Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable CookeryAlcott, William A. (William Andrus)
Science
Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery
Alcott, William A. (William Andrus)
Food; Vegetarianism
"The change which would be produced by simple habits on political
economy, is sufficiently remarkable. The monopolizing eater of animal
flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by devouring an acre at a
meal, and many loaves of bread would cease to contribute to gout,
madness, and apoplexy, in the shape of a pint of porter, or a dram of
gin, when appeasing the long-protracted famine of the hard-working
peasant's hungry babes.
"The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter, consumed in fattening the
carcass of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance, undepraving
indeed, and incapable of generating disease, if gathered immediately
from the bosom of the earth. The most fertile districts of the habitable
globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and
waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation. It is only the
wealthy that can, to any great degree, even now, indulge the unnatural
craving for dead flesh, and they pay for the greater license of the
privilege, by subjection to supernumerary diseases.
"Again--the spirit of the nation that should take the lead in this great
reform would insensibly become agricultural; commerce, with its vices,
selfishness, and corruption, would gradually decline; more natural
habits would produce gentler manners, and the excessive complication of
political relations would be so far simplified that every individual
might feel and understand why he loved his country, and took a personal
interest in its welfare.
"On a natural system of diet, we should require no spices from India; no
wines from Portugal, Spain, France, or Madeira; none of those
multitudinous articles of luxury, for which every corner of the globe is
rifled, and which are the cause of so much individual rivalship, and
such calamitous and sanguinary national disputes.
"Let it ever be remembered, that it is the direct influence of excess of
commerce to make the interval between the rich and the poor wider and
more unconquerable. Let it be remembered, that it is a foe to every
thing of real worth and excellence in the human character. The odious
and disgusting aristocracy of wealth, is built upon the ruins of all
that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner
of a barbarism scarce capable of cure. Is it impossible to realize a
state of society, where all the energies of man shall be directed to the
production of his solid happiness?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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