ALL ANIMAL ENERGY COMES FROM PLANTS.
By J. Howard Moore
J. Howard Moore, A. B., in The Vegetarian and Our Fellow Creatures. ALL beings, whether phytophagous (feeding on plants) or creophagous (feeding on animals) are sustained by food compounds obtained directly or indirectly from plants. “All flesh is grass.” No animal can produce protoplasm, which is the physical basis of all life. This is a power of the plant and of the plant only. No animal can create starch or sugar or fat or proteid. The animal may, by the acids of its body, change food substances from one form into another, as proteids into peptones, starch into sugar, sugar into glucose, and starch or sugar into fat. These changes are superficial changes. They involve no synthetic or constructive process. They are affected by a slight shifting of the atomic elements, and are brought about generally in order to render the substances more assimilable, that is, in order to get them into forms in which they will readily strain through the membranes and permeate the cells and tissues of the body. No animal can create energy—more accurately, no animal can by molecular manipulation change kinetic energy into potential. All any animal can do is to dissipate the energy generated in the sunlit laboratories of the plant. . . . The energy of the engine is derived from the same source, for coal is “fossil sunshine.” Now, the plant is the natural receptacle for that part of the solar energy which shows itself in the phenomena of the organic life of the earth. The plant stores this energy in the form of potential compounds. It takes the simple binary compounds of water, carbon dioxide, or ammonia, and under the miraculous action of sunlight converts them into the exceedingly complex and unstable compounds of starch, sugar, oil, and proteid. The animal takes these compounds and by degrading them to their original binary beginnings, that is, by changing their potential energy into kinetic, derives its life and motion. The sun charges the plant, and the plant energizes the animal. An ear of corn or wheat is a battery of stored radiance, which the bodies of animals discharge in acts of kindness and crime. The plant is, therefore, the natural food of the animal, and the plant kingdom is the exclusive source of all the life, thought, and activity of the animal world. When one animal makes a meal out of another, it simply reappropriates the energy which its victim has previously appropriated from the plant—it simply uses second-hand that which its victim has taken first-hand. The plant and the animal are mutualists. They co-operate with each other. The plant is fixed and passive. Its nature and organization adapt it to the storing of energy. The animal is detached and active. Its nature and organization make it a consumer of energy. The plant in the exercise of its natural functions creates that which is indispensable to the animal, and vice versa. The plant eats and drinks ammonia, carbon dioxide, and water, and produces proteid, starch, sugar, cellulose, and fat. The animal takes these products of the plant and gives in exchange, as the excrementitious products of its waste and decay, carbon dioxide, water, and urea. The plant and animal kingdoms are bound together by common interests and reciprocal necessities. They are not two separate and independent empires. They are the supplemental halves of the organic whole. And whenever any animal, instead of accepting the bounty and co-operation of the plant, turns round and swallows its fellow, it violates one of the oldest-established adaptations in nature. It is, therefore, not only possible to find in the plant world the substances necessary to human life, but we necessarily find them there, for they are to be found primarily no place else.