There is an ethical and an æsthetic aspect of diet, just as there is a hygienic and chemical aspect. There is a wider view of this question of diet than merely that of supplying the body with pabulum for the tissues; the body itself cannot be built equally well from all food-stuffs, but the body is cleaner and internally purer on some foods than upon others. The keeping of the body in a clean, pure state—a fit tenant for the soul—is in itself an aspect of the diet problem that should affect us most keenly. It is not as though food had no effect upon mental life and morals. Far from it. There is the closest inter-relation. The whole process of ingesting food is disgusting, in one sense, but that is no excuse for choosing, in consequence, carrion and offal to feed upon! Think of the condition of a man’s stomach who has eaten a regular _table-d’hôte_ dinner, and compare it, in the mind’s eye, with the stomach of a man who has dined on peaches and Brazil nuts! Were one to stop and think of what meat _is_, and what it _was_, it is doubtful if one could eat it. It is merely dead and decaying flesh—flesh from the body of an animal. There is nothing more repellent to think about than the “scorched corpses,” as Bernard Shaw calls them, which grace the tables of so-called civilised people. The sight, the smell, the taste, all are repellent. Only by the fact that they are covered up, and their true nature concealed by cooking, and basting, and pickling, and peppering and salting can we eat them at all. If we were naturally carnivorous animals, we should delight in bloodshed and gore of all kind! We should go out and kill our dinner, just as we now eat it; and the one would seem no more repulsive to us than the other. Carnivorous animals secure their food in this way, and so should we, if we were naturally carnivorous. We should eat our flesh warm and quivering—just as it comes from the cow! But instead of this, what do we find? That the majority of people in civilised nations will not even consent to go near a slaughter-house! And when they _do_ go, they come away sickened at the sights and the odours which they encounter. Take for example the following extracts from a diary—the notes being descriptive of a Chicago meat market:— “Slithered over bloody floor. Nearly broke neck in gore of old porker. Saw few hundred men slicing pigs, making hams, sausages, and pork chops. Whole sight not edifying; indeed, rather beastly. Next went to the cattle killing house. Cattle driven along gangway and banged over head with iron hammer. Fell stunned: then swung up by legs, and man cuts throats. Small army of men with buckets catching blood; it gushed over them in torrents—a bit sickening. Next went to sheep slaughter-house. More throat-cutting—ten thousand sheep killed a day—more blood. Place reeks with blood; walls and floor splashed with it, air thick, warm, offensive. Went and drank brandy....”[32] [32] “Logic of Vegetarianism,” p. 55.