The seventeenth-century merchant, autodidact, and radical health reformer Thomas Tryon (pseudonym “Philotheos Physiologus”) is known to scholars of early American Literature as the inspiration for Benjamin Franklin's extended experiment in plant-based eating. Beyond this, historians have tended to limit Tryon's impact on ethical vegan thought in America to Quakers such as John Woolman and Benjamin Lay. However, the logical principles that anchor Tryon's veganism can be traced through the nineteenth century and into the present. His commitment to other-than-human sentience, his linkage of the violence of slaughter to militarism and violent crime, and his concern for the environmental impacts of animal agriculture are among the issues that he explores within the context of the “Edenic diet” : a long-standing vegan practice of non-violent eating based on Genesis 1:29, which is accompanied by a refusal of the divine permission to consume animal flesh, granted after the Flood (Genesis 9:3). Tryon proposes that the consumption of flesh dramatically intensifies the fallen condition of postlapsarian humanity.

This presentation looks to the early Modern contexts of Tryon's model of the human as a microcosm of the universe, relations among which are conditioned by astrological influences and the humoral profiles of plant, animal, and human beings. Consumption of certain substances, including clothing and bedding as well as food, disrupts the individual's humoral balance causing illness, aggression, cruelty, violence, and even wars. Tryon's proposed return to a prelapsarian, Edenic condition is therefore based on a protocol that precludes contact with anything obtained by violence. In his memoirs (1705) he describes how his inner “voice of wisdom” would command him “to eat no Butter, Cheese, Eggs nor Milk, nor any Product of the Animal Kingdom.” Animal products sympathetically work a bestializing effect that leads humanity further into the consequences of the Fall; Tryon's theosophical dietetics aims to reverse this process by applying an anti-speciesist logic of relationality that resonates with modern theories of ethical veganism.