Was Ben Franklin Vegan?
Everyone knows Franklin as a polymath and a genius. Few know he was vegan.
Have you ever wondered about the secret to Ben Franklin’s runaway success? Could it be due to his vegan diet?
Let’s explore.
Franklin in His Own Words
Franklin was born in 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts — one of 17 children! His childhood was marked by a lust for knowledge.
By the time he was 16, he devoured books. And he didn’t eat animals.
At first, his reason for being vegan was simple: it was the most economical way to live! He took all the money he would have spent on expensive meats and dairy, and bought books with the money instead.
Smart cookie!
He writes about this in his famous and super-readable Autobiography of Ben Franklin.
If you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it in a while, it’s worth re-reading. It’s really good.
Ben the Vegan
Many people know that Franklin became a vegetarian at a young age because the diet was “healthier and more ethical.”
Here is Franklin:
When about 16 years of age, I happen’d to meet with a book written by one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet. I determined to go into it. My brother being yet unmarried, did not keep house, but boarded himself and his apprentices in another family. My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chid for my singularity.
The savings racked up quickly:
[By not eating meat] I presently found that I could save half what he paid me. This was an additional fund for buying books: but I had another advantage in it.
Franklin makes clear that it wasn’t just about more for books. His diet also made him smarter!
Vegan Advantage?
What was the other “advantage” that Franklin got from his diet?
Here it is:
My brother and the rest going from the printinghouse to their meals, I remain’d there alone, and dispatching presently my light repast (which often was no more than a biscuit or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a tart from the pastry cook’s, and a glass of water) had the rest of the time till their return for study, in which I made the greater progress from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.
Choosing to not break bread with his meat-eating brother might seem extreme, but it allowed him to read more, and to learn more. And he clearly didn’t lack protein.
Franklin is a smart guy.
Take a look at how clearly he establishes the cause-and-effect of his mean lean plant-based diet: “I made the greater progress from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.”
Going vegan makes you smarter. And stronger. And more compassionate. You know, the works.
Vegetarian or Vegan?
Was Frankling actually vegan vegan or was he just vegetarian? Did he still eat eggs, dairy, and fish?
We don’t know for sure. But we see clear vegan signs directly in his writing, and from several reasonable inferences.
First, the inferences.
Franklin’s Productivity
“Temperance in … drinking” is usually thought to refer to alcohol, but there’s also the well-known fact that drinking dairy makes a body drowsy and sleepy (for many people, that’s the chief attraction — “a glass of milk before bed”).
We now know that milk has many powerful sleep-inducing compounds: tryptophan, calcium, vitamin D, and melatonin. The whole point of milk is to knock you out so that your body can go from being a small cow to a giant cow in as small amount of time as possible.
Today’s mega dairy corporations know that dairy is extremely addictive, so they have created the ultimate product loop for you — (1) buy milk; (2) subconsciously replicate a mother’s touch (warrrrm milk; silky smooth cheeeese; “happy” & “giving” cows); (3) sink into knock-out sleep; (4) get fatty & sedated; (5) go back to Step 1.
So if you pour cow milk [baby calf growth fluid!] on your morning cereal, please ask yourself: Why are you putting yourself back to sleep, instead of getting woke?
Franklin was very scientific about his sleep — which allowed him to be more productive. Could he be that productive if he was fighting milk-induced drowsiness? No way!
Temperance in “drinking” means saying no to the moral sleep potion that we call … cow, goat, horse, or camel … milk.
Drinking cow milk is no different than drinking horse milk. Or camel milk. It’s milk intended for baby cows, horses, and camels. We have no right to it.
With all that estrogen that our bodies are not evolutionarily made for. No, thank you.
Franklin’s Health & Age
There’s another logical inference that suggests Franklin was a full-blown vegan. He lived a reeeeeeeeally long life!
Born in 1706, he died in 1790 — aged 84~!
Ben Franklin lived almost twice as long as the average male back then!
To put that number into perspective, that’s older than the longest life expectancy in the most “developed” countries of the world — today!
Logically, there’s only one diet and one lifestyle that could have prolonged Franklin’s life by that much: veganism.
It’s not just that he lived a long life.
He lived a very physically active life, well into old age. When men half his age were wearing powdered wigs and wooden teeth, he was teaching young American gangsters how the OGs be doing it:
There’s a reason Franklin enjoys pride of place in the global political and popular imagination. He literally outlived his enemies. He is a living embodiment of “we are what we eat.”
If you eat peacefully, you age gracefully. It’s as simple as that. Then, and now.
Franklin was hipster before hipster was cool. Franklin kept dancing and pumping out one great idea after another — well into old age. That’s how vegans roll.
Franklin’s so woke, he straight refuses to die!!!
Trying On … Tryon
Need more direct textual proof about Franklin’s veganism? Here it is.
Remember that guy Tryon who wrote the book that set Franklin on his vegan way? Well, it was Tryon’s short digest, called Wisdom’s Dictates.
With a title like that, curiosity peaks.
And here’s the wisdom that Tryon imparted on Franklin, and which Franklin then imparted on to us:
The moral emphasis of Wisdom’s Dictates can be seen on the title page, which refers to the bill of fare as “Seventyfive Noble dishes of Excellent Food, far exceeding those made of fish or flesh, which banquet I present to the sons of wisdom, on such as shall decline that depraved custom of eating flesh and blood.”
In the opening pages of Wisdom’s Dictates, Tryon teaches:
Refrain at all times such foods as cannot be procured without violence and oppression.
He goes on. It’s worth quoting at length:
For know, that all the inferior[*] creatures when hurt do cry and fend forth their complaints to their maker…Be not insensible that every creature doth bear the image of the great creator according to the nature of each, and that he is the vital power in all things. Therefore, let none take pleasure to offer violence to that life, lest he awaken the fierce wrath, and bring danger to his own soul. But let mercy and compassion dwell plentifully in your hearts, that you may be comprehended in the friendly principle of God’s love and holy light. Be a friend to everything that’s good, and then everything will be a friend to thee, and cooperate for thy good and welfare.
*In that context, ‘inferior’ is best translated as ‘smaller,’ not inferior in some moral sense, as the passage makes clear.
The point is very simple. If you eat death, then you are death. It means that you have no respect for life; including your own.
Tyron also opposed “hunting, hawking, shooting, and all violent oppressive exercises” because they are … wrong.
It doesn’t get more vegan than that.
And that’s the book that got Ben Franklin on the vegan path from the ripe young age of 16 to 84, and, 300 years later, to your screen.
Awakening > Wokeness
As woke as he was, Franklin was no saint. Even though Tryon taught him that we should practice charity and love towards all living beings, Franklin owned slaves for nearly 50 years (from 1735 to 1781).
Whaaaaaaa???? Ewwww. Gross.
Yeah, exactly.
But there’s a vegan twist to this story.
In 1758, after munching on some fried “Chinese cheese” (his name for tofu), Franklin visited a school for black children. There he began to see the error of his ways. Over the next two decades, he began to raise his own awareness about the cruelty of slavery.
It absolutely sucks that it took that long (just as it absolutely sucks that the whole world isn’t yet vegan), but please follow the story.
In 1787, six years after his own status as a slave-owner ended, Ben Franklin became President of the Philadelphia Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, aka the Abolition Society (the first anti-slavery society in the U.S., formed in 1774 by Franklin’s friends).
Though he refused to agitate against slavery at the U.S. Constitutional Convention, in 1790, he petitioned the very first U.S. Congress to ban slavery.
A few months later, he died. But his ghost still haunts the world.
In the words of historian David Waldstreicher,
Franklin’s importance to the history of slavery may lie less in his contribution to antislavery after 1787 than in his earlier mediation of slavery, freedom, and revolution. It took [a] slaveholder with doubts about slavery, to explain the paradox of American slavery and American freedom to a skeptical world — and to America itself.
That’s a vegan arc if ever there was one.
Now What?
So, do you want to make history? Invent and popularize useful things? Travel the world and dance with the coolest peeps? Start and win revolutions? Get sooo woke that you refuse to die and tourists come searching for your dancing ghost in Philadelphia’s twilight hours?
Or do you want to just go back to a milky sleep, willfully blind to the cruelty all around you — unable to rouse yourself towards a better you?
People love choice when it comes to eating.
What’s your choice?
