Sowing for Physical and Spiritual Health by David Paulson; W. S. Sadler

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 27, 1900

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 77, No. 48.

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Sowing for Physical and Spiritual Health

By David Paulson; W. S. Sadler

David Paulson & W. S. Sadler

FLESH FOODS.

(Continued.)

FOUR GREAT REASONS IN FAVOR OF

A NON-FLESH DIET.

1. The Folly of Gratifying a Depraved Taste at the Expense of Animal Life.—Some maintain that if animals were not eaten, the world would soon be overrun by them; but this is certainly a poor excuse for persisting in laying the foundation for a premature grave; for in that case both the man and the animal die together. On the other hand, many whose conscience does not allow them to see a dumb animal slain simply to gratify four square inches of taste space, say that, in order to be consistent, we must not interfere with the various vermin and bugs that infest the world. But such forget that the Lord allowed the thorns and thistles to grow for Adam to dig up, not for him to eat. And so undoubtedly the Lord has allowed a great many unpleasant creatures to exist in the world; and the principle that leads us to destroy a bug that may be stealing our own blood is certainly a different principle from that which leads us to kill a cow for the purpose of contaminating our blood. To deprive an animal of its life for no other reason than to satisfy perverted appetite, when there is an abundance of other food substances to be had, is surely unwarranted.

2. Remarkable Increase of Disease in the Animal World.—As the curse is resting more and more heavily upon man on account of his sinful habits of life, those animals which are the most closely associated with him are compelled to share in the curse.

Tuberculosis.—The consumptive man expectorates on the hay; the cow that eats the hay contracts tuberculosis, and its milk is contaminated with the same; the susceptible child contracts the disease from this milk, and perhaps either dies a premature death or grows up to be a wretched consumptive,—to go about spreading the infection to both men and animals. The owners of some of the finest herds in the United States are finding that from fifty to sixty per cent of their milch cows have tuberculosis in some form. The live-stock commissioners of one State have estimated that one third of all the cows that furnish one of the largest cities in the Union with milk are infected with this dread disease.

Lumpy Jaw.—Lumpy jaw is a common name for another disease that is becoming prevalent among cattle. The neck becomes large and swollen and great abscesses form, and the animal becomes a hideous sight. At the stock yards the bodies of such animals are supposed to be used simply for fertilizing purposes; but if the reports of those who have investigated this subject are to be trusted, many of these animals are worked up into sausage, to be sold to cheap restaurants, street lunch cars, and where else we do not know.

Hog Cholera.—It is a well-known fact that when an epidemic of hog cholera invades a certain part of the country, a great many more railroad cars are needed in that vicinity to carry the swine to the market than before; and if the butcher can get the start of the disease by only a day or two, it is regarded perfectly proper and consistent.

Trichinosis.—Many swine are also infected with trichinæ. Germany does not accept any pork from the United States that has not been subjected to governmental inspection. Small slices of pork are slipped under a microscope, and careful eyes try to discover the little cysts in which the trichinæ lie curled up. Two out of every hundred hogs killed in one of the largest packing houses are found to have trichinæ, and so these can not be sent to Germany; but as there is no law against selling pork containing trichinæ in the United States, they are put on the market just the same, thus increasing the real percentage of diseased pork that is consumed in this country. One of New York’s most eminent physicians said, after years of experience in post-mortem and dissecting rooms, that five or six per cent of all human bodies give evidence of having been infected with trichinæ. So there are more men who have trichinæ than swine, which is presumably because there are more men who eat hogs than there are hogs that have an opportunity to eat men. Rats burrow in the cemeteries, and eat the bodies of the dead, and thus become infected from those who have had trichinæ; and as one of the favorite delicacies of the hog is a rat, either dead or alive, the hog becomes infected; and when man eats the swine, the circle is completed. When an infected hog is hung up in the market, and twenty persons buy of it, all become infected; so it can be readily seen how easy it is for such diseases to become diffused.

Cancer.—That the increase in cancer among human beings is keeping pace with the increase in the use of flesh foods is a fact that is now being recognized by many leading physicians. It is evident that when the human system has to use up a great deal of its reserve force in carrying off the waste matter found in meat, especially if such a person has inherited a susceptibility to cancer, his chances of succumbing to the disease must be immensely increased by the use of flesh foods.

3. Meat Eating and Spirituality.—From first to last, the practice of flesh eating is in no way calculated to promote spirituality. The influence of killing animals and using them as food is in every way calculated to lessen our regard for life. This must be particularly the effect upon the men, and oftentimes young boys, who are employed in the work of slaughter. The newspapers a short time ago recorded a sad case of two children, aged six and eight respectively, who, having seen their father killing hogs, concluded to play “butcher,” as they called it; the older of the two killing his younger brother with an ax. This is an exceptional case, but serves to indicate the moral influence of the practice of taking animal life to gratify depraved appetite. Aside from these indirect moral influences, the poisons contained in the meat exert a direct influence upon the finer sensibilities of mind and soul. The presence of these poisons in the blood as it circulates through the brain day by day can not but result in great injury to the moral sensibilities. How inconsistent for the Christian, who is striving for purity of mind and holiness of heart, to cause his brain to be ever bathed with a stream of poisonous substances which nature had previously recognized as such, and was engaged in the task of eliminating from the animal’s system when it was felled by the slaughter weapon! Meat eating produces cloudiness of mind, numbness of conscience, and lethargy of soul.

4. Is It Economy to Eat Secondhand Food?—We can get albumen or proteids from both the animal and the vegetable kingdom. About ten per cent of ordinary bread is gluten, which is a proteid. Less than one fourth of the weight of a pound of beefsteak is food, the remainder is water, not pure water, however, as found in fruit. From a health standpoint, animal foods should be regarded expensive, at any cost; but even when viewed from a standpoint of dollars and cents, flesh foods must necessarily be more expensive than the natural products of the earth, as a rough calculation will show: Ordinarily an ox is not sold to the butchers until he is three years old. Previously to this time he has required, on the average, an acre of land each summer for grazing, and another acre to supply the necessary hay for winter. To raise this animal has therefore required six acres of land. The ox now probably weighs about twelve hundred pounds, live weight, or about six hundred pounds when dressed and hung up in the meat market. As flesh contains only about twenty-five per cent of nourishment, if a person were to live exclusively on meat, he would use about three pounds a day; so in this way these six acres of land would furnish food for only two hundred days, or a little more than six months. Suppose, instead, that these six acres were sown with wheat, with a yield of only ten bushels to the acre, we should receive sixty bushels, or thirty-six hundred pounds of wheat. A pound of wheat produces about three fourths of a pound of flour. The land necessary for the raising of the steer yielded six hundred pounds of flesh food. The same amount of land sown with wheat gives us twenty-seven hundred pounds of flour; and instead of its being less than twenty-five per cent nutriment, as is the case with flesh food, it is fully seventy-five per cent; therefore, it will not require so much to supply the daily ration as when living exclusively upon animal flesh.

To aid in determining how much dry food was actually consumed in one day, ten healthy young persons volunteered to live for two weeks exclusively on granose, a thoroughly toasted whole-wheat preparation. At the end of that time it was found that they had consumed an average of a pound a day, and a comparison of their bodily weight at the beginning and at the close of the experiment showed a gain of several pounds in the weight of some, only a slight gain in others, while not one had lost in weight.

To secure more trustworthy data, the food that was actually consumed by several hundred of the nurses and other employees of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, was weighed, and its equivalent in dry food estimated, and it was found that they used daily about a pound and a quarter of dry food, divided among the following food elements: starch 16 ounces; proteids, 2½ ounces; fats, 1½ ounces. These young persons maintained their normal weight on this quantity, so it would be fair to assume that this was the normal amount for at least these working people.

Six acres would yield twenty-seven hundred pounds of flour, three fourths of each pound being solid nourishment; so this quantity would equal

about two thousand pounds of dry food (free from water), and, allowing one and one-fourth pounds for daily consumption, would supply one person with food for sixteen hundred days, or nearly four years and a half. Six acres of land, when used to rear an animal, will furnish food for only six months: the same land sown in wheat will supply food for four years and a half.

Do we, then, wonder that flesh foods are expensive? A pound of peas, beans, or lentils has more nourishment than three pounds of meat; but think of the enormous difference in their expense as they are purchased in the market.

Prominent investigators have again and again called attention to the fact that one cause of the poverty of the laboring man is the fact that he spends so much of his money for that which is not bread (Isa. 55:2); or, in other words, for articles of food containing but little food value. The ordinary family spends sufficient money for tea and coffee and flesh foods to bountifully support another family on the luscious fruits, nourishing grains, and wholesome nuts, which nature originally intended man to live upon.