Meat Prices and the Vegetarian Diet
An advance of three cents a pound wholesale in the price of mutton has caused the prices of other meats also to be advanced. This places the wholesale price of fancy mutton at sixteen cents a pound, which is said to be the highest at which it has been sold in forty years. The soaring of price of meat is not an unmitigated evil, for it is teaching a great many people that they do not need meat anyway. Some are finding out that they can get on better without it than with it. The men and the women who intelligently restrict themselves to a properly prepared vegetarian diet get on much better and cheaper than the meat eater. The big trust that controls the prices of meat, and that is able, with just a word, to advance the price in this way, is not overly scrupulous in regard to the selling of diseased products. It is true that meat is supposed to be closely inspected; but at the same time, it is an open secret that the inspector is not above being bribed, and hence very much diseased meat is openly sold in the market. And, besides, the methods in vogue in many places of fattening animals fills them with disease, yet this very meat will pass the ordinary inspector and appear to be the very best and choicest. Many people will testify that they have not used meat for years, and that they are stronger and in better health than when they used it. The meat-eater is under the necessity of eating the poisons that, through the breaking down of the tissues, are constantly in the very healthiest of animals. Flesh foods are not a necessity, and can be dispensed with to advantage by any one who will take the pains to learn how to select and cook a proper vegetarian diet.