Unmitigated Rubbish

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 6, 1913

Unmitigated Rubbish

The president of the American Meat Packers’ Association recently declared that without the use of meat “we shall pass to the condition of the low-caste Chinaman.” Regarding this the New York Weekly Witness says: “It is not likely the time will ever come when it will not be possible for the great majority of the people of this country to eat meat, but it might prove a great blessing to most of our people if they could be compelled to get on with very much less meat.”

The first statement quoted above, the Witness characterizes as “unmitigated rubbish,” and surely it is. There are millions of people in this world into whose dietary meat never enters, and yet they are quite as strong physically and capable of quite as much physical and mental endurance as those who live on an omnivorous diet. Nor are the people of this class confined to the races of India or the natives of the South Sea islands. In temperate zones, in such countries as England and the United States, there are thousands of people who for the greater part of their lives, and perhaps during their entire lives, have subsisted wholly on vegetarian products, and these are holding their own with their meat-eating fellows in both intellectual and material pursuits. Meat is by no means a necessity in the dietary of the average laboring man or brain worker. The elements which it contains should be supplied in other foods, but the vegetable kingdom affords an abundance of protein matter, so that recourse to meat products is by no means necessary. The public mind needs education on this question.