Food Reform Movements: “Simpler, Plainer, and More Natural”: Dietary Reformers and the Agrarian Myth in the Jacksonian Era

Aroused by the Second Great Awakening —a religious revival movement that spread through the young republic in the first half of the nineteenth century—and confronted with the making of an urban and industrial society, religious leaders were quick to embrace physiological reform, preaching a moral and physical salvation instead of a theological one and taking a prominent role in the so-called Popular Health Movement of the 1830s–1850s. Health reformers usually embraced a large variety of causes: hydrotherapy, dress reform, sex hygiene, temperance, and especially, dietary reform.