“Let us, in a few words, compare our dining-hall with yours. With our system there is no food wasted by leaving it on side-dishes, for we do not use them in the same manner as you do. We object to them on the ground that the eater--the only person who knows what he likes and what he wants--does not do the dishing up, when side-dishes filled by the cooks are used. In your so-called first-class hotels, there is perhaps as much, if not more, good food left in the side-dishes on the tables as is eaten. Your bill of fare system is also very wasteful. When it is used, cooks must prepare a great variety of articles, for some of which, perhaps, no one calls; for others there are more calls, but there is a tendency of great waste. In our system of eating there is also very little waste of food from cooking too much at a meal. The cooks know about how much is needed at each meal for the family, and that is about all the family cooks for, unless a considerable number of visitors have ordered meals there. Visitors, as I have said, always pay the same price for a meal as a member of the family does. Every able-bodied man, woman and youth believes in, and practices independence and self-maintenance. We all detest assistance and protection from others. “Much of the food cooked in your hotels is also not eaten because the expected number of guests did not eat there at that meal. There is no way for a hotel-cook to know how much to cook. The eating at hotels is all uncertainty and irregularity. There may be many or there may be none for dinner. We have no rich idlers who live upon the labor of others, and who waste more food than they eat; and we have no starving poor who would be glad to get the leavings. With us all able-bodied persons must earn their meals by productive labor. No amount of speculation and scheming in our world will ever secure a meal for any one. “In our system of eating and cooking, as compared with yours, there is also an immense saving of labor and food on account of our being purely vegetarians; for the production of flesh meat requires in an average much more land and labor than the production of the same amount of nutrition in vegetation. You waste annually more than a thousand million dollars worth of labor, even as low as your wages are now, in the production of tobacco and intoxicating liquor, which, according to your own most distinguished physiologists, is far more injurious than beneficial to the human system. Right here, I believe, is another of the great causes which is instrumental in the production of your crimes, cruelty and disease. “Our manner of eating is considerably different from yours, which I will explain to you when we get to our system of education. We endeavor to build all our habits and customs on the so-called laws of life, health and happiness. Every act that conduces to the fullness of them we consider right, and every act that detracts from the fullness of them we consider wrong.