Veganism in the early Republic promised freedoms from disease, immorality, violence, enslavement, war, and land scarcity, as well as freedoms of self-determination and self-perfection. The US was viewed by utopian vegan thinkers like Bronson Alcott as the ideal location for this personal and project of improvement based on the exercise of freedom because he accepted the myth of “virgin land” awaiting an Edenic reawakening. Thus, early US veganism served not only the cause of Republican freedoms but also the colonial project of the settler nation. This presentation builds on Kyla Wazana Tompkins' work on Sylvester Graham's “Imperial Dietetics” and the work of Indigenous vegan theorists like Billy-Ray Belcourt, Margaret Robinson, and Rita Laws, who have exposed the weaponization of animal and plant agriculture as a strategy of settler colonialism, to explore this discursive doubleness of republican “freedom” via the dual meaning of “seed” in early American vegan activism.

The key figure is Sylvester Graham, who promoted individual freedom to choose as self-improvement through dietary reform. US national character is at stake in his campaign against processed foods and also masturbation, the common solution to which is the adoption of “the vegetable diet.” The interests of the US colonial project are served through a national identity grounded in Graham's advice concerning “seeds.” Masturbation, or the onanistic spilling of human seed, contradicts the reproductive logic of settler colonialism that demands the demographic replacement of Indigenous peoples. The avoidance of sexual over-stimulation by means of a simple vegan diet based on wheat bread solves the reproductive issue and normalizes imported European seed (specifically wheat) as the staple American grain, replacing Indigenous corn. In this early Republican moment, veganism resonated strongly with dominant discourses of national identity formation: as a “Pythagorean diet” that would harmonize the US diet with the ideals of the classical imperial republics; and the exceptionalist idea of a new Euro-Indigenism expressing harmony between settlers and the land. The substitutive logic of settler colonialism was thus served by vegan understandings of US formation as an issue of personal as well as national freedoms.