Did Mary Baker Eddy say anything about vegetarianism?

We are sometimes asked if Mary Baker Eddy was a vegetarian or made any statements about a plant-based diet.

Eddy was not a vegetarian, and our records show that she ate meat throughout much of her life.

For example, Hermann S. Hering, who served The Mother Church as First Reader and in several other capacities, made the following observations during an 1897 visit to Eddy’s home, Pleasant View, in Concord, New Hampshire:

On occasion of the visit to Pleasant View in July (4–5), 1897, a question arose on the train about meat-eating, and the statement was made that of course Mrs. Eddy was a vegetarian–she wouldn’t kill anything for food….It was a very hot day, one of the hottest they ever remembered at Concord. We were told that there was cool water in the basement…..We looked around this beautiful clean cellar with the furnace at one end–all clean and whitewashed. Up on the rafters, quite high up, was a row of the best hams and sides of bacon you ever saw. That shows that Mrs. Eddy was not a vegetarian. I said to one of the workers I knew, “When you get a chance, you ask Mrs. Eddy about the question of avoiding the eating of meat for the sake of becoming more spiritual.” The point was about not eating meat for the sake of purifying one’s self. Later I got the answer. Mrs. Eddy made this statement to him and he made it to me: If you avoid eating meat for the sake of becoming more spiritual, you come under a law of theosophy; which is much worse than anything you might get from the meat. She said too that if you stop eating meat, you might put your body under an unnecessary strain ¹

However, it is also true that Eddy was eating meat less often in her later years. Biographer Gillian Gill noted this in her 1998 book Mary Baker Eddy:

As the years went by, though never a professing vegetarian, Mrs. Eddy ate less and less meat, just a little liver or chicken occasionally, with perhaps fish hash for supper, or something light on toast. Bacon—or salt pork, as she called it—was her favorite meat ….²

While she made no direct statements with regard to vegetarianism, we also located this observation that Eddy made, found in an undated sermon from our collections: “What are gustatory enjoyments chewing and swallowing a roasted turkey or gulping down a lamb that licked the hand just raised to shed its blood?”³

Eddy’s numerous statements on diet dwelt mostly on adopting a spiritual approach to the topic. For example, in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures she wrote, “The individuality created by God is not carnivorous, as witness the millennial estate pictured by Isaiah ….” She then quoted Isaiah 11:6:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
And the calf and the young lion, and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.⁴

The book also says, “Admit the common hypothesis that food is the nutriment of life, and there follows the necessity for another admission in the opposite direction, — that food has power to destroy Life, God, through a deficiency or an excess, a quality or a quantity.”⁵ And it contains an account of a person suffering from “dyspepsia” (indigestion), who found healing by means of that prayer-based approach, with this result: “He learned that a dyspeptic was very far from being the image and likeness of God, — far from having ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle,’ if eating a bit of animal flesh could overpower him.”⁶