The initail use of vegetable in the Black Panther was in an article stating that psychosurgery would send people "back into society as vegetables." The wording was used to note how the government would save money by sending people back into society rather than paying to incarcerate them.

Use of Vegetable in January 1973 Article

While many may think that the term vegetable is derived from the medical term vegetative state, the term vegetative states was not coined to refer to a brain-damage condition until 1972 whereas the use of the term vegetable in discussions about the impacts of psychosurgery dates back to the 1940s and 1950s, before the coining of vegetative state.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

The term vegetable as an adjective to describe a person was first used in the seventeenth century. But, these early uses of the word were to describe someone who lived an uneventful life without intellectual or social activity. It wasn't until the mid-twentieth century that vegetable emerged as a term used to describe individuals who are deemed to not be able to perform a nondisabled level of mental or physical activity.

History of the Term "Vegetable"

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

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