Embodied Politics: Antebellum Vegetarianism and the Dietary Economy of <i>Walden</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Near the beginning of Walden, Henry David Thoreau tells his readers that his “experiment in living” is dedicated to learning “what are the gross necessaries of life... the grossest groceries,” a choice of metaphor that might remind us just how much of his personal and political reform project in Walden hinges on diet and Thoreau's attitude toward literal “groceries.” Thoreau's interest in dietary practices has generally been read as apolitical or even antipolitical, primarily because his dietary and consumptive practices have never been adequately situated amid contemporary antebellum debates about diet and food commodity consumption. A turn to Sylvester Graham's vegetarian movement, however, shows that far from being divorced from civic concerns, the vegetarian dietary theory driving Thoreau's practices at Walden Pond plays a complicated role in the political design of Walden. Uniting private practices with public reform, Thoreau draws on Graham's theory of a universal physiological constitution that all human beings, and perhaps even animals, could be imagined to possess, in order to denominate the human body as a significant site of political reform. Ultimately, antebellum vegetarians such as Graham and Thoreau restricted appetite for animal foods and commodities in order to reform, reshape, and remake what they viewed as a flawed democratic body, reimagining the limits of citizenship and civic participation in the process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".