside the theoretical arguments and exhortations in “The Vegetarian” lay practical information and advice. Numerous issues offered economic justifications for vegetarianism, some in the form of testimonials. Topics covered household and social economics, focusing on the extravagance of getting necessary nutrients via animal flesh instead of straight from vegetables.³⁷

Although Royal Fillmore produced hundreds of weekly columns between 1911 and 1916, keeping his readers abreast of current and historical vegetarian rationale, he was, from the point of view of metaphysics, a backup to the star of the show, his father Charles. The contrast between the writings of the two on meatless meals couldn’t be more vivid. While Royal was loquacious, Charles used his words sparingly. While Royal threw at his readers every traditional rationale for vegetarianism and then some, Charles stuck to metaphysics and that all-important issue of assimilation, the act of food becoming flesh. While Royal flamboyantly dwelt on the carnage of the slaughterhouse, the stench of scorched corpses, and the hypocrisy of those who celebrated Christmas with the dead bodies of murdered turkeys, Charles quietly enthralled his readers with the majesty of the transfer of life from one cell to another, the celestial importance of that transfer, and the ability of all humans to regenerate body and soul to achieve a higher spiritual consciousness. And he did it all in one essay, published for the first time in 1903.

In that essay, “As to Meat Eating,” Charles stated that in 1887, when he began studying New Thought ideas (what he referred to as “the Truth”), he was told that thought, not food, dictated his well-being. That dictum proved correct as long as his spiritual growth remained within his conscious mind. However, after some time of study and effort, he began to experience “vibrations” in his “sympathetic nerve centers,” feelings that he attributed to the quickening of his subconscious mind. As he put it, he “was becoming a conscious vital battery,” witnessed by the dramatic growth in his “vital currents.” His appetite, passion, and emotions became so strong he could hardly control them. Unsure of how to manage these increased life forces, he “set up a system of communication with the higher realms of consciousness” through which he learned what his body did with the food he fed it. Upon receiving food, the body put it through a “process of regeneration” to get it to the “condition to be built into the new body in Christ.” This regeneration, he learned, took place in the numerous “subconscious centers” of the body.³⁸

Physical and spiritual regeneration lay at the heart of Unity philosophy. Both Charles and Myrtle believed they could, through sustained spiritual effort, regenerate the cells in their bodies and in so doing cure illness, avert old age (perhaps even reverse the aging process), and even regenerate whole body parts. The ultimate act of regeneration—something Charles thought entirely possible for those highly practiced and spiritual persons—was dematerialization. Accomplishing such a feat, one could avoid death altogether. Charles worked all his life on regeneration. He believed he had successfully restored lost hearing in one ear and had made great progress with his tubercular leg. After years of spiritual practice, he discarded his leg brace. Decades later, shortly before his death in 1948 at age ninety-four, he stated that he had succeeded in restoring length and bulk to his leg, but had not entirely healed it. Disappointed that he had not been able to escape death, he believed that he would reincarnate and perhaps be successful in a future life.³⁹

Regeneration of the body occurred at the cellular level. Charles called the cell a “mind battery vibrating with intelligence, force and substance.”⁴⁰ Living cells in food had these same characteristics. Charles and others believed that plant foods retained their life after harvesting. Meat, on the other hand, because it was the substance of a dead animal, was life interrupted. Meat cells did not exhibit the “vigor and force of the animal” and were “only a festering mass of dead cells without a single animating principle.” Furthermore, these cells could not regain “upbuilding” life until they had “pass[ed] through earth and the vegetable kingdom to the animal” (197–198).

Vitality was essential in food because humans, indeed all living organisms, ate to sustain life. As Charles emphatically put it, “life is the object of eating. Every form in existence is a manifestation of life, and the life idea that pervades it is its source. If that life idea is for a moment withdrawn the form collapses. Hence we do not eat matter, but life” (195). When a person ate, his body “appropriated” the food’s cells and they became a part of his consciousness, the degree to which depending on the eater’s ability to consciously regenerate the cells. The body, by itself, could extract only a small amount of energy from food cells, without the mental assistance of the eater to “build up and sustain” it for years, but this “thread of life [was] frail and its texture coarse” (196). The eater could change that tenuous state through conscious regeneration.

One can see then why food was so important to Unity metaphysicians. Meat, which they thought consisted of decaying “corpse-cells that tend to disintegrate,” burdened the body. Furthermore, those cells retained the animal’s negative states of consciousness, such as fear, suffering, violence, ignorance, anger, and lust, all of which transferred to the eater. Charles told a story of a group of diners who, after eating a beef dinner, became violently ill. The meat was not tainted, but, on further investigation, physicians discovered that the steer had fought for its life for an hour after its slaughter. He believed that during this time the animal transferred its anger and terror to its cells and that those negative qualities caused the diners’ illnesses (198). Charles advised eaters to choose foods with the most vibrant vitality. Once their bodies assimilated such food into their cells, eaters must daily subject them to the “refining” process of regeneration. Such effort, Charles believed, “established a new body built up as designated by Jesus in the symbology of the New Testament” (197).

This metaphysics of meatless meals appears in a scattershot manner in “The Vegetarian” column, although readers unaware of Charles’s important essay, or any other synthetic New Thought treatment of the subject, must have had difficulty synthesizing the difficult philosophy. “Every cell has a state of vibration … that is controlled by the mind of the organization to which the cell belongs,” wrote Veg on January 24, 1912, and the eater had to “attune” those vibrations to his own. In other columns he explained that carnal cells had “low” vibrations that took a great deal of energy for the eater to overcome. They antagonized the body and so were not a true food. He called meat a “nutrio-stimulant,” because, upon being digested and assimilated, it “disorganize[d] the proper body channels” as did alcohol, tobacco, tea, drugs, coffee, and cocoa. This effect countered the natural life forces in humans and degraded “man’s organism” to the carnal plane.⁴¹ In addition, “The Vegetarian” suggested that the participation in death attending all meat eating somehow factored into the metaphysical process. “Death is the breaking up of the unity between soul and body,” he wrote. “If we do not wish to experience it ourselves, we should be careful not to be a party to it.” To participate not only altered the body: it injured the “Universal Life” within us which “demands protection for all other life.”⁴²

In contrast to meat, vegetables had “negative vibrations,” which made them easily assimilable and increased the body’s receptivity to regeneration. Vegetables could give life to eaters if eaters allowed them to do so. They were man’s natural food and possessed the wisdom to convert that which was not food—in other words, soil and the air animals exhale—and turn it into food pulsating with life. In addition, vegetables cleansed not only the blood of animals from the eater’s body and mind but also the thoughts and actions that blood provoked.⁴³ Vegetables that grew below the ground were “of a more material state” but still contained one of the highest forms of energy. Fruits and nuts, on the other hand, were filled with sunshine, and their energy was easily set free. They exemplified the truth that, because everything was an aspect of mind, the more spiritual the thought realm in which a thing was produced, the better adapted it was for food.⁴⁴

Royal Fillmore devoted most of the space in his column to the practicalities of daily vegetarianism. Occasionally he pulled back from the dishes and the drama to remind his readers of the true task in which they all engaged themselves—“to transforming human sepulchers into Temples of the Living God.” Although food constituted the building material and vegetables were by far the superior choice, food, nevertheless, remained material until the eater “permitted the great harmonious Spirit of Truth to shape it into living substance.”⁴⁵ This phrase nicely sums up the essence of Unity beliefs and why food mattered when the mind was everything. Mind, the body, and the food one ate were not disparate entities or ideas. The mind was not simply ethereal and the body and food merely substantial. Rather, they were unified by the fact that all three were, as Charles Fillmore expressed it, “life.” No Cartesian dualism existed where organic matter without a residing soul was mere matter. Rather, all organic forms contained in their cells the power and majesty of the connected universe. If they were plants, that power rested in their seeds, and they mysteriously multiplied it with soil, water, sunshine, and air. If they were animals, they got it at generation and they lost it when they died. Between that beginning and end, only humans could consciously utilize this life when they digested their vegetable food and directed it to their cells to engage it.

In the hands of Charles Fillmore, the Unity philosophy retains the Christian tradition of the sacrament in that it is an act that imparts, at the least, a spiritual benefit and, at the most, divine grace. The taking of the sacrament is perhaps the most unusual food practice among Christians in the early twentieth century. A “meal” partaken of bread and wine, Catholics believed it was transformed through prayer by a priest into the literal body and blood of Christ. Protestants, on the other hand, believed the ritual taking of the two foods to have spiritual benefits. Despite this difference, both groups believed the regenerative power of the consumed bread and wine to be connected to the divinity of Jesus Christ. Charles Fillmore rejected that divinity along with its ability to spiritually regenerate. However, he believed in the human perfection of Christ and endeavored to provide his followers with the method through which they could attain it. A modern self-help philosophy with the highest rewards, it incorporated the ancient, sacred, and essentially Christian ritual of communion. Special food eaten as a part of a spiritual practice brought about desired spiritual growth. The traditional Christian practices implicate Christ in that growth; the Unity practice exemplifies Christ and requires the eater to achieve the same goal. Communion employs bread and wine; Unity uses vegetable foods. Communion was and is strongly associated with the divine, Unity’s philosophy with the natural and the human.

In eliminating the divinity of Christ, Unity philosophy necessarily had to do away with the traditional communion practices of Christian churches that relied on such divinity. Those practices made no sense in a faith in which Christ was a human, albeit a perfected one. The removal of the ritual did not mean, however, that regeneration of the spirit through food disappeared as well. In fact, Charles Fillmore’s philosophy quite clearly stated that regeneration of the spirit as well as the body was altogether possible and, like other aspects of New Thought religion, could be achieved on one’s own, without the intervention of minister, priest, or god. The transformative force that the communion bread and wine were believed to be, or to represent, was the life force found in the cells of live organisms. Consumption of those cells was necessary for humans who wished to regenerate their spirits, their flagging bodies, and even, according to Charles Fillmore, their damaged or missing body parts. For early Unity practitioners, then, the daily act of eating vegetables that possessed the “life force” constituted a “communion” in which their consumption equaled the taking of blessed bread and wine, and their mental concentration on their bodily cells the accompanying prayer. It was the bridge that enabled them to cross the deep chasm between their old sickly or sinful selves and their new “Christ Consciousness.”

In the nineteenth century, American Protestant beliefs fused with democratic ideas, spawning many new sects that practiced direct communication with God. The U.S. version of European romanticism, transcendentalism, strengthened that belief and urged Christians to look within themselves as well as to nature for personal growth. Unity took American Protestantism a step further when, insisting on the human superiority of Christ, it pronounced humans not only to have the same potential within themselves but to have to achieve it by themselves. A vehicle of this new empowering faith was food. The right foods, vegetables, possessed the life force necessary for spiritual regeneration. In addition, vegetarianism offered a wealth of possibilities for bringing the interested seeker and the adherent together at the Unity table, enabling the commensal bond and group identity so helpful in a young and growing congregation located in the meat-filled world of early twentieth century Kansas City. Thus, while Unity offered some novel ideas on the properties and power of food, it relied on age-old customs to implement those ideas.

Notes

1. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 303–317; Vahle, The Unity Movement, 145.

2. Albanese, A Republic Mind and Spirit, 303–317.

3. Rapport, “Eating for Unity.”

4. Vahle, The Unity Movement, 6, 33–34.

5. Ibid., 6–8, 34–39.

6. Unity, November 1, 1895, 9, as quoted ibid., 39.

7. Vahle, The Unity Movement, 39–46.

8. Ibid., 145–148.

9. “Ready Reference File.”

10. “Unity Inn Timeline”; “The Unity Inn—901 Tracy Avenue”; “The Convention,” Unity Magazine (September 1906): 214–215.

11. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, December 6, 1911, 4; and Weekly Unity, September 25, 1909, 1; Weeekly Unity, February 3, 1915, 1; and Weekly Unity, August 7, 1920, 1–2.

12. Weekly Unity, September 25, 1909, 1.

13. Rapport, “Eating for Unity.”

14. Wharton, “Physiologic Optimism.”

15. Iacobbo and Iacobbo, Vegetarian America, 125–154.

16. Ibid.

17. The length of digestion and assimilation (the repair and replacement of worn out body parts) concerned scientists and eaters alike at the time. The longer the process, the healthier and longer lived would be the eater.

18. Wharton, “‘Tempest in a Flesh-Pot.’”

19. On theology and vegetarianism in general for this time period, see Calvert, “‘Ours Is the Food That Eden Knew’”; and Gregory, “‘A Lutheranism of the Table.’”

20. Vahle, The Unity Movement, 201–203.

21. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, January 20, 1915.

22. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, May 19, 1915.

23. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, January 20, 1915.

24. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, December 11, 1912.

25. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, June 25, 1913, January 20, 1915, March 24, 1915, September 4, 1915, December 25, 1915, March 4, 1916.

26. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, August 22, 1912.

27. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, January 1, 1913 (quote), July 16, 1913, February 25,

28. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, April 3, 1912 (quote), May 15, 1912.

29. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, March 15, 1912.

30. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, January 8, 1913.

31. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, September 4, 1912, September 18, 1912, October 23, 1912, January 1, 1913, June 11, 1913, July 9, 1913, August 20, 1913.

32. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, January 1, 1913.

33. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, October 23, 1912.

34. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, May 1, 1912.

35. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, May 20, 1916.

36. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, July 2, 1913, September 3, 1913, April 1, 1914, June 3, 1914, January 6, 1915, January 8, 1916, April 17, 1912.

37. See, for example, “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, August 7, 1912, October 30, 1912, May 5, 1913, April 16, 1913, April 22, 1913, May 19, 1915, and May 26, 1915.

38. Fillmore, “As to Meat Eating.”

39. Vahle, The Unity Movement, 57–63.

40. Fillmore, “As to Meat Eating.”

41. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, January 24, 1912, June 10, 1914, September 2, 1914, October 23, 1914, February 28, 1914, April 24, 1912.

42. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, March 20, 1912.

43. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, January 24, 1912, February 28, 1912, October 22, 1913, March 10, 1915.

44. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, February 12, 1913.

45. “The Vegetarian,” Weekly Unity, February 25, 1915.