William A. Alcott

“ Start not back at the idea of subsisting upon the potato alone, ye who think it necessary to load your tables with all the dainty viands of the market—with fish, flesh, and fowl, seasoned with oil and spices, and eaten, perhaps, with wines;—start not back, I say, with disgust, until you are able to display in your own pampered persons a firmer muscle, a more beau-ideal outline, and a healthier red than the potato-fed peasantry of Ireland and Scotland once showed you, as you passed by their cabin doors! ”

“ It takes for granted, as I understand it, that what we call civilization, has rendered animal food necessary to man. But is it not obvious that the condition of things which is thus supposed to render this species of food necessary, is not likely to disappear—nay, that it is every century becoming more and more the law, so to speak, of the land? Who is to stop the labor-saving machine, the railroad car, or the lightning flash of intelligence? ”

“ In vain may we resort to early discipline and correct education—in vain to moral and religious training—in vain, I had almost said, to the promises and threatenings of heaven itself, so long as we continue the use of food so unnatural to man as the flesh of animals, with the condiments and sauces, and improper drinks which follow in its train. Our hope, under God, is, in no small degree, on a radical change in man's dietetic habits—in a return to that simple path of truth and nature, from which, in most civilized countries, those who have the pecuniary means of doing it have unwisely departed. ”

“ How much more natural to suppose that the more perfect the health of the stomach, the better it will bear, for a time, with slight or even serious departures from truth and nature! How much more natural to suppose that perfect health is the very best defence against all the causes which tend to invite or to provoke disease! And what it would be natural to infer, is proved by experience to be strictly true. The thorough-going vegetable-eater can make a meal for once, or perhaps feed for a day or so, on substances which would almost kill many others ”

“ The destruction of animals for food, in its details and tendencies, involves so much of cruelty as to cause every reflecting individual—not destitute of the ordinary sensibilities of our nature—to shudder. I recall: daily observation shows that such is not the fact; nor should it, upon second thought, be expected. Where all are dark, the color is not perceived; and so universally are the moral sensibilities which really belong to human nature deadened by the customs which prevail among us, that few, if any, know how to estimate, rightly, the evil of which I speak. ”

“ Still my appetite for animal food seems unabated. I have ever been a man unusually temperate in the use of intoxicating drinks; and by no means intemperate in the luxuries of the table. I take no meat, no alcoholic or fermented drinks, not even cider; and, for a year past, my health has been better than for three years previous; and I think that about one third the amount of nourishment usually taken by men of my age, might subserve the purposes of food for me better than a larger quantity. The more I eat, the more I desire to eat; and abstinence is my best medicine. ”

“ It has been said, that the great fondness men have for animal food, is proof enough that nature intended them to eat it. As if men were not fond of wine, ardent spirits, and other things which we know cut short their days! ”

“ Should we ever deviate from our present principles—should we approach nearer the mode of living common in wealthy families—we should soon be obliged to establish, in our institution, as it is in others, medicine closets and nurseries. Instead of the freshness which now adorns the cheeks of our youth, paleness would appear, and our church-yards would contain the tombs of promising young men, who, in the bloom of their years, had fallen victims to disease. ”

“ He is destitute of experience, and he has no example. But he has a stomach, and he is hungry: he has hands and he has teeth; the world is all before him, and he is the lord of it, at least so far as to use such food in it as he pleases.
Does any one believe that, in these circumstances, man would prey upon the animals around him? Does any person believe—can he for one moment believe—he would forthwith imbrue his hands in blood, whether that of his own species or of some other? ”

“ The Irish of modern days, as well as the Scotch, are confined almost wholly to vegetable food. So are the Italians, the Germans, and many other nations of modern Europe. Yet, where shall we look for finer specimens of bodily health, strength, and vigor, than in these very countries? The females, especially, where shall we look for their equals? The men, even—the Scotch and Irish, for example—are they weaker than their brethren, the English, who use more animal food?
It will be said, perhaps, the vegetable-eating Europeans are not always distinguished for vigorous minds. ”

“ So fully were the Romans, at one time, persuaded of the superior goodness of vegetable diet, that, besides the private example of many of their great men, they established laws respecting food, among which were the lex fannia, and the lex licinia, which allowed but very little animal food; and, for a period of five hundred years, diseases were banished along with the physician from the Roman empire. Nor has our own age been destitute of examples of men, brave from the vigor both of their bodies and their minds, who at the same time have been drinkers of water and eaters of vegetables. ”

“ How have I been struck with the change produced in the young mind by that merriment which often accompanies [Pg 282] the slaughter of an innocent fowl, or lamb, or pig! How can the Christian, with the Bible in hand, and the merciful doctrines of its pages for his text,
"Teach me to feel another's woe,"
—the beast's not excepted—and yet, having laid down that Bible, go at once from the domestic altar to make light of the convulsions and exit of a poor domestic animal? ”

“ Millions of Gentoos have lived to an advanced age without having tasted any thing that ever possessed life, and been wholly free from a chain of maladies which have scourged every civilized nation on the globe. The wandering Arabs, who have traversed the barren desert of Sahara, subsisting on the scanty pittance of milk from the half-famished camel that carried them, have seen two hundred years roll round without a day of sickness. ”

“ In Japan and China—the former more especially—if the march of civilization should be found to have rendered animal food more necessary, it has at the same time rendered it less accessible to the mass of the population. The great increase of the human species has crowded out the animals, even the domestic ones. Some of the old historians and geographers tell us that there are not so many domestic animals in the whole kingdom of Japan, as in a single township of Sweden. And must not all nations, as society progresses and the millennium dawns, crowd out the animals in the same way? ”

“ In every period of history it has been known that vegetables alone are sufficient for the support of life; and the bulk of mankind live upon them at this hour. The adherence to the use of animal food is no more than a gross persistence in the customs of savage life, and an insensibility to the progress of reason and the operation of intellectual improvement. This habit must be considered as one of the numerous relics of that ancient barbarism which has overspread the face of the globe, and which still taints the manners of civilized nations. ”

“ Here, then, we are consuming that unnecessarily—if animal food is unnecessary—which would sustain seventy-nine millions of human beings in life, health, and happiness.
Now, if life is a blessing at all—if it is a blessing to twenty-two millions in Great Britain, and twenty millions in the United States—then to add to this population an increase of seventy-nine millions, would be to increase, in the same proportion, the aggregate of human happiness. ”

“ By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system. Reasoning is surely superfluous on a subject whose merits an experience of six months should set forever at rest. ”

“ But, if you still maintain that such is your natural mode of subsistence, then follow nature in your mode of killing your prey, and employ neither knife, hammer, nor hatchet—but, like wolves, bears, and lions, seize an ox with your teeth, grasp a boar round the body, or tear asunder a lamb or a hare, and, like the savage tribe, devour them still panting in the agonies of death. ”

“ It must be obvious, at a single glance, that if the vegetable products of an acre of land—such as wheat, rye, corn, barley, potatoes, beans, peas, turnips, beets, apples, strawberries, etc.—will sustain a family in equal health eight times as long as the pork, or beef, or mutton, which the same vegetables would make by feeding them to domestic animals, it must be just as mistaken a policy for the individual to make the latter disposition of these products as for a nation to do so. Nations are made of individuals ”

“ Debility is gradually converted into strength, disease into healthfulness; madness, in all its hideous variety, from the ravings of the fettered maniac, to the unaccountable irrationalities of ill-temper, that make a hell of domestic life, into a calm and considerate evenness of temper, that alone might offer a certain pledge of the future moral reformation of society.
"On a natural system of diet, old age would be our last and our only malady; the term of our existence would be protracted; we should enjoy life, and no longer preclude others from the enjoyment of it ”

“ In this view, the world, I mean our own portion of it, sometimes seems to me like one mighty slaughter-house—one grand school for the suppression of every kind, and tender, and brotherly feeling—one grand process of education to the entire destitution of all moral principle—one vast scene of destruction to all moral sensibility, and all sympathy with the woes of those around us. ”

“ In short, it is an undeniable fact, that even a thorough-going vegetable eater might prove every thing he wished, from old established writers on medicine and health, though themselves were feeders on animal food; just as a teetotaler may prove the doctrine of abstinence from all drinks but water, from the writings of medical men, though themselves are still, in many cases, pouring down their cider, their beer, or their wine—or at least, their tea and coffee. ”

“ How can it be right to be instrumental in so much unnecessary slaughter? How can it be right, especially for a country of vegetable abundance like ours, to give daily employment to twenty thousand or thirty thousand butchers? How can it be right to train our children to behold such slaughter? How can it be [Pg 281] right to blunt the edge of their moral sensibilities, by placing before them, at almost every meal, the mangled corpses of the slain ”

“ If vegetable food is not preferable to animal, I certainly do not wish to have it so regarded. This profession of a sincere desire to know and teach the truth may be an apology for placing the letters in the order in which they appear—which certainly is such as to give no unfair advantages to those who believe in the superiority of the vegetable system—and for the faithfulness with which their whole contents, whether favoring one side or other of the argument, have been transcribed. ”

“ I have said that the vegetable-eater finds no serious inconvenience from the quality or quantity of his food; but I mean to speak here of the immediate effects solely. No doubt every error of this sort produces mischief, sooner or later. The more perfect the appetite is, the greater should be our moral power of commanding it, and of controlling the quality and quantity of our food and drink, as well as the times and seasons of receiving it. ”

“ Do not children and young persons, that is, tender persons, live on milk and seeds, even before they are capable of much labor and exercise? Do not all the eastern and southern people live almost entirely on them? The Asiatics, Moors, and Indians, whose climates incapacitate them for much labor, and whose indolence is so justly a reproach to them,—are these lazier and less laborious men than the Highlanders and native Irish? ”

“ Vegetable eaters are not so hard driven to find whereon to subsist, as many appear to suppose. For the question is continually asked, "If you dispense wholly with flesh and fish, pray what can you find to eat?" Now, while we are aware that one small sect of the vegetarians—the followers of Dr. Schlemmer—eat every thing in a raw state, we are, for ourselves, full believers in plain and simple cookery. That a potato, for example, is better cooked than uncooked, both for man and beast, we have not the slightest doubt. ”

“ And again—how often is it that fat, plethoric, meat-eating children, their faces looking as though the blood was just ready to ooze out, are with the greatest complacency exhibited by their parents as patterns of health! But let it ever be remembered, that the condition of the system popularly called rude or full health, and which is the result of high feeding, is too often closely bordering on a state of disease. ”

“ Our beauty is almost as much within our control, as a race, as our conduct.
A vegetable diet, moreover, promotes and preserves a clearness and a generally healthful state of the mental faculties. I believe that much of the moral as well as intellectual error in the world, arises from a state of mind which is produced by the introduction of improper liquids and solids into the stomach, or, at least, by their application to the nervous system. Be this as it may, however, there is nothing better for the brain than a temperate diet of well-selected vegetables, with water for drink. ”