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PREFACE
The title of this book is not ambiguous, but as it relates to a subject rarely thought about by the generality of people, it may save some misapprehension if at once it is plainly stated that the following pages are in vindication of a dietary consisting wholly of products of the vegetable kingdom, and which therefore excludes not only flesh, fish, and fowl, but milk and eggs and products manufactured therefrom.The Author.
This work is reprinted from the English edition with changes better adapting it to the American reader.
The Publishers.
MAN'S FOOD
Health and happiness are within reach of those who provide themselves with good food, clean water, fresh air, and exercise.
A ceaseless and relentless hand is laid on almost every animal to provide food for human beings.
Nothing that lives or grows is missed by man in his search for food to satisfy his appetite.
Natural appetite is satisfied with vegetable food, the basis for highest and best health and development.
History of primitive man we know, but the possibilities of perfected and complete man are not yet attained.
Adequate and pleasant food comes to us from the soil direct, favorable for health, and a preventive against disease.
Plant food is man's natural diet; ample, suitable, and available; obtainable with least labor and expense, and in pleasing form and variety.
Animal food will be useful in emergency, also at other times; still, plant substance is more favorable to health, endurance, and power of mind.
Variety of food is desirable and natural; it is abundantly supplied by the growth of the soil under cultivation.
Races of intelligence and strength are to be found subsisting and thriving on an exclusive plant grown diet.
The health and patience of vegetarians meet the social, mental and physical tests of life with less disease, and less risk of dependence in old age.
Meat eaters have no advantages which do not belong also to those whose food is vegetable.
Plant food, the principal diet of the world, has one serious drawback; it is not always savory, or palatable.
Plant diet to be savory requires fat, or oil, to be added to it; nuts, peanut, and olive oil, supply it to the best advantage.
Plant diet with butter, cream, milk, cheese, eggs, lard, fat, suet, or tallow added to it, is not vegetarian; it is mixed diet; the same in effect as if meat were used.—Elmer Lee, M.D., Editor, Health Culture Magazine.
NO ANIMAL FOOD
I
URGENCY OF THE SUBJECT
Outside of those who have had the good fortune to be educated to an understanding of a rational science of dietetics, very few people indeed have any notion whatever of the fundamental principles of nutrition and diet, and are therefore unable to form any sound opinion as to the merits or demerits of any particular system of dietetic reform. Unfortunately many of those who do realise the intimate connection between diet and both physical and mental health, are not, generally speaking, sufficiently philosophical to base their views upon a secure foundation and logically reason out the whole problem for themselves.
Briefly, the pleas usually advanced on behalf of the vegetable regimen are as follows: It is claimed to be healthier than the customary flesh diet; it is claimed for various reasons to be more pleasant; it is claimed to be more economical; it is claimed to be less trouble; it is claimed to be more humane. Many hold the opinion that a frugivorous diet is more natural and better suited to the constitution of man, and that he was never intended to be carnivorous; that the slaughtering of animals for food, being entirely unnecessary is immoral; that in adding our share towards supplying a vocation for the butcher we are helping to nurture callousness, coarseness and brutality in those who are concerned in the butchering business; that anyone of true refinement and delicacy would find in the killing of highly-strung, nervous, sensitive creatures, a task repulsive and disgusting, and that it is scarcely fair, let alone Christian, to ask others to perform work which we consider unnecessary and loathsome, and which we should be ashamed to do ourselves.
Of all these various views there is one that should be regarded as of primary importance, namely, the question of health. First and foremost we have to consider the question of physical health. No system of thought that poses as being concerned with man's welfare on earth can ever make headway unless it recognises this. Physical well-being is a moral consideration that should and must have our attention before aught else, and that this is so needs no demonstrating; it is self-evident.
Now it is not to be denied when we look at the over-flowing hospitals; when we see everywhere advertised patent medicines; when we realise that a vast amount of work is done by the medical profession among all classes; when we learn that one man out of twelve and one woman out of eight die every year from that most terrible disease, cancer, and that over 207,000 persons died from tuberculosis during the first seven years of the present century; when we learn that there are over 1500 defined diseases prevalent among us and that the list is being continually added to, that the general health of the nation is far different from what we have every reason to believe it ought to be. However much we may have become accustomed to it, we cannot suppose ill-health to be a normal condition. Granted, then, that the general health of the nation is far from what it should be, and looking from effects to causes, may we not pertinently enquire whether our diet is not largely responsible for this state of things? May it not be that wrong feeding and mal-nutrition are at the root of most disease? It needs no demonstrating that man's health is directly dependent upon what he eats, yet how few possess even the most elementary conception of the principles of nutrition in relation to health? Is it not evident that it is because of this lamentable ignorance so many people nowadays suffer from ill-health?
Further, not only does diet exert a definite influence upon physical well-being, but it indirectly affects the entire intellectual and moral evolution of mankind. Just as a man thinks so he becomes, and 'a science which controls the building of brain-cell, and therefore of mind-stuff, lies at the root of all the problems of life.' From the point of view of food-science, mind and body are inseparable; one reacts upon the other; and though a healthy body may not be essential to happiness, good health goes a long way towards making life worth living. Dr. Alexander Haig, who has done such excellent and valuable work in the study of uric acid in relation to disease, speaks most emphatically on this point: 'DIET is the greatest question for the human race, not only does his ability to obtain food determine man's existence, but its quality controls the circulation in the brain, and this decides the trend of being and action, accounting for much of the indifference between depravity and the self-control of wisdom.'
The human body is a machine, not an iron and steel machine, but a blood and bone machine, and just as it is necessary to understand the mechanism of the iron and steel machine in order to run it, so is it necessary to understand the mechanism of the blood and bone machine in order to run it. If a person understanding nothing of the business of a chauffeur undertook to run an automobile, doubtless he would soon come to grief; and so likewise if a person understands nothing of the needs of his body, or partly understanding them knows not how to satisfy them, it is extremely unlikely that he will maintain it at its normal standard of efficiency. Under certain conditions, of which we will speak in a moment, the body-machine is run quite unconsciously, and run well; that is to say, the body is kept in perfect health without the aid of science. But, then, we do not now live under these conditions, and so our reason has to play a certain part in encouraging, or, as the case may be, in restricting the various desires that make themselves felt. The reason so many people nowadays are suffering from all sorts of ailments is simply that they are deplorably ignorant of their natural bodily wants. How much does the ordinary individual know about nutrition, or about obedience to an unperverted appetite? The doctors seem to know little about health; they are not asked to keep us healthy, but only to cure us of disease, and so their studies relate to disease, not health; and dietetics, a science dealing with the very first principles of health, is an optional course in the curriculum of the medical student.
Food is the first necessary of life, and the right kind of food, eaten in the right manner, is necessary to a right, that is, healthy life. No doubt, pathological conditions are sometimes due to causes other than wrong feeding, but in a very large percentage of cases there is little doubt that errors in diet have been the cause of the trouble, either directly, or indirectly by rendering the system susceptible to pernicious influences.[1] A knowledge of what is the right food to eat, and of the right way to eat it, does not, under existing conditions of life, come instinctively. Under other conditions it might do so, but under those in which we live, it certainly does not; and this is owing to the fact that for many hundred generations back there has been a pandering to sense, and a quelling and consequent atrophy of the discriminating animal instinct. As our intelligence has developed we have applied it to the service of the senses and at the expense of our primitive intuition of right and wrong that guided us in the selection of that which was suitable to our preservation and health. We excel the animals in the possession of reason, but the animals excel us in the exercise of instinct.
It has been said that animals do not study dietetics and yet live healthily enough. This is true, but it is true only as far as concerns those animals which live in their natural surroundings and under natural conditions. Man would not need to study diet were he so situated, but he is not. The wild animal of the woods is far removed from the civilized human being. The animal's instinct guides him aright, but man has lost his primitive instinct, and to trust to his inclinations may result in disaster.
The first question about vegetarianism, then, is this:—Is it the best diet from the hygienic point of view? Of course it will be granted that diseased food, food containing pernicious germs or poisons, whether animal or vegetable, is unfit to be eaten. It is not to be supposed that anyone will defend the eating of such food, so that we are justified in assuming that those who defend flesh-eating believe flesh to be free from such germs and poisons; therefore let the following be noted. It is affirmed that 50 per cent. of the bovine and other animals that are slaughtered for human food are affected with Tuberculosis, or some of the following diseases: Cancer, Anthrax, Pleuro-Pneumonia, Swine-Fever, Sheep Scab, Foot and Mouth Disease, etc., etc., and that to exclude all suspected or actually diseased carcasses would be practically to leave the market without a supply. One has only to read the literature dealing with this subject to be convinced that the meat-eating public must consume a large amount of highly poisonous substances. That these poisons may communicate disease to the person eating them has been amply proved. Cooking does not necessarily destroy all germs, for the temperature at the interior of a large joint is below that necessary to destroy the bacilli there present.
Although the remark is irrelevant to the subject in hand, one is tempted to point out that, quite apart from the question of hygiene, the idea of eating flesh containing sores and wounds, bruises and pus-polluted tissues, is altogether repulsive to the imagination.
Let it be supposed, however, that meat can be, and from the meat-eater's point of view, should be and will be under proper conditions, uncontaminated, there yet remains the question whether such food is physiologically necessary to man. Let us first consider what kind of food is best suited to man's natural constitution.
II
PHYSICAL CONSIDERATIONS
There are many eminent scientists who have given it as their opinion that anatomically and physiologically man is to be classed as a frugivorous animal. There are lacking in man all the characteristics that distinguish the prominent organs of the carnivora, while he possesses a most striking resemblance to the fruit-eating apes. Dr. Kingsford writes: 'M. Pouchet observes that all the details of the digestive apparatus in man, as well as his dentition, constitute "so many proofs of his frugivorous origin"—an opinion shared by Professor Owen, who remarks that the anthropoids and all the quadrumana derive their alimentation from fruits, grains, and other succulent and nutritive vegetable substances, and that the strict analogy which exists between the structure of these animals and that of man clearly demonstrates his frugivorous nature. This view is also taken by Cuvier, Linnæus, Professor Lawrence, Charles Bell, Gassendi, Flourens, and a great number of other eminent writers.' (see The Perfect Way in Diet.)
Linnæus is quoted by John Smith in Fruits and Farinacea as speaking of fruit as follows: 'This species of food is that which is most suitable to man: which is evidenced by the series of quadrupeds, analogy, wild men, apes, the structure of the mouth, of the stomach, and the hands.'
Sir Ray Lancaster, K.C.B., F.R.S., in an article in The Daily Telegraph, December, 1909, wrote: 'It is very generally asserted by those who advocate a purely vegetable diet that man's teeth are of the shape and pattern which we find in the fruit-eating, or in the root-eating, animals allied to him. This is true.... It is quite clear that man's cheek teeth do not enable him to cut lumps of meat and bone from raw carcasses and swallow them whole. They are broad, square-surfaced teeth with four or fewer low rounded tubercles to crush soft food, as are those of monkeys. And there can be no doubt that man fed originally like monkeys, on easily crushed fruits, nuts, and roots.'
With regard to man's original non-carnivorous nature and omnivorism, it is sometimes said that though man's system may not thrive on a raw flesh diet, yet he can assimilate cooked flesh and his system is well adapted to digest it. The answer to this is that were it demonstrable, and it is not, that cooked flesh is as easily digested and contains as much nutriment as grains and nuts, this does not prove it to be suitable for human food; for man (leaving out of consideration the fact that the eating of diseased animal flesh can communicate disease), since he was originally formed by Nature to subsist exclusively on the products of the vegetable kingdom, cannot depart from Nature's plan without incurring penalty of some sort—unless, indeed, his natural original constitution has changed; but it has not changed. The most learned and world-renowned scientists affirm man's present anatomical and physiological structure to be that of a frugivore. Disguising an unnatural food by cooking it may make that food more assimilable, but it by no means follows that such a food is suitable, let alone harmless, as human food. That it is harmful, not only to man's physical health, but to his mental and moral health, this book endeavours to demonstrate.
With regard to the fact that man has not changed constitutionally from his original frugivorous nature Dr. Haig writes as follows: 'If man imagines that a few centuries, or even a few hundred centuries, of meat-eating in defiance of Nature have endowed him with any new powers, except perhaps, that of bearing the resulting disease and degradation with an ignorance and apathy which are appalling, he deceives himself; for the record of the teeth shows that human structure has remained unaltered over vast periods of time.'
According to Dr. Haig, human metabolism (the process by which food is converted into living tissue) differs widely from that of the carnivora. The carnivore is provided with the means to dispose of such poisonous salts as are contained in and are produced by the ingestion of animal flesh, while the human system is not so provided. In the human body these poisons are not held in solution, but tend to form deposits and consequently are the cause of diseases of the arthritic group, conspicuously rheumatism.
There is sometimes some misconception as regards the distinction between a frugivorous and herbivorous diet. The natural diet of man consists of fruits, farinacea, perhaps certain roots, and the more esculent vegetables, and is commonly known as vegetarian, or fruitarian (frugivorous), but man's digestive organs by no means allow him to eat grass as the herbivora—the horse, ox, sheep, etc.—although he is much more nearly allied to these animals than to the carnivora.
We are forced to conclude, in the face of all the available evidence, that the natural constitution of man closely resembles that of fruit-eating animals, and widely differs from that of flesh-eating animals, and that from analogy it is only reasonable to suppose that the fruitarian, or vegetarian, as it is commonly called, is the diet best suited to man. This conclusion has been arrived at by many distinguished men of science, among whom are the above mentioned. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and to prove that the vegetarian is the most hygienic diet, we must examine the physical conditions of those nations and individuals who have lived, and do live, upon this diet.
It might be mentioned, parenthetically, that among animals, the herbivora are as strong physically as any species of carnivora. The most laborious work of the world is performed by oxen, horses, mules, camels, elephants, all vegetable-feeding animals. What animal possesses the enormous strength of the herbivorous rhinoceros, who, travellers relate, uproots trees and grinds whole trunks to powder? Again, the frugivorous orang-outang is said to be more than a match for the African lion. Comparing herbivora and carnivora from this point of view Dr. Kingsford writes: 'The carnivora, indeed, possess one salient and terrible quality, ferocity, allied to thirst for blood; but power, endurance, courage, and intelligent capacity for toil belong to those animals who alone, since the world has had a history, have been associated with the fortunes, the conquests, and the achievements of men.'
Charles Darwin, reverenced by all educated people as a scientist of the most keen and accurate observation, wrote in his Voyage of the Beagle, the following with regard to the Chilian miners, who, he tells us, live in the cold and high regions of the Andes: 'The labouring class work very hard. They have little time allowed for their meals, and during summer and winter, they begin when it is light and leave off at dusk. They are paid £1 sterling a month and their food is given them: this, for breakfast, consists of sixteen figs and two small loaves of bread; for dinner, boiled beans; for supper, broken roasted wheat-grain. They scarcely ever taste meat.' This is as good as saying that the strongest men in the world, performing the most arduous work, and living in an exhilarating climate, are practically strict vegetarians.
Dr. Jules Grand, President of the Vegetarian Society of France speaks of 'the Indian runners of Mexico, who offer instances of wonderful endurance, and eat nothing but tortillas of maize, which they eat as they run along; the street porters of Algiers, Smyrna, Constantinople and Egypt, well known for their uncommon strength, and living on nothing but maize, rice, dates, melons, beans, and lentils. The Piedmontese workmen, thanks to whom the tunnelling of the Alps is due, feed on polenta, (maize-broth). The peasants of the Asturias, like those of the Auvergne, scarcely eat anything except chick-peas and chestnuts ... statistics prove ... that the most numerous population of the globe is vegetarian.'
The following miscellaneous excerpta are from Smith's Fruits and Farinacea:—
'The peasantry of Norway, Sweden, Russia, Denmark, Poland, Germany, Turkey, Greece, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and of almost every country in Europe subsist principally, and most of them entirely, on vegetable food.... The Persians, Hindoos, Burmese, Chinese, Japanese, the inhabitants of the East Indian Archipelago, and of the
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