Meat and the Workingman’s Strength
What nonsense it is that the great Edinburgh Review indulges in! In comparing Americans and their greater products with European workmen, it attributes the superiority of the former to the fact that they can purchase with better wages a larger amount of meat, and says, “Without that form of support in extensive quantities, the high evolution of energy witnessed in the American workingman would either not take place, or would result very speedily in mental and bodily exhaustion.” The idea that meat furnishes more strength or energy or power of continuance than a non-meat diet is a fruit of ignorance. We know to the contrary. We know men who have for years lived on a non-flesh diet who are doing better work than they did when on a flesh diet. More than this, they are doing as hard work, mentally and physically, as flesh-eaters in the same lines, and are as fruitful in resources, as energetic in work, as enduring in labor. The man who lives properly on fruits, grains, and vegetables, can work longer hours without exhaustion, and with as unflagging energy, as any flesh-eaters (other things being equal), and, we believe, longer.