Morbidly Excited Soils: Agricultural Science, Diet Reform, and Environmental Epistemologies in Antebellum Communal Settlements

My paper considers the interplay between dietary and hygienic reforms and agricultural practices among utopian socialist antebellum reformers. In his 1849 Lectures, diet reformer Sylvester Graham described the “depraving... [ view full abstract ]

My paper considers the interplay between dietary and hygienic reforms and agricultural practices among utopian socialist antebellum reformers. In his 1849 Lectures, diet reformer Sylvester Graham described the “depraving processes of modern agriculture,” which resulted in “morbidly excited soil.” While many “Associationists” at Brook Farm, the North American Phalanx, and the Skaneateles Community closely followed Graham’s dietary and dress prescriptions, they put his principles in dialogue with scientific agriculture in their communities. Community members embraced “bookfarming” and engaged in practices such as the use of “stimulating” inputs to “excite” the soil. As communities became experimental laboratories for testing the theories of popular physiological and agricultural reformers, participants rhetorically connected the health of the soil to the health of the body and their project of social regeneration. Debates within communities highlight broader tensions and harmonies between agricultural and dietetic reform, which spoke to competing anxieties in a new market economy, and simultaneously offered alternative models for relationships to a more-than-human environment.