Why Eat Meat? by J. Howard Moore

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jun 28, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 25.

Why Eat Meat?

By J. Howard Moore

J. Howard Moore, A.M., in Vegetarian Magazine

If we can do without meat for a few weeks, we can do without it for a few months; and if for a few months, we can do without it permanently. There is an abundance to eat without eating meat at all, and the very best kinds of food at that. Our markets are piled with the riches of June the year around, thanks to never-tiring freight-trains from California and the Gulf.

There are grains of all kinds and in hundreds of forms, vegetables, dairy products, eggs, nuts, and fruits. These foods are just as nourishing and delicious as flesh foods, and many of them much more so. They are also more wholesome, for they are without the uric acid of flesh and without the strong tendency to putrefy.

A large number of our most common diseases are recognized by physicians to be caused primarily by meat eating, and flesh foods are regularly forbidden in their treatment. Among them are rheumatism, gout, dyspepsia, cancer, epilepsy, Bright's disease, headache, and appendicitis. If a meat-free diet is a good diet to get well on, it is likely to be a good diet to stay well on.

Man is anatomically a vegetarian. This is recognized by all comparative anatomists from Cuvier to Darwin. The vegetarian diet is more economical at all times than a meat diet. It affords greater energy and endurance. In all the walking matches and other contests of endurance in England and Germany between vegetarians and meat eaters the vegetarians have beaten the meat eaters out of their boots. The greatest walking, cycling, and lifting records of the world have been made by vegetarians. . . .

To abstain from meat eating solely because meat is so expensive, and in order to bring down the price, is to manifest a moral sensitiveness and acumen on a par with that of the woman whose automobile ran over a tramp, and who bemoaned the accident because it made it necessary for her vehicle to be disinfected.