Upton Sinclair

“ Woods Hutchinson, the most prominent of the champions of meat eating, puts the case: “Vegetarianism is the diet of the enslaved, stagnant, and conquered races, and a diet rich in meat is that of the progressing, the dominant and the conquering strains. The rise of any nation in civilization is invariably accompanied by an increasing abundance in food supplies from all possible sources, both vegetable and animal.” ”

“ Man is his food. Each human body is made by chemical action from its food. All our actions and all our thoughts come from what we eat, even as the movements of machinery proceed from the coal fed into the boilers of the engine which operate the machine. If we eat the right food, namely, the food which contains the elements our bodies require in the proper proportions, we repair all waste, replace broken down tissue and supply ourselves with physical and mental energy for our toils and joys in life ”

“ The most broadly interesting of these Yale food experiments are those having to do with the question of endurance. The vast majority of people are not ambitious to excel as athletes; they find better and more enjoyable forms of work in life than putting up big dumb-bells, or breaking records on the athletic field. Of course, everybody wants to be strong, and to have well-trained and active muscles; but on the whole, what the majority of people need is physical and mental stick-to-itiveness—the ability to work without deterioration, without running down like worn-out machinery. ”

“ In our survey of the processes and organs of digestion, we saw that after food has traversed the stomach and small intestine it passes into the colon, where it must remain for some considerable time, while the absorption of its digested elements is completed. And this brings us to the most important of the discoveries of the new hygiene. It has been found that some of the foods which human beings eat are loaded with injurious bacteria, and with the poisons which these bacteria produce. ”

“ The habit which many business and professional men form, in the stress of their occupations, of allowing their meal hours to be intruded upon, at times depriving themselves of a meal, will undermine the best digestion in the long run. There is no physiologist who would not endorse the following words of Kellogg: “Every individual ought to consider the hour for meals a sacred one, not to be intruded upon under any ordinary circumstances. Eating is a matter of too momentous importance to be interrupted or delayed by ordinary matters of business or convenience. ”

“ In the United States the average length of life is about forty-two years; but a large and growing school of modern scientists (comparative anatomists) declare that the natural age of the human family cannot be much less than from one hundred, to one hundred and twenty-five years. Any death that comes at least before one hundred years, is not a natural death but accidental or violent. From the point of view of science, death through disease is just as accidental and violent as the extinguishment of life in a railway wreck or by drowning in the sea ”

“ For business men and women, indeed, for workers of all kinds, good health is capital; and the story of the new hygiene is the story of the throwing open of hitherto unsuspected reserve-stores of energy and endurance for the use of all. ”

“ It is important to apply these truths to the question of nutrition. It is positively harmful to eat food when one is gloomy or low spirited or worried or angry.
You may object to this that you cannot at will make an optimist of yourself at meal times, and turn on a flow of good humor as you draw water from a tap. But you can at least refrain from eating, and if you do you will discover that the real hunger which is bound to develop is a very strong emotion. It will drive away any ordinary attack of the blues very quickly ”

“ And if the cycle of human life followed an ideal course, he concluded men and women after living a healthy and useful life extending over at least a century, with their usefulness and satisfaction in life at maximum during the latter portion of that period, would then give themselves up calmly and gracefully to the arms of death, as to the arms of a friend laying them down to earned and wished-for rest. Old age would have no terrors, and death no victory. ”

“ Their function was for a long time not understood; the discovery of the real facts, perhaps the most epoch-making discovery ever made concerning the human body, the world owes to the genius of Metchnikoff, the head of the Pasteur Institute of Paris. These cells are the last reserves of the body in its defense against the assault of disease. Whenever, in spite of all opposition, the hostile germs find access either to the blood or to the tissue, the white cells rush to the spot, and fall upon them and devour them. ”

“ The old struggle against the forces of nature [Pg 9] once relaxed, men grew effeminate and women weak; diseases increased; physical fibre softened and atrophied and withered away; moral fibre went the same path to destruction; dry rot attacked the foundations of society, and eventually the whole fabric toppled over, or was swept aside, to be built up again by some conquering horde of barbarians, which in its turn grew civilized, and in its turn succumbed to the virulent poison that seemed inherent in the very nature of civilization, and for which there seemed to be no antidote. ”

“ Thus, a new science of economics having been worked out, and the causes of poverty and exploitation set forth, we see a world-wide and universal movement for the abolition of these evils. And hand in hand with this goes a movement of moral regeneration, manifesting itself in a thousand different forms, but all having for their aim the teaching of self-mastery—the replacing of the old natural process of the elimination of the unfit by a conscious effort on the part of each individual to eliminate his own unfitness. ”

“ Every act of a human being has its effect upon this battle; at every moment of your life you are either strengthening the power of your own organism or strengthening your enemies. Once the organism is unable to beat back its enemies, health begins to fail and death and complete disintegration is the ultimate result.
It must be understood that the peril of these hostile germs is not merely that they devour the substance upon which the body’s own organisms have to be nourished. ”

“ Out of all proportion to all other causes which lead to the formation of body poisons, is the production of toxins in the colon or large intestine. Metchnikoff’s studies show beyond a doubt that there is a close connection between the size of the colon and the duration of life in various birds and animals. Where the colon is used, and has attained large proportions, as in man, in the horse, and many other animals, life is comparatively short, and death is premature. Where the colon is rudimentary, or where only such foods are eaten as do not decay or ferment in the colon, then life is long. ”

“ Indeed, in the view of some physiologists, ordinary pure cold water is by far the most powerful and useful of all known healing agencies. It heals not by any strange or occult power, but by co-operating with the natural forces of the body, by aiding to the utmost those physiological processes by means of which the body sustains itself in health, and resists the encroachments of disease by the means of its bodyguard of blood cells, and by maintaining at its high pitch its innate vital resistance. ”

“ This knowledge the world owes to Horace Fletcher, the American business man who has made many of the greatest physiologists of our times embark upon years-long series of experiments and inquiries into the problems of man’s nutrition. As a result, the text-books of physiology are now being rewritten; and as a further result, tens of thousands of men and women, among them some of the best known authors, physicians, clergymen, military men, and business men of both Europe and America, have been restored to health by the knowledge of how to eat their food. ”

“ Let us see what takes place: when a person dips his body into cold water, as in sea bathing, or when he steps into the bath at home, the first thing he does, which in fact he finds himself doing involuntarily, is to draw in a deep breath. ”

“ The practical value of the experiment consists in the fact that any layman can apply it, with or without a knowledge of food values, though with more advantage if he possess than if he lack such knowledge. If the dietetic rules of the present experiment are followed, no self-denial as to foods is required. It is, however, absolutely necessary that there should be self-control enough to break up the habit of hurried eating to which modern civilization has brought us—habituating us, as it were, to eat against time. ”

“ I believe that to-day our civilization is rapidly degenerating; but also I believe that it contains within itself two forces of regeneration which were lacking in old societies, and which are destined ultimately to [Pg 11] prevail in our own. The first of these forces is democracy, and the second is science.
To whatever department of human activity one turns at the present day, he finds men engaged in combating the age-long evils of human life with the new weapon of exact knowledge ”

“ He states that scientific study of the constitution of man, and of the workings of man’s nature, and of his environment in the world, do not support the view that man is born unto sorrow as the sparks fly upward—to quote the words of the Psalmist—but can really be fitted to live a useful and happy life, ending in a calm and peaceful old age—if man will but turn his attention to the knowledge by which he can really live in harmony with his environment. ”

“ The blood not being as well nourished as it should be, the white army of the soldiers of the body begin to weaken and to die, and the forces of disease penetrate through their warding lines and attack the fort of life from many sides, or else concentrate their strength in the form of some virulent sickness. ”

“ The sudden and complete exclusion of meat is not always desirable, unless more skill and knowledge in food matters are employed [Pg 91] than most persons possess. On the contrary, disaster has repeatedly overtaken many who have made this attempt. Pawlow has shown that meat is one of the most, and perhaps the most, ‘peptogenic’ of foods. Whether the stimulus it gives to the stomach is natural, or in the nature of an improper goad or whip, certain it is that stomachs which are accustomed to this daily whip have failed, for a time at least, to act when it was withdrawn. ”

“ It solves the whole question of the right combination of foods; solves the question of the quantity of foods, and the quality of foods, after one has got his appetite trained, his natural instinct trained; and when it comes to certain diseases like acidity of the stomach, hyper-acidity or hypo-acidity, dilation of the stomach or cirrhosis of the liver, or any other trouble with the digestive organs, if it does not effect a radical cure it makes it possible to tolerate a condition which otherwise would be deadly in a short time. ”

“ The phrase, which was once accurate, is now misleading, for the germ “theory” is part of the definite achievement of science. Not only have we succeeded in isolating the specific germ whose introduction into the body is responsible for different diseases, but in many cases, by studying the history and behavior of the germ, we have been able to find methods of checking its inroads, and so have delivered men from scourges like yellow fever and the bubonic plague. ”

“ He himself thinks that there is nothing very remarkable in all this. He attributes it to his abstention from meat, from tea and coffee, alcohol and tobacco. He never eats more than one “hearty” meal a day; his second meal, when he takes one, consisting of a little fruit. His sole regret is that during the first fourteen or fifteen years of his life he ate meat. He believes that any child, if it begin right, can, when it grows up, do all that he is doing. ”

“ The new ideas of living which are the subject of this book have proceeded from investigation of the human body with the high-power microscope. The discoveries made, which have to do, not so much with the body itself as with the countless billions of minute organisms which inhabit the body, may be best set forth by a description of the blood. “The blood is the life,” says Exodus, and modern science has confirmed this statement. From the blood proceeds the life of all the body, and in its health is the body’s health. ”

“ To prevent any possible deterioration of the American stock should be a national ambition. We cannot too strongly insist on the necessity of proper ideals for the family, for simple life and for those habits and tastes which produce vigor and make more capable of strenuous service to our country. The preservation of national vigor should be a matter of patriotism.... Federal activity in these matters has already developed greatly, until it now includes quarantine, meat inspection, pure food administration, and federal investigation of the conditions of child labor. ”

“ Another way in which exercise directly helps the battle of the blood within us, is by assisting such organs of body-poison elimination as the spleen, the liver, and the portal system of veins. It is in these organs that the exhausted blood is broken up and cast off. The blood in these organs is loaded with broken down tissue and other waste material from the body, and is contaminated with gases and poisons. In the body of the person who leads a sedentary life a great volume of blood settles in these organs and is prematurely put out of use. ”

“ No sauce can equal appetite. Experiments by Professor Pawlow of St. [Pg 154] Petersburg, Director of Department of Experimental Physiology in the Imperial Literary School of Medicine, have shown that there is a real “appetite juice” formed by the body when it is hungry.
Appetite, and hunger, are not synonymous terms with the mere habit-craving for food which most people consider to be either appetite or hunger. Real hunger, or appetite, only comes to the body when the body has earned it. There must be an expenditure of tissue, which the body requires to be repaired ”

“ It remains to give an account of a great national movement which has for its aim the spreading of a knowledge of the new hygiene in a semi-political way, a circumstance which to our minds proves that not only this nation but the whole of modern civilization is on the eve of a great revolution in its habits of living, and that this revolution will have for its rallying cry the word “Knowledge.” ”

“ But not a wheel of the official machinery at Washington was ever set in motion for the alleviation or cure of diseases of the heart or kidneys, which will carry off over six millions of our entire population. Eight millions will perish of pneumonia, and the entire event is accepted by the American people with a resignation equal to that of the Hindoo, who, in the midst of indescribable filth, calmly awaits the day of cholera. ”

“ The act of eating is the starting point of the long series of processes whereby our bodies are nourished. It is the only act of them all which lies within our control. We [Pg 42] can directly supervise the work of our mouths; we can watch over the action of the teeth, and tongue, and palate; but we can not supervise the work of the stomach, or of the intestinal tube. Once we have swallowed our food, our mastery over it has ceased—except for some hit-or-miss participation in the further processes of its digestion by means of pills or potions. ”

“ They are preventable death, preventable sickness, preventable conditions of low physical and mental efficiency, and preventable ignorance. The magnitude of these wastes is testified to by experts competent to judge. They fall like the shades of night over the whole human race, blotting out its fairest years of happiness. ”