Vegetarianism: Cornflake Crusaders

Through Ellen White, founder of the Seventh-day Adventists and a former patient of James Caleb Jackson’s at Our Home, the early Adventists became acquainted with the latest in health-care procedures. Sister White, as she was affectionately dubbed by her followers, absorbed her immense health knowledge partly through divine revelation and partly through a close reading of the works of food reformers like Graham and Jackson. She was an avid reader of Jackson’s Water-Cure Journal. She also saw, in one of her visions, that God had fashioned the human body as his temple, so that any abuse of the body was a violation of God himself. Alcohol, tobacco, and meat were detrimental to the body, so she roundly denounced them and declared them to be proscribed foods. Eventually, through her prophecies and teachings, the Seventh-day Adventists became strong advocates of a vegetarian diet.