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I am pretty sure Anne Rice had this happening in maybe the first book or a sequel. The possibility that blood not taken directly from a living human being (so either from animals or from a blood bank) can be consumed for sustenance, even if not preferred, shows that vampires are more biological than "magical."

releseabe
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    What's the difference between "animal blood" and "blood from animals?" – DavidW Apr 17 '22 at 00:35
  • Rice does do this in Interview, which is the earliest I can think of. The relevant TVTropes page is "Vegetarian Vampire" but I don't feel like going through all the other categories and looking up the dates; Vampirella and Blade jump out at me as pre-dating Interview but I don't know if that aspect of the story is earlier. (IIRC Blade didn't start out as a vampire at all, but I have no idea when that changed.) – DavidW Apr 17 '22 at 03:05
  • @DavidW: I think there is no difference but I don't understand why you are asking this question. – releseabe Apr 17 '22 at 03:43
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    @releseabe: I suspect because, before the edit, the question title referred to both. – FuzzyBoots Apr 17 '22 at 05:03
  • @FuzzyBoots: wow, i wonder what i meant -- i am sure i was thinking of human blood but like from a blood bank instead of directly from a human neck. – releseabe Apr 17 '22 at 05:27
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    Damon Knight wrote a humerous story, "Eripmav" about extraterrestrial plant people who had "vampires" who drank sap instead of blood. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?57065 It was not early enough to be the first, and they don't really count anyway, but I thought I would mention it just for fun. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/242414/vegetable-aliens-short-story-with-a-pun – M. A. Golding Apr 17 '22 at 15:36
  • Does the accepted answer to the old question (from 1838) meet your requirements? – user14111 Apr 18 '22 at 05:11
  • @Tom This question asks what is the earliest example of a story meeting certain requirements. Is the earliest story meeting the present requirements mentioned among the answers to the old question which this allegedly duplicates? If so, which story is that, and how do you know it's the earliest? – user14111 Apr 18 '22 at 06:24

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Copying my answer to the old question What was the first story to depict a vampire who does not feed on humans?

1956: "She Only Goes Out at Night . . ." by William Tenn (pseudonym of Philip Klass), first published in Fantastic Universe, October 1956, available at the Internet Archive, is about a young lady vampire named Tatiana Latianu

He came back about eleven-thirty, looking as old as his father. I was right, all right. When he'd wakened Tatiana and asked her straight, she'd broken down and wept a couple of buckets-full. Yes, she was a vampire, but she'd only got the urge a couple of months ago. She'd fought it until her mind began to crack. Then she'd found that she could make herself invisible, when the craving hit her. She'd only touched kids, because she was afraid of grown-ups—they might wake up and be able to catch her. But she'd kind of worked on a lot of kids at one time, so that no one kid would lose too much blood. Only the craving had been getting stronger . . .

and the country doctor who cures her:

The only thing none of us counted on was Doc. Not enough, that is.

Once he'd been introduced to Tatiana and heard her story, his shoulders straightened and the lights came back on in his eyes. The sick children would be all right now. That was most important. And as for Tatiana—

"Nonsense," he told her. "Vampirism might have been an incurable disease in the fifteenth century, but I'm sure it can be handled in the twentieth. First, this nocturnal living points to a possible allergy involving sunlight and perhaps a touch of photophobia. You'll wear tinted glasses for a bit, my girl, and we'll see what we can do with hormone injections. The need for consuming blood, however, presents a somewhat greater problem."

But he solved it:

They make blood in a dehydrated, crystalline form these days. So every night before Mrs. Steven Judd goes to sleep, she shakes some powder into a tall glass of water, drops in an ice-cube or two and has her daily blood toddy. Far as I know, she and her husband are living happily ever after.

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user14111
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    That beats what I was going to suggest, Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows in 1967. And now I remember reading that story, too. – M. A. Golding Apr 17 '22 at 15:28
  • It seems like we should close this question as a duplicate of the one you originally answered. – Tom Apr 18 '22 at 03:53
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    @Tom I thought of that, but I think this is a different question. I don't think the acepted answer to the old question qualifies as an answer to this question. Does it? – user14111 Apr 18 '22 at 05:08
  • @Tom Assume for the sake of argument that this 1956 story meets the requirements of the new question, but the 1838 story which is the accepted answer to the old question does not meet the requirements of the new question. If the new question is closed as a duplicate, and if someone subsequently finds an example which is earlier than 1956 but later than 1838 (which would then be the real answer to the new question), what is to be done? It can't be posted as an answer to this question which is closed, and it can't be an snswer to the old question. which has a better answer. – user14111 Apr 18 '22 at 05:21