On view at Maine Historical Society from September 10, 2024 to May 17, 2025. Curated by Avery Yale Kamila, Vegan Kitchen columnist for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram and vegetarian history researcher, and, John Babin, author and Visitor Services Manager at Maine Historical Society. Supported by MHS staff: Katie Alleman, Tilly Laskey, Jamie Rice, Sofia Yalouris, and Abby Zoldowski. Graphic design by Patricia Cousins.
Vegetarian History
Wabanaki peoples who’ve lived in what is now known as Maine cultivated vast cornfields and blueberry barrens, and stewarded maple groves across generations for over 13,000 years. Other people and cultures advocated for complete vegetarianism—Pythagoras in Greece, Buddha in Asia, and the Mahavira in India—and wrote about the practice of abstaining from animal flesh, 2,500 years ago.
In Maine, French Jesuit priest Father Sebastian Rasle reported in a 1722 letter that he ate vegetarian meals including corn meal porridge, tree nuts, and root vegetables during a time when he attempted to colonize Abenaki peoples in Norridgewock, and convert them to Christianity. Rasle recorded Abenaki peoples’ sophisticated agriculture and plant-based foods in a Abenaki-French dictionary. Over the centuries and often guided by religious movements, what vegetarians eat and their access to food has changed, in Maine and across the United States.
By the early 19th century, Maine vegetarians consumed whole wheat bread, butter, potatoes, cooked vegetables, and fruit. Early 20th century food processing innovations introduced packaged peanut butter, breakfast cereals, and plant-based meats. Today, in the early 21st century, tofu, tempeh, veggie burgers, and vegan ice cream flavor local vegetarian meals.
Early 19th Century Vegetarian Foods
During the 1820s to 1840s, vegetarianism was called Grahamism—named for vegetarian celebrity and Temperance lecturer, Sylvester Graham. Grahamite meals were simple: whole wheat bread, butter, vegetables, fruits, and pure water. Maine vegetarians of the time included Jotham Sewall (1760-1850) of Chesterville and Captain Peter Twitchell (1761-1855) of Bethel, who were both vegetarians by 1810 and 1816, respectively. James Gower (1772-1855) of Abott was a lifelong vegetarian, suggesting his Topsham parents were also vegetarians.
Reuben Mussey, a nationally esteemed surgeon and vegetarian, was an anatomy and surgery professor at the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin College in Brunswick from 1830 to 1835. He encouraged students to try vegetarianism. One who took his advice was Dr. Horace A. Barrows (1809-1852) of Harrison, who suffered from a chronic illness and used vegetarianism to treat it. Dr. Barrows advised patients to do the same, and Dr. William Alcott’s 1838 medical book Vegetable Diet includes Barrows’ plant-based medical experience.
Vegetarian Mary Gove Nichols of Lynn, Massachusetts, gave a series of lectures in Bangor during 1839, prompting local women to form Maine’s earliest-known vegetarian society. Starting in 1845, Jeremiah Hacker of Brunswick and Portland, who grew up in a Quaker family, published the pro-vegetarian newspaper The Portland Pleasure Boat.
Grahamism
Sylvester Graham, 1880
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Celebrity vegetarian and Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham visited Maine from Pennsylvania in 1834, delivering a month’s worth of lectures to great fanfare, first in Brunswick and later in Portland. Since the word “vegetarian” had not yet been coined, he was said to prescribe Grahamism, telling audiences to abstain from meat, alcohol, coffee, tea, and sugar; to drink only pure water; and to eat vegetables and whole wheat flour.
His advice was so popular the flour became known as “Graham” flour, made into foods called Graham bread, a quick bread called Graham gems, and Graham crackers, the widely-marketed vegetarian health food product sold in Portland. While Graham lectured in Portland, proprietors advertised Graham wheat products in Portland’s 1834 newspapers. Allen’s noted in the Portland Daily Advertiser on June 24, “Graham Bread, Constantly on hand and for sale cheap.” John Pearson’s June 26 ad posted Graham Bread for sale at their Casco Street Bake House. Blake & Howe bakery boasted in the Eastern Argus on June 26, “We manufacture the bread recommended by Dr. Graham of good stock brought from New York expressly for the purpose.”
Horace Barrows was a trained medical doctor from Harrison who ate a vegetarian diet to alleviate his chronic health issues. In his diary entry for July 27, 1838 Barrows wrote about an experience spending the day with his spouse, Irene Bearce Barrows, replicating the laborious whole wheat breadmaking instructions from Sylvester Graham’s 1837 book, A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making noting,
Finished reading ‘Graham’s Treatise on Bread & Breadmaking’ & last but by no means least (inasmuch as it occupied the most of the day) washing & drying 1 1/2 Bushels of wheat agreeable to Graham’s directions—an experiment we have never tried before since we kept house.
Map of Portland with illustrations of buildings, 1836
Item Contributed by
Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education
Daily Evening Advertiser, June 26, 1834
Graham’s lectures were persuasive. In Brunswick the meat market lost customers, while in Portland, commercial bakeries began selling Graham bread. According to Graham’s lecture notes, “A woman keeping a confectionary shop in Portland told Dr. J.W. Mighels that if she should meet Graham in the Street and had a pistol she would shoot him for he had damaged her more than a hundred dollars by his lectures.” The Portland Medical Association endorsed Graham’s system of living.
Despite his celebrity status, some did not appreciate Sylvester Graham’s message. On June 26 the Portland Daily Advertiser announced an anti-Graham lecture the evening of June 27, 1834 at Portland City Hall. In the next column, the newspaper advertised Graham’s sixteen courses of lectures on the Science of Human Life, to take place successive nights—excluding Sunday. Ranging from 25-cents for one night to four dollars for the course for a family, the cost was equal to about five to one hundred dollars in 2024.
Graham only delivered his controversial “Lecture to Mothers,” which taught female anatomy and counseled less sex, three times. While delivering the lecture in late June 1834, a mob gathered outside the Temple Street Chapel in Portland, threw rocks through the church windows, and stopped Graham from speaking. Protesters in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1833 and Boston in 1837 also put an end to his lectures due to the women’s rights concerns Graham raised.
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Early 20th Century Vegetarian Foods
Ellen Gould Harmon White (1827-1915), circa 1878
Courtesy of the Ellen G. White Estate Inc.
Vegetarian meals changed dramatically with advances in food processing technology like canned vegetables and the development of commercial vegetarian foods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Maine industries produced great quantities of canned corn, beans, squash, and fruits, expanding food options for vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike. With a vast availability of options, eating vegetarian became less about religious doctrine and more about secular ideas relating to nutrition.
In an 1863 vision, Ellen G. White of Gorham and Portland—a prophet and founder of the Seventh-day Adventist church—saw vegetarian foods as ideal for humans. White and her Christian followers founded numerous vegetarian food businesses, most notably the Michigan-based Battle Creek Sanitarium run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Kellogg’s cereal fame.
Maine grocery stores advertised Battle Creek breakfast cereals, plant-based meats such as Protose and Nuttose, and other vegetarian foods such as Savita, like a nutritional yeast; Fig Bromose, an early energy bar; and Malted Nuts, a nut milk.
C.W. Post was a patient at the Battle Creek Sanitarium and later launched his own line of popular Post breakfast cereals and vegetarian foods. Shaw’s grocery stores in Portland carried Battle Creek products, and in 1898 and 1936, the grocer hosted food demonstrations with the employees of the celebrated Sanitarium.
Adventists continue to open and operate vegetarian food businesses in Maine, such as the all-vegetarian Poland Spring Health Institute which operated from 1979 to 2004, and Little Lad’s plant-based food manufacturer in Corinth, known for its Herbal Corn product since 1995.
Canning in Maine
In the 1850s, the Winslow Packing Company in Portland perfected and patented the process to can food. Later known as the Portland Packing Company, they led the way for Portland and other packing houses in Maine to dominate the business of canning fresh Maine produce like green corn, beans, vegetables, and fruits. These new, shelf-stable foods had attractive labels, made cooking easier, and provided year-round access to healthful foods.
Maine’s 1970s Vegetarian Mood
Vegetarianism was in vogue in 1970, when a reissue of the book Living the Good Life by internationally-known vegetarians and Maine residents Scott Nearing and Helen Nearing became a bestseller.
The Nearings attracted new vegetarians to Maine, as people flocked to Harborside to study at what is now the Good Life Center. That same year, Portland’s meat-free co-op, the Good Day Market (1970-1997), opened and incubated at least five other vegetarian businesses: The Hollow Reed (1974-1981), an influential restaurant that was plant-based its first season; The Hungry Hunza sandwich restaurant (1977-1981); the No Moo Dairy tofu shop (1976-1981); Second Ceres (1981-1984), all-vegan its first season; and Ala Carte (1982-1983), a vegetarian food cart.
In 1975, more than 1,500 vegetarians gathered at the University of Maine in Orono for the World Vegetarian Congress, where comedian and vegetarian Dick Gregory was the headline speaker. The following year, vegetarian restaurants Fig O My Heart in Old Town and Food for Thought in Oakland opened.
In 1978, The Hungry Hunza catered a 1,000-person vegetarian food fundraiser in Portland headlined by President Jimmy Carter and featuring soysage stroganoff.
Early 21st Century Vegetarian Food
Click to see more 21st Century Vegetarian Foods
The Whole Almond Original sprouted almond milk, Portland, ca. 2021
With the turn of the 21st century, vegetarian and vegan activity in Maine increased. Chase’s Daily vegetarian restaurant opened in Belfast in 2000. Two years later, filming began in South Portland for Totally Vegetarian, a cooking show picked up nationally by PBS.
In 2005, the first Maine Vegetarian Food Festival, now VegFest, took place. Portland’s Green Elephant Vegetarian Bistro opened in 2007, based on the vegan dishes co-owner Dan Sriprasert learned to make in Thailand at his mother’s food stall during the country’s annual Vegetarian Festival. In 2008, Heiwa Tofu in Rockport opened. In 2009, national food justice advocate and vegan chef Bryant Terry gave a talk and cooking demonstration in downtown Portland. That same year, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram added a vegetarian column, and Lalibela Tempeh in Bowdoinham launched.
In 2012, filming began in Cumberland on the PBS cooking show Vegan Mashup. Maine’s first all-vegan ice cream shop, Sticky Sweet, opened in 2017. The following year the Totally Awesome Vegan Food Truck drove into Portland. In 2019, the Portland Public Schools gained national attention when they added daily vegan hot lunches. Tootie’s Tempeh started manufacturing in Biddeford in 2022. Atlantic Sea Farm, also based in Biddeford, sold more than 300,000 of its kelp veggie burgers in 2023.
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