[Sidenote: By religious, ethical and hygienic organizations] [Illustration: A 3½ YEAR OLD TREE on our plantation, photographed August, 1920. October it bore many clusters of large, fully developed pecan nuts. ] Everywhere in America there are large numbers of people, organized and unorganized, who will not eat the flesh of any animal. In sanitaria of all sorts there is a tendency to reduce to the minimum the use of all animal meat or do away with it entirely. In one system of forty sanitaria there are practically no drugs used because the patients are put on a perfected diet system in which nuts are substituted for animal flesh. At Battle Creek Sanitarium alone, under Dr. Kellogg, over 10,000 patients have adopted the meatless diet. Nut meat is largely used there to replace animal flesh. Nuts Meet the Demand For Uncooked Foods [Sidenote: The most perfect uncooked food] Many physicians who specialize in diseases of the intestinal tract are advising the use of uncooked foods. Dr. Kellogg, in his book, Colon Hygiene, sums up one strong argument in simple, non-technical language when he says on page 223: “=Raw food resists the destructive changes which are produced by bacteria, while cooked food makes no such resistance.=” Nut meat is practically the only source of both protein and fat, in large proportions, which it is safe to eat uncooked. This statement is readily proved by high authority. In the Congressional Record for January 6, 1917, we read: “Nuts occupy a unique position in the list of important food products, in that, with the possible exception of a few other fruits, in =the raw condition they alone afford a fairly complete and balanced food for human beings=.” The fact that nut importations in 1917 were nearly ten times as great in value as those in 1900—while the consumption of animal flesh had failed to even keep pace with the increase in population—is evidence of increasing public recognition of the great and varied advantages of nut meat over animal flesh. [Sidenote: Less butter-fat demanded, more nut-fat] Possibly you will find this increase in the consumption of nut meats even more surprising when you consider that there was practically twenty per cent. less butter sold from America’s farms in 1909 than in 1899, according to U. S. census figures. In other words, the consumption of butter, which is the principal table article competing with nuts in fatty content, was falling off to four-fifths during practically the same period while the consumption of nut meat was increasing so rapidly. Perfected pecan nuts contain more protein than beefsteak, and almost as much fat as butter. Isn’t it only natural that people should want their nourishment and fat in this concentrated form—hermetically sealed and kept pure by nature? Is there any such assurance of purity and cleanliness on butter—or on beefsteak?