To Kill or Not to Kill:
Flesh Foods Versus Plants
THIS book on simple food is vegetarian, of course. It is the simplest, cleanest, easiest way to eat. I take it for granted that to live on plants and fruits, seeds and nuts is the way for rational, kindly and perceptive people to live. By the time mankind has fully advanced from complex back to simple living, flesh will have been dropped from the diet and that cruel costly fare will be left to the carnivores. The readers of this book may be beyond that repulsive custom, but for those who are not, I set down what I consider legitimate arguments for a vegetable diet. However, I realize in advance I shall make little dent upon the general public, long-time confirmed in its savage custom.
The sight of slabs of flesh should horrify and disgust any sensitive person if they exercised their inborn compassion. Habit has dimmed their native kindliness. Their palates have become abnormally corrupted and conditioned by a taste for dead food, its flavoring and odors. People who eat slaughtered creatures every day find it hard to imagine what to substitute for meat, not realizing that meat is the substitute for vegetables.
A Cook being bidden by his Master to dress him a peece of flesh; he asked of him Cheese and Oile to make the sawce; to whom his Master answered: away, fool, away; if I had either Cheese or Oile, what needed I to have bought a peece of flesh?
THOMAS MOFFETT,
Helth's Improvement, 1600
Nature has provided man with an abundance of food for full nourishment instead of putrefying corpses, which repugnant diet decent folk would abhor if generation upon generation had not, through use and custom, habituated themselves to the ghoulish practice of making their stomachs the burial ground for dead bodies.
I wonder of what sort of feeling, mind, or reason, that man was possessed who was first to pollute his mouth with gore, and to allow his lips to touch the flesh of a murdered being; who spread his table with the mangled forms of dead bodies, and claimed as daily food and dainty dishes what but now were beings endowed with movement, with perception, and with voice?
PLUTARCH,
On the Eating of Flesh, 70 A.D.
It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite loathing and disgust.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY,
A Vindication of Natural Diet, 1813
However, I do agree with Gandhi that many a meat-eater who may be kindly and considerate is a better man than a strict vegetarian who beats his wife. We knew one self-righteous vegetarian (a fanatical new convert) who, entertaining us for dinner, ignominiously relegated his wife and daughter, still flesh-eaters, to the kitchen to eat while we were served with our host in the dining room. This hardhearted purist had much to learn about right living, although he was on the track to right diet.
The word "vegetarian" derives from the Latin "vegetus"—whole, sound, fresh, lively. The meat humans eat is neither whole, sound, fresh or lively. It is dis-limbed, tainted, decaying, stale and dead. A diet consisting of green leafy vegetables, root crops, grains, berries, nuts and fruits supplies all the body needs for strength and well-being. It is healthful food, aesthetic, economical, harmless to our brother animals, easy to grow, to prepare and to digest.
Flesh-eating by humans is unnecessary, irrational, anatomically unsound, unhealthy, unhygienic, uneconomic, unaesthetic, unkind and unethical. May I elaborate?
Unnecessary: Meat is not a necessity but a cultivated want. We need not butcher our fellow creatures for food. Millions of people throughout the world and through the ages have lived their whole lives on plant food and been none the worse; in fact, they have probably been in better health because of their abstemious diet. I had the good sense to be born in a vegetarian family and have lived into my seventies in good health and strength, without meat. Scott became a vegetarian in his mid-thirties and has lived into his nineties, hale and hearty, with plenty of brain and brawn, and without meat. It is obviously not necessary to eat cooked flesh.
A vegetarian friend, Henry Bailey Stevens, wrote some Rhymes for Meat-Eaters, from one of which I quote:
With lentils, tomatoes and rice, olives and nuts and bread, Why does a man care to gnaw a slice of something bleeding and dead?
With honey, banana and pear, orange and corn and beet,
Why does he feel he must tear into some carcass meat?
How does his nose go astray, what in his instinct warps,
That he wants to ravish and slay, in order to feed on a corpse?
Irrational: The argument is frequently made that if we did not kill and eat animals, the creatures would take over and cover the earth. This is not necessarily so. The process of natural selection would intervene as it does with wild animals. If we stopped breeding and cozening domestic animals, the rate of their population growth would immediately and drastically diminish.
Animals need not be bred; they need not be killed; they need not be eaten. "But it is natural for us to eat animals" is the usual remark—"Animals were made for us." That is hardly logical. Animals were on the earth aeons before man. They waited long before their de-vourers arrived.
If it were so natural, why not catch and kill your own animal, cut a slice from the carcass or tear off a leg of the living beast and eat it "naturally," fresh and whole? You could do that with a fruit or a vegetable, but not with your pet cat or dog's quivering flesh. Many who claim to love animals and have them for pets would never kill and eat their own Bunny Boy, But others' pets, other animals' offspring and parents that have been murdered by others, can be put into the stew pot and callously consumed.
She, indignantly: "The cat has eaten our pet bird."
He, determinedly: "The wicked beast shall die."
Then he resumed his quail on toast, and she her pigeon pie.
Some animal lovers' interest in animals is often most intense in the vicinity of the stockpot. An ancient folio, The Shepherd's Calendar (1493) has the anonymous author speak fondly to the snail about to be cooked: "Never does Lombard eat thee in such sauce as we make for thee. We put thee in a big plate, with black pepper and onions."
Carnivora, you call savage and ferocious—lions and tigers and serpents—while yourselves pollute your hands with blood and come behind them in no species of barbarity. And yet for them murder is the only means of sustenance; whereas to you it is a superfluous luxury. Why do you belie the Earth as though she were unable to feed and nourish you? You have a super-abundance of all the necessaries of existence. In point of fact, it is not the lions and wolves we kill to eat, as we might do in self-defense. On the contrary, we leave them unmolested; and yet the innocent and the domesticated and helpless—these we kill.
PLUTARCH,
On the Eating of Flesh, 70 A.D.
Some people are not to be persuaded to taste of any creatures they have daily seen and been acquainted with while they were alive: others refuse what they' fed and took care of themselves, yet all of them feed heartily and without remorse on beef, mutton and fowls when they are bought in the market.
BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE,
Fable of the Bees, 1723
Most meat-eaters have a squeamish limit beyond which even they will not go. They will not eat worms, slugs, garden snails (though they are said to be an excellent source of protein), or insects, mice, rats, cats or dogs, horses, or human beings. "The Samoans, who eat dogs, despise eggs and chickens. Similarly, the Qitoto of Brazil, who eat rats, frogs, lizards, snakes and turtles, eat the eggs of reptiles but despise those of birds."1 Bernard Shaw spoke of meat-eating as "cannibalism with its heroic dish omitted." And Bronson Alcott remarked to Emerson who was dilating upon the horrors of cannibalism while carving up a roast: "But, Mr. Emerson, if we are to eat meat at all, why should we not eat the best?" I would agree, in that I have often thought a baby's chubby arm looks delicious and (if I ate flesh) good enough to munch on.
Anatomically Unsound: Animals (and man is one of them) are structurally and functionally adapted to a particular mode of nutrition. The rabbit, to which a vegetarian is often disparagingly compared, is of the Rodentia order, feeding entirely on vegetable matter. The pig is an Omnivora; its diet is closest to the typical human omnivorous diet of today. The domesticated pig is not particular about what it eats. Like millions of contemporary humans, its diet includes practically anything edible, of both animal and vegetable origin.
Physiologically, a fruit and vegetable diet is more in line with the human anatomy. The teeth, the digestive system, the hands, feet and mammary glands of humans resemble the ape family to a great extent.
Primitive humanity was, no doubt, like the anthropoids, mainly frugiverous.
ROBERT BRIFFAULT,
The Mothers, 1927
The digestive juices of man are not sufficient to tackle what the carnivores eat. The carnivores secrete hydrochloric acid about ten times as strong as that of humans and have a very short intestinal tract so that meat is quickly digested and expelled. Man's digestive tract is three times as long, holds food for two or three days, forming a putrefying mess if on a meat diet.
The structure of the teeth gives an important clue as to the natural food of a species. Flesh-eating animals have tusks and fangs for tearing and gnawing; herbivores and frugivores have smooth teeth for grinding and chewing. Man and gorilla both belong to the frugivora family. Our front teeth are for biting and our back teeth for crushing and pulping; therefore human diet should be similar to that of the apes: raw fruit, raw vegetables, nuts, shoots and sprouts.
Certainly Man by Nature was never made to be a Carnivorous Creature: nor is he arm'd at all for Prey and Rapin, with gag'd and pointed Teeth and crooked Claws, sharpened to rend and tear: but with gentle Hands to gather Fruit and Vegetables, and with Teeth to chew and eat them.
JOHN RAY,
Historia Plantarum, 1686
Unhealthy: During World War II Denmark was put on emergency rations and the king called for a meatless program for a year. Denmark established a world record for lowered death rate that year and a marked decrease in the illness rate. Going back to meat-eating the next year sent the death rate back to the pre-war level.
The strongest of animals, the bull, the elephant, the gorilla, the hippopotamus, are all vegetarian. The camel, also a vegetarian, has long endurance records; the horse and deer have speed records.
A farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw materials of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerks him and his lumbering plough in spite of every obstacle.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
Walden, 1854
As to the vaunted necessity for protein and the high protein content in animal flesh and animal products to maintain robust health: protein is certainly required in the body for growth and repair, but is there not a maximum as well as a minimum beyond which one should not go? Too much protein overtaxes the vital organs. The excess must be eliminated as waste or be stored in the muscles, which become hard and inflexible. One might well ask: How little protein does one require, not how much does one need?
There is protein in nuts, beans, peas, lentils, mushrooms, cheese, milk, eggs, wholemeal cereals, and many green vegetables. Practically no common foodstuff is devoid of some protein. Plants manufacture it from the nitrogen of the air. They make the simpler type of protein, but the same amino acids as in meat.
Vegetable protein is the original source of meat protein. Nuts are not a substitute for meat; meat is a substitute for nuts. All fruits average out with about as much protein as in mother's milk. The banana has more protein than mother's milk. Vegetables average out to about 3 percent protein, nuts to 15 percent and seeds about 20 percent.
If one fed adequately on fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and sprouts one could do without animal flesh and dairy products and still be above the minimum necessary intake recommended by orthodox nutritionists.
Unhygienic: It is not only healthier but cleaner to eat fresh vegetables and fruits instead of putrefying meat. Animal carcasses are often full of poisons and sicknesses, and of food additives and chemicals that have been used to fatten or soften or preserve the corruptible flesh. These poisons go into the human bodies that consume the dead meat. With a carnivorous diet the human is a tomb for animal disease. Dead animal bodies contain heavy concentrations of toxic wastes, virulent bacteria and are often diseased with tumors, cancers, tuberculosis, swine fever, and other dangers to health.
Most meats available today are virtually saturated with antibiotics, hormones, tranquilizers, pesticides, dyes, deodorants, and radiation.... The majority of processed meats contain preservatives, stabilizers, plastic residue, and other harmful substances.
The Mother Earth News,
No. 2, "Meat Is No Treat,"
No one knows better than meat inspectors how much disease there is among animals slaughtered for food. A woman attended a banquet and ordered a vegetable plate. At her side sat a stranger who also chose a vegetable plate. "You too are a vegetarian?" she asked him. "No, madam," he replied, "I am a meat inspector."
Uneconomic: Too many thousands of acres of valuable fertile land are being devoted to pasturage or fodder-feed for animals that are fattened to be eaten by man: over half of all agricultural land in the United States. This land could be planted with crops for direct, firsthand feeding to man, a much quicker and economical way of obtaining food than at secondhand, through animal's bodies. An estimated 40 percent of the world's livestock production is derived from vegetable sources that could be used for human food.
There is supposed to be about one acre per person in the world for food production. Meat-eaters take nearly two acres to feed the animals they eat. It is more ecologically and economically sound to devote fertile land to human food than to pass choice grains and legumes through the bodies of cattle. One acre of grazing land produces forty-three pounds of food protein when planted in soybeans, which are nutritionally equal to meat, are cheaper, containing less fat, and with less chance of communicable diseases.
The amount of protein that can be produced on an acre of land by dry beans, peas or soybeans would meet the requirement of one person for 1,116, 1,785 and 2,224 days respectively. Beef, pork or poultry so produced would meet the requirements for 77, 129 and 185 days respectively.
Bio-Dynamic magazine, No. 126
For a given area of land, some ten times as many calories can be produced in the form of cereals or root crops than in the form of meat, eggs, milk, cheese.
DR. JOHN YUDKIN,
Sweet and Dangerous, 1972
Vegetarianism could go far toward solving the world food problem by eating lower on the food chain. To feed the world's population more adequately and economically, the enormous quantities of grains, pulses and legumes fed to farm stock animals should be drastically curtailed or eliminated entirely.
Unaesthetic: The revolting slabs and gobbets of flesh that are displayed and hung in butcher shops, or slickly plastic-packaged in supermarkets, would shock any fairly sensitive or artistic person who could bring himself to view the sight objectively. Aesthetically, fruits and vegetables are certainly more attractive than cut-up carcasses and ground-up pieces of flesh, raw and red, or roasted or broiled.
Walter de la Mare wrote a poem about a butcher shop.
I can't abear a Butcher, I can't abide his meat,
The ugliest shop of all is his, The ugliest in the street:
Baker's are warm; cobbler's dark; chemists burn watery light;
But oh, the sawdust butcher's shop, that ugliest of sights!
Ruskin has lyricized: "The criterion of a beautiful action or of a noble thought is to be found in song, and an action about which we cannot make a poem is not fit for humanity." Did he ever apply this test to flesh-eating?
I rarely used animal food, not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
Walden, 1854
Unkind: Let's look at meat-eating from the animal's point of view. They have rights not to be infringed on. They love their lives and their families. Wild creatures are hunted and killed cruelly with no compassion. Domestically bred animals are wrenched from their families, transported callously and carelessly to abattoirs; there, frenzied with fear at the crowding, the mutual cries and the stench, they are pole-axed, hooked on moving belts for final slaughter, their throats cut, their dangling, twisting, agonized bodies slashed and skinned often before all of life is extinct. I know, because I've seen it on two horrifying visits to slaughterhouses in Chicago twenty-five years ago.
There is a sad song from the thirteenth century, found in the library of a Bavarian Benedictine monastery. Here is one verse of "Cignus usted Cantat":
Once I dwelt in the lakes, Once I was a beautiful swan.
O miserable me! Now I am roasted black!
I am borne upon a platter and can no longer fly.
I catch sight of gnashing teeth,
O miserable me! Now I am roasted black!
We cannot eat flesh without unkindness and violence and cruelty. Fish are dragged from their natural element with ferociously sharp hooks; whales' gigantic bodies are tracked in the sea and mercilessly stabbed until death; seals are murdered with clubs and stripped half-living of their skins; crabs and lobsters are boiled alive.
We throw our Crabs alive into scalding Water, and tye our Lobsters to the Spit to hear them squeek when they are roasted, our Eels and Gudgeons jumping to avoid the Danger of the Frying-pan leap into the Fire.
WILLIAM KING,
The Art of Cookery, 1709
What about "humane killing" you may ask. How can one be cruel humanely? Killing is killing. It has been estimated that man kills in one day more cattle than carnivorous animals kill in a hundred years. Let me quote words from lofty philosophers on the cruel and gruesome, and human, custom of slaying and eating our fellow creatures.
William Cowper: Earth groans beneath the burthen of a war waged with defenseless innocence.
Romain Rolland: Thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse.
Pythagoras: What a monstrous crime it is that entrails should be entombed in entrails; that one ravening body should grow fat on others which it crams into it; that one living creature should live by the death of another living creature.
Plutarch: Why kill and martyr so cruelly these gentle beings who harm no one, but who are so useful to you, who aid you in your labour, are your faithful companions, and furnish you with clothing to cover you and milk to feed you? What more do you require of them? Does not the ground produce sufficient fruits for your food?
Leo Tolstoy: It is not even the suffering and death of the animals that is so horrible but the fact that man, without any need for so doing, crushes his lofty feeling and mercy for living creatures and does violence to himself that he may be cruel.
Unethical: "How could you select such an occupation?" asked a horrified onlooker to a worker in the stockyards of Chicago. "We're only doing your dirty work, sir," was the scornful and silencing reply. Whoever eats the meat without killing the animal himself is having his dirty work done for him.
I know not which strikes me most forcibly in the ethics of this question—the injustice, the cruelty or the nastiness of flesh-eating. The injustice is to the butchers, the cruelty is to the animals, the nastiness concerns the consumers. With regard to this last in particular, I greatly wonder that persons of refinement—aye, even of decency—do not feel insulted on being offered, as a matter of course, portions of corpses as food! Such comestibles might possibly be tolerated during sieges, or times of other privation of proper viands in exceptional circumstances, but in the midst of a civilized community able to command a profusion of sound and delicious foods, it ought to be deemed an affront to set dead flesh before a guest!
ANNA KINGSFORD,
Addresses on Vegetarianism, 1912
We are not only killers; we are slave drivers and exploiters; we are food robbers. We rob the bees, for honey; we rob the chickens, for eggs; we rob the cows, for milk. Cattle in their wild state suckle their calves for fifteen months. Domesticated cows are pushed beyond their normal breeding capacity, separated from their calves often at birth and are fooled into giving us milk instead of to their calves. As to wild poultry, most birds lay four or five eggs a year. Factory-farming forces domestic birds to lay hundreds.
Milk is food for the infant of its species. Eggs are food for the embryo bird. Neither should be consumed by human adults.
The Egyptians for a great while durst not eat Eggs, because they are imperfect or liquid Flesh; neither did they eat a long time any Milk, because it is but discoloured Blood.
THOMAS MOFFETT,
Helth's Improvement, 1600
Every egg contains a chicken: that is, the entire material wherewith to make one; and requires nothing to produce a living animal but a little rise in temperature, either naturally or artificially applied.
SIR HENRY THOMPSON,
Food and Feeding, 1880
The egg too has a mind, doing what our able chemists will never do, building the body of a hatchling, choosing among the proteins: These for the young wing-muscles, these for the great crystalline eyes, these for the flighty nerves and brain: choosing and forming: a limited but superhuman intelligence.
ROBINSON JEFFERS,
De Rerum Virtute, 1963
Fowl and cattle and other domesticated animals live a sheltered but an unnatural existence, wholly dependent upon our power of life and death. We who interfere in their lives and participate in any way in their deaths are ethically responsible.
Aware of the almost universal abuse of our animal brothers, Scott and I, as vegetarians, have lessened our dependence on animal products. We drink no milk, eat no eggs (except what may come in dishes served away from home), wear no animal skins or coats of leather, and try to get nonleather belts and shoes. We are not purists, nor entirely consistent in our avoidance of harm to animals. We both eat honey, stolen from the bees. Scott eats yogurt, although he is turning to tofu, a soybean product. Aware of the vegetarian's need for vitamin B-12, we both eat some cottage cheese. I have a predilection for Dutch cheeses, having lived long in Holland, and my mother being Dutch. I also have a well-known (to my friends) liking for ice cream: a remnant from my misguided youth. This addiction is indulged in occasionally, at birthdays and other celebrations, when I may fall from grace. I have used buttermilk in journey cakes, and cheese occasionally in a cooked vegetable dish.
We are looked down on with some scorn by purist friends for using any dairy products. If there is egg or milk in something while traveling, we'll eat it. If there's meat, we won't. Inconsistent? Certainly. Who isn't, about many things? Is there a thoroughly consistent person on earth?
All diets are relative to the consciences of the eater. One cannot be perfectly consistent in living, but a more or less harmless way of life is possible, and if not as pure as the purest one can at least try to be not as gross as the grossest. Scott and I have worked out a diet for ourselves that reduces our exploitation of animals to a minimum. It keeps us in good health and is open to improvement as we learn more and experiment further.
There are pure and not so pure recipes in this book: none requiring eggs, few milk or cheese. There are some suggesting the use of honey and maple syrup, which we prefer for sweetening rather than any form of sugar. Maple syrup, which we made so plentifully in Vermont and which we now have to buy, is not entirely free of exploitation, as it involves tapping and draining, to some slight extent, of the life blood of the noble maple trees.
Slavery of animals to man is one thing. Men also exploit themselves and become slaves to animals. Breeders, milkers, shepherds, graziers, farmers, slaughtermen, all involve labor devoted to being valets and nursemaids to animals. The time and care would better be centered on breeding and caring for better human beings.
We humans are privileged animals. We will not be cooked for a cow's dinner or infected with a disease so that a monkey can find out the cause of its illness; or taught to run round and round in a wheel to make a squirrel laugh; or caged and our throats slit to make us sing sweetly for our supper; or locked behind zoo bars as examples of curious human beings, or our breast-milk stolen to give to calves. Nor will our babies be sent to the slaughterhouse and sliced up for someone's dinner.
"Waiter! Bring back the pudding!" called Alice. She cut a slice and handed it to the Red Queen. "What impertinence!" said the Pudding. "I wonder how you'd like it, if I were to cut a slice out of you, you creature!"
LEWIS CARROLL,
Through the Looking Glass, 1896
There is a fierce rhyme called "Tit for Tat," set to music by one of my favorite composers, Benjamin Britten. Whether the words are his or not I could not trace. I heard the song sung at an International Vegetarian Congress in The Hague.
Have you been catching a fish, Tom Noddy?
Have you snared a weeping hare?
Have you whistled "No Nunny" and gunned a poor bunny?
Or blinded a bird of the air?
Have you trod like a murderer through the green woods,
Through the dewy deep dingles and glooms,
While ev'ry small creature cries shrill to Dame Nature:
"He comes! Run! Run! He comes!'?
Wonder I very much do, Tom Noddy, if ever when you are aroam,
An ogre from Space will stoop a lean face, and lug you home.
Lug you home over his fence, Tom Noddy, of thornstocks nine yards high,
With your knees strung round his old iron gun and your head dangling by:
And hang you up stiff on a hook, Tom Noddy, from a stone-cold pantry shelf,
Whence your eyes will glare in an empty stare, till you are cooked yourself!
Food habits can be changed, though they are one of the strongest habits of the human family. It has been said that an immigrant will abandon the language of his fatherland before he abandons the eating pattern on which he was brought up. However, food patterns do change. We no longer eat our fellow men, though we still kill masses of them, to what purpose? An African cannibal, on hearing of the huge numbers of people killed in modern wars, exclaimed, "Why all those men? You can't eat so many!"
Many young people today are modifying the mores they were born into, while thousands in our own acquaintance alone are trying new ways of preparing and processing food. Hundreds that we know are turning to vegetarianism as a more wholesome way of eating.
There are those, of course, who scorn the "roots and berries school" and see it as a fad of those who "feed on rabbit or caterpillar food." I am fairly sure that diehards for today's conventional meat diet who may happen to read the preceding pages will never be moved to abandon their feeding on "putrid Carcasses of Dead Animals," as John Evelyn, that believer in "the wholesome-ness of the Herby Diet," surmised in his Acetaria (1699):
I am sufficiently sensible how far, and to how little purpose I am gone on this Topic: Our raw Sallet deckt in its best Trim, is never like to invite Men who have once tasted Flesh to quit and abdicate a Custom which has now so long obtained.... This is not my Business, further than to show how possible it is by so many instances and Examples, to live on wholesome Vegetables, both long and happily.
I acknowledge that leaving off meat-eating means taking the lives of plants when we cut off their lives, swallow and digest them. And I apologize to the radish, the carrot, the head of lettuce, the apple, the orange, when eating them. Some day, I hope, we shall be able to live on sunlight absorbed through the skin and deep breaths of clean air—though that also is teeming with minuscule forms of life.
So far, eat we must, in order to survive. Therefore we should look to the less sentient forms of life for sustenance. Life is inherent in every food substance that we imbibe, and one has to kill to eat, whether it be an apple, a tomato, or a blade of grass. By what right do we consume these marvels of nature? Plants have an important place on earth. I salute the trees and apologize if I cut one down. I shrink from picking a daisy or a pansy, or biting into an apple or radish. Who am I to take their lives in their prime?
We should widen the range of human feeling until it encompasses all life on earth, doing the most good to the greatest number and the least harm to the least number. Standards and relative degrees of harm and harmless-ness will vary with each one of us. Some will continue to eat fish and fowl while eschewing red meat; some will eat nothing that walks or wiggles—still eating dairy products; some will eat no products at all of the animal kingdom—no eggs, milk, cheese or honey. But we can all be constantly aware of the rights of others, be it baby lamb, bison, fly or cauliflower. We can modify our food habits so that we approach the ideal of living on fruits and nuts and seeds which have finished their life cycle and with which the tree or bush or plant is finished.
The time will come in the world's history, and a movement is setting in that direction even now, when it will be deemed as strange a thing to find a man or a woman who eats flesh as food, as it is now to find a man or a woman who refrains from eating it.
RALPH WALDO TRINE,
Every Living Creature, 1899
The time will come when men will look on the murder of animals as we now look on the murder of men.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
1 Mark Graubard, Man's Food, Its Rhyme or Reason, 1943