FLESH FOODS.

There is no disputing the fact that many thousands of people appear to attain a very fine physical development and seem to maintain good health who subsist upon a mixed diet, including meat. It is unquestionably true that meat will sustain life, and it is equally true that life can be sustained without it.

The objections to meat are: First, it is laden with the poisons that come from the torn-down tissue and urea of the animal, all of which must be taken into the blood and disposed of by the excretory organs of the body which are always worked to their normal capacity to carry off the waste products that come from our own body; and when laden with that of another animal, they are often taxed beyond their power.

Second, recent experiments in the State of Ohio and Illinois developed the fact that about 76 per cent. of the best cattle in these two States are diseased. The majority of them have tuberculosis. All readers of this book may not be willing to wholly eschew the juicy sirloin, or even the fat pork chop; but we do believe that when they have thought the matter seriously over without the consultation of appetite, they will decide that the flesh of another animal is not only hazardous, but wholly unnecessary as an article of food.

If one decides that meats are absolutely necessary, it should be his object to take it in its best and most nutritive form. Cooking cannot possibly improve it. The only change that heat could possibly make would be to convert part of its nutritive value into heat and pass it off into the atmosphere. Inasmuch, therefore, as heat is merely an expression of energy, the energy or heat lost in cooking might be applied to the body if the meat were eaten without the application of fire.

The most popular reason given for cooking meat is that it kills disease germs. In the first place, nothing should be eaten that contains disease germs, and in the second place, heat does not kill them. The germs cannot be destroyed until the meat is destroyed of which they are a part. In partly cooked or rare meats no germs are destroyed, and it is admitted by all authorities that rare meats are more easily digested and far more nutritious than those well done. There is no reason why the rare meat idea should not be carried to its logical end, and the food served entirely raw.

In the form of meat there is nothing more nourishing than beefsteak a la Tartar (see recipe), or Hamburger steak, uncooked, dried beef, jerked venison, etc. All of these are much to be preferred to the cooked article.

If cooking were abolished the taste and requirements of the body would very soon solve the meat question. People would eat shell fish, dried and smoked meat, and possibly beefsteak a la Tartar so long as the body called for or demanded them, and no longer. This would also solve several other great questions with which misguided individuals, societies, churches, political parties and State legislatures are vainly struggling.

It is impossible to keep alive the appetite for such stimulants as tobacco, fermented and distilled liquors, tea and coffee, when the body is correctly fed. A being who subsists upon clean, elementary foods would have no more desire for stimulants and narcotics than a horse or a dog would have for a Manhattan cocktail.

It is the changing, the perverting, the cooking and the artificializing of foods that creates and keeps alive these abnormal desires. If we feed the body upon elementary foods, in the state in which nature created them, we can depend upon it to suggest to us daily that which it needs. The strange faculty of hunger was made a part of the human organism, to perform this specific work.