Chapter 5:THE USE OF MEAT: The Fasting Cure by Upton Sinclair from archive.org

THE USE OF MEAT 

I AM asked many questions as to my 
attitude toward the question of meat- 
eating. I was brought up on a diet 
of meat, bread and butter, potatoes, 
and sweet things. Four years ago 
when I found myself desperately run 
down, suffering from nervousness, in- 
somnia, and almost incessant head- 
aches, I came upon various articles 
written by vegetarians, and I began to 
suspect that my trouble might be due 
to meat. I went away on a camping 
trip for several weeks, taking no meat 
with me, and because I found that I 
was a great deal better, I believed that 
the meat had been responsible for my 
trouble. I then visited the Battle 

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THE FASTING CURE 

Creek Sanitarium, and became 
familiar with all their arguments 
against meat, and thereafter I did not 
use it for three years. I called myself 
a vegetarian; but at the same time 1 
realized that I differed from most 
vegetarians in some important par- 
ticulars. 

For instance, I had never taken any 
stock in the arguments for vege 
tarianism upon the moral side. It has 
always seemed to me that human 
beings have a right to eat meat, if 
meat is necessary for their best 
development, either physical or men- 
tal. I have never had any sympathy 
with that ' * humanitarianism ' ' which 
tells us that it is our duty to regard 
pigs and chickens as our brothers. I 
was listening the other day to one of 
these enthusiasts, who had been read- 
ing aloud one of the " Uncle Remus " 

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THE USE OF MEAT 

stories, and who went on in touching 
language to set forth the fact that his 
vegetable garden constituted one place 
where " Bre'r Rabbit " was free to 
wander at will and to help himself; 
and he described how happy it made 
him to see these gentle animals hop- 
ping about among his cabbages, having 
lost all their fear of him. That sort 
of thing will work very well so long as 
it is confined to one farm, and so long 
as there is a hunting season upon all 
the other farms in the locality ; but let 
the humanitarians proceed to apply 
their regimen in a whole state, and 
they will soon have so many billions of 
rabbits hopping about among their 
cabbages that they will have to choose 
between shooting rabbits or having no 
cabbages. 

The reader, I presume, is familar 
with calculations which show the rate 

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THE FASTING CURE 

at which rabbits multiply, how many 
tens and hundreds of millions would 
be produced by a single pair of rabbits 
in ten years. It should be quite ob- 
vious that the time would come when 
all human beings would be spending 
their energies in planting gardens to 
support rabbits ; and that if ever they 
stopped planting gardens, there would 
be a famine for the rabbits, with in- 
finitely more suffering than is involved 
in the present method of keeping them 
down. Also, even though the humani- 
tarians might have their way with 
men, the hawks and the owls and the 
foxes would probably remain unre- 
generate. I remember, when I was a 
small boy, being sternly rebuked by an 
agitated maiden lady who discovered 
me throwing stones at a squirrel. Not 
so many days afterwards, however, 
the lady discovered the squirrel en- 

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THE USE OF MEAT 

gaged in carrying off young birds from 
a nest outside her window, and she 
found her theories about ' ' kindness to 
dumb animals " rudely disturbed. 

The same thing, it seems to me, is 
still more true of domestic animals. 
Domestic animals survive on earth 
solely because of the protection of 
man, and for the sake of the benefits 
they bring to him. If it is necessary 
to human health and well-being to 
slaughter a cow rather than to wait 
and let her die of old age and lingering 
disease, it seems to me that nothing but 
mawkish sentimentality would protest. 

It is pointed out to us what places 
of cruelty and filth our slaughter- 
houses are ; the reader may believe that 
I learned something about this in my 
preparations for the writing of ' * The 
Jungle." But then this is not neces- 
sarily true about slaughter-houses — 

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THE FASTING CURE 

any more than it is necessarily true 
that railroads must kill and maim a 
couple of hundred thousand people in 
this country every year. In Europe 
they have municipal slaughter-houses 
which are constructed upon scientific 
lines, and in which no filth is permit- 
ted to accumulate; also they have 
devised means for the killing of 
animals which are painless. In the 
stockyards I have seen a man standing 
upon a gallery, leaning over and 
pounding at the head of a steer with a 
hammer, and making half a dozen 
blows before he succeeded in knocking 
down the terrified animal. In Europe, 
on the other hand, they fit over the 
head of the animal a leathern cap, 
which has in it a steel spike ; a single 
tap upon the head of this spike is suf- 
ficient to drive it into the animal's 

brain, causing instant insensibility. 

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THE USE OF MEAT 

And it must be borne in mind also 
that the sufferings of dumb animals 
are entirely different from our own. 
They do not suffer the pains of antici- 
pation. A cow walks into a 
slaughter-house without fear, and 
stands still and permits a leathern 
cap to be fitted over its head without 
suspicion; and while it is placidly 
grazing in the field, it is untroubled by 
any consciousness of the fact that next 
week it will be hanging in a butcher's 
shop as beef. I recall in this con- 
nection an observation of that wise 
philosopher, Mr. Dooley, concerning 
the inhumanities of vegetarianism. He 
said that it had always seemed to him 
a very cruel thing ' * to cut off a young 
tomato in its prime, or to murder a 
whole cradle full of baby peas in the 
pod." 

These things will convince the 

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THE FASTING CURE 

devotee of the religion of vege- 
tarianism that I am a lost soul, and 
always have been. Perhaps so. I try 
to guide my conduct by scientific know- 
ledge; what I ask to know about the 
question of meat-eating is the actual 
facts of its effect upon the human 
organism — the amount of energy 
which it develops, the diseases which 
it causes, or, on the contrary, 
the immunity to disease which it 
claims to confer; also, of course, its 
cheapness and convenience as an 
article of diet. Some evidence of this 
sort we possess; but very little, it 
seems to me, in proportion to the im- 
portance of the subject. Professor 
Fishef has conducted some thorough 
experiments as to the influence of 
meat-eating upon endurance, which 
seem to develop the fact that vege- 
tarians possess a far greater amount 

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THE USE OF MRAT 

of endurance than meat-eaters. These 
experiments are what we want, but 
they seemed to me, when I read them, 
to be weak in one or two important 
particulars. They did not tell us 
what the vegetarians ate, nor what the 
meat-eaters ate. Those who are vege- 
tarians at the present day are very apt 
to be people who have given some 
thought to the question of diet, and 
have attempted to adopt sounder ways 
of life ; while, on the other hand, meat- 
eaters are generally people who have 
given no thought to the question of 
health at all — they are very apt to be 
smokers and drinkers as well as meat- 
eaters. Also it is to be pointed out 
that endurance is not the only factor 
of importance to our physical well- 
being. 

There have been numerous exposi- 
tions of the greater liability of meat to 

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THE FASTING CFRE 

contamination. Dr. Kellogg, for in- 
stance, has purchased specimens of 
meat in the butcher-shops, and has had 
them examined under the microscope, 
and has told us how many hundreds of 
millions of bacteria to the gram have 
been discovered. This argument has 
a tendency to appal one ; I know it had 
great effect upon me for a long time, 
and I took elaborate pains to take into 
my system only those kinds of food 
which were sterilized, or practically 
so. This is the health regimen which 
is advocated by Professor Metchnikoff ; 
one should eat only foods which have 
been thoroughly boiled and sterilized. 
I have come, in the course of time, to 
the conclusion that this way of living 
is suicidal, and that there is no way of 
destroying one's health more quickly. 
I think that the important question is, 
not how many bacteria there are in the 

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THE USE or MEAT 

food when you swallow it, but how 
many bacteria there come to be in food 
after it gets into your alimentary 
canal. The digestive juices are 
apparently able to take care of a very 
great number of germs ; it is after the 
food has passed on down, and is lodged 
in the large intestine, that the real fer- 
mentation and putrefaction begin — 
and these count for more, in the ques- 
tion of health, than that which goes on 
in the butcher-shop or the refrigerator 
or the pantry. 

Do not misunderstand what I mean 
by this. I am not advocating that 
anyone should swallow the bacteria of 
deadly diseases, such as typhoid and 
cholera ; I am not advocating that any- 
one should use food which is in a 
state of decomposition — on the con- 
trary, I have ruled out of my dietary a 
number of foods in common use which 
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THE FA3TINQ CURE 

depend for their production upon bac- 
terial action; for instance, beer and 
wine, and all alcoholic drinks, all 
kinds of cheeses, sauerkraut, vinegar, 
etc. My point is simply that the 
ordinary healthy person has no reason 
for terrifying himself about the com- 
mon aerobic bacteria — which swarm in 
the atmosphere, and are found by hun- 
dreds of millions in all raw food, and 
in cooked food which has not been kept 
with the elaborate precautions that a 
surgeon uses with his instruments and 
linen ; also that the real problem is to 
take into the system those foods which 
can be readily digested and assimi- 
lated, and which afford the body all the 
elements that it needs to keep itself i.i 
the best condition for the inevitable, 
incessant warfare with the hostile 
organisms which surround it. 

So far as meat is concerned, of 
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THE USB OP MEAT 

course no sensible person would use 
meat which showed the slightest trace 
of being spoiled, nor any meat which 
had been canned, or ground up and 
made into messes, such as sausage. If 
one uses reasonably fresh meat, the 
bacteria which may be on the outside 
of it will be killed by proper cooking. 
And so the question is, it seems to me, 
what does meat do after it gets into 
the stomach? And that is a matter 
for practical experiment, which very 
few people have made so far as I have 
any information. Innumerable people 
are eating meat, of course; but they 
are eating it in combination with all 
other kinds of destructive foods, and 
they are eating it prepared in innu- 
merable unwholesome ways. So far 
as I know, no scientist has ever taken 
a group of normal men and kept them 
for a certain period upon a rational 

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THE FASTING CURB 

vegetarian diet, and then put them for 
another period upon a diet containing 
broiled fresh meat, and made a 
thoroughly scientific study of their 
condition, as, for instance. Professor 
Chittenden did for his ' ' low proteid ' ' 
experiments. 

For about a year previous to read- 
ing about Dr. Salisbury's " meat 
diet," I had been following the raw- 
food regimen. I had gained wonder- 
ful results from this and I had written 
a good deal about it; but I had got 
these results while leading an active 
life, and not doing hard brain-work. I 
found continually that when I settled 
down to a sedentary life, and to writ- 
ing which involved a great nervous 
strain, I began to lose weight on raw 
food; and if I kept on with this regi- 
men, I would begin to have headaches, 
and other signs of distress from what 

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THE USE OF MEAT 

I was eating. As an illustration of 
what I mean, I might say that quite 
recently I plunged into a novel in 
which I was very much absorbed, and 
I lost twelve pounds in sixteen days; 
and this, it must be understood, with- 
out changing my diet in the slightest 
particular. I went on with the work 
for about six weeks, and by that time I 
had lost twenty pounds. In explain- 
ing this to myself, I was divided be- 
tween uncertainty as to whether I was 
working too hard, or whether I was 
eating too much. Finally I took the 
precaution to weigh what I was eat- 
ing, and to make quite certain that I 
was eating no more than I had been 
accustomed to eat during periods when 
I had remained at my normal weight. 
I then cut the quantity of my food in 
half, and found that I lost much less 
rapidly. This served to convince me 

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THE FASTING CURB 

that the trouble lay in the fact that 
I had not sufficient nervous energy 
left to assimilate the food that I was 
taking. 

And I have known others to have 
this same experience. Bernarr Mac- 
fadden, in particular, told me that he 
could not get along upon the nut and 
fruit diet while closely confined in his 
office, and that he found the solution 
of his problem in milk. Inasmuch as 
there is nothing that poisons me quite 
so quickly as milk, I had to look 
farther for my solution. As a matter 
of fact, I had been looking for this 
solution for more than ten years, 
though it is only quite recently that I 
had come to understand the problem 
clearly. It is a problem which every 
brain-worker faces; and I am sure, 
therefore, that there will be many who 
will find the report of my experiments 

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THE USB OF MEAT 

and blunders to be of interest to them. 
I have tried, under these circum- 
stances, all kinds of the more diges- 
tible foods — toast, rice, baked potatoes, 
baked apples, milk, poached eggs, and 
so on; always I have found that these 
foods digested perfectly, but they 
poisoned my system because of their 
constipating effect; and this was a 
dilemma which I was never able to get 
around. 

I now read Dr. Salisbury's book, 
'* The Relation of Alimentation to 
Disease." Many of his experiments I 
found extremely interesting. Dr. 
Salisbury described the consequences 
of the ordinary starch and sugar diet 
as making a " yeast-pot " of one's in- 
testinal tract. I found in my own 
case many of the symptoms which he 
described, and I determined to see 
what would be the effect of the meat 
diet in my case. 

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THB FASTING CURB 

I began the experiment with reluc- 
tance. I had lost all interest in the 
taste of meat, and I had a prejudice 
against it ; I hated the smell of it, and 
I hated the feeling of it, and I was 
prepared for the direst consequences, 
according to the prophecies of my 
vegetarian friends. I should not have 
been at all surprised if I had been 
made very ill by my first meal. I was 
prepared to allow for that, supposing 
that after three years I had perhaps 
forgotten how to digest meat. To my 
surprise, however, I found no difficulty 
at all. I soon gave up preparing the 
meat according to the elaborate pre- 
scription of Dr. Salisbury, and con- 
tented myself simply with eating good 
lean beef -steak. I continued the ex- 
periment for two weeks, living upon 
meat exclusively. I found that all my 
symptoms of stomach trouble disap- 

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THE USB OF MEAT 

peared, and I had no headaches what- 
ever. I got quite weak upon the exclu- 
sive diet, but this was according to 
Dr. Salisbury's statement; just as soon 
as I added a little shredded wheat bis- 
cuit and dried fruit to the menu this 
trouble disappeared, and I gained in 
weight with great rapidity, and was 
soon back where I had been before. 

I did not continue the diet, owing 
partly to distaste for it, and partly to 
the inconvenience of it. I had accus- 
tomed myself to the raw food way of 
living, and any one who knows what 
this means can understand my distaste 
for washing plates and scraping fry- 
ing-pans, and going to the bother of 
getting fresh meat and keeping it and 
cooking it. Also, of course, there was 
the item of expense. Upon the raw- 
food diet I had been able to live for 
ten cents a day. I am never accus- 

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THE FASTING CURE 

tomed to spending more than thirty or 
forty cents a day, even when indulging 
in abundant fresh fruit. 

Perhaps I ought also to specify that 
a good deal of the success of the diet 
may have been owing to the hot-water 
regimen which is a part of it. An 
hour or two before every meal one is 
supposed to sip at least a pint of very 
hot water, which has the effect of 
cleansing out the stomach, and stimu- 
lates peristaltic action to a remark- 
able degree. I had been accustomed 
to drink hot water while fasting, but I 
had never taken it systematically, as I 
did at this time. It is a trick well 
worth knowing about. 

I ought also to mention the fact that 
I suggested to several others that they 
try this meat diet. One of them, a 
friend who had been eating raw food 
at my suggestion, with the very best 

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THE USB OF MEAT 



results, began the experiment and con- 
tinued for three days, and the results 
were most disappointing. This 
friend, a woman in middle years, be- 
came very ill, with all the symptoms of 
stomach trouble, diarrhoea, and 
general poisoning. She wrote me that 
she gave up the diet at the end of three 
days, because she saw no use in making 
herself desperately ill. She added : ** I 
followed the regimen in every smallest 
detail, precisely according to Dr. 
Salisbury's direction. You know me, 
and you know that when I do a thing 
I do it thoroughly, so there is no need 
to say any more about that." Which 
only goes to show that, as the proverb 
has it, *' One man's meat is another 
man's poison." 

Dr. Salisbury recommends the meat 
diet especially in cases of tuberculosis. 
He finds that the predisposing cause 

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THE FASTING CUBE 

of this disease is " vegetable fermen- 
tation." He declares that the exces- 
sive starch and sugar diet leads to the 
production of yeast spores and other 
ferments in the intestinal tract, and 
that these are absorbed into the circu- 
lation and ultimately clog the small 
capillaries in the lungs. Dr. Salis- 
bury's theory was set forth over thirty 
years ago, and that was before Koch 
had made his discovery of the tubercle 
bacillus. This discovery would seem 
to put Dr. Salisbury's theory out of 
court altogether; but as we physical 
culturists are inclined to suspect, there 
are causes of disease lying behind the 
attack of the specific bacillus. These 
causes are a depleted blood supply and 
a weakened system; and it seems to 
me, from what I have observed of con- 
sumptives and their diet, that Dr. 
Salisbury's theories fit in very well in- 
deed with the Koch theory. 

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THE U8B OF MEAT 

I wrote recently to Professor Chit- 
tenden to ask him what, in his opinion, 
would be the effects of the meat diet 
upon tuberculosis. He replied that he 
knew no reason for believing that it 
would be of special benefit but that the 
whole subject of diet in tuberculosis 
seemed to him to be one concerning 
which there was urgent need of experi- 
ment and investigation. This is un- 
questionably the case. I know no two 
physicians who seem to agree in the 
diets they prescribe to consumptives, 
and I have never met two consumptives 
who followed the same regimen. The 
general idea seems to be to stuff as 
much food in your system as you pos- 
sibly can, especially milk and raw 
eggs ; and it seems to me quite certain 
that, whatever system may be correct, 
this system is incorrect. 

This much seems to me to be clear : 

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THE FASTING CURB 

tuberculosis is a disease brought about 
by under-nourishment. It is a disease 
to which the poor are especially liable ; 
and while this is undoubtedly in part 
due to bad air, it is also due to bad 
feeding. And when ignorant people 
wish to live cheaply, the foods they eat 
are the sugar and starch foods. I re- 
member in Thoreau'g " Walden " he 
sets forth how he lived for many 
months upon five or six dollars' worth 
of food. He does not give the amount 
of the food by weight, so of course we 
cannot tell exactly; but he gives the 
prices he paid, and the leading articles 
in his diet were flour, rice, corn-meal, 
molasses, sugar and lard. One is, 
therefore, perfectly prepared to learn 
that Thoreau died of consumption. 
And the same thing, I believe, will hap- 
pen to a good many enthusiastic vege- 
tarians of my acquaintance. They 

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THE USB OF MEAT 

have given up meat, and they have 
made up for it by increasing their con- 
sumption of bread and crackers, rice 
and potatoes, and prepared and pre- 
digested cereals, which they eat with 
cream and sugar. Even when they use 
high proteid food, it is in some form 
such as beans, which contain a great 
deal of starch, and in a form which is 
difficult of digestion. As a result of 
this, they are thin and anaemic looking 
— they do not seem to be able to put on 
flesh by means of intellectual fervour 
and an optimistic philosophy. The re- 
sult of ray meat-diet experiment has 
been to convince me yet more firmly 
that the cooked-vegetable diet is the 
worst diet in the world for myself. (I 
am content to phrase it that way, and 
leave it for others to find out about 
their own case.) There has been some 
agitation in vegetarian circles since 

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THE FASTING CURB 

the report has gone around that I have 
become a backslider, and have ^one 
back to the flesh-pots. I state the 
facts here for what they may be worth 
to others. I shall never call myself a 
" vegetarian " again — though I shall 
be a vegetarian the greater part of the 
time. 

For it should be noted, of course, 
that the objections which I have 
brought against the cooked vegetarian 
diet do not apply at all to the raw-food 
diet, which is entirely a different 
matter. If one lives upon nuts, whole 
grains boiled or shredded, salad vege- 
tables and fruits, he does not get an 
excess of either starch or sugar, but a 
perfectly balanced dietary, every 
article of which is rich in natural salts 
— in which the starchy foods, and 
especially the prepared cereals, are 
fatally deficient. Such a diet can be 

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THE USE OF MEAT 

followed by any person in normal 
health, who is leading a physically 
active life. I have known a number 
of people, old and young, to start out 
upon this way of life without any pre- 
liminaries, and they have noted a 
great gain in health and efficiency, and 
have had no trouble of any sort. This 
diet is as cheap as the bean and white 
flour and rice diet of the ordinary 
" vegetarian," and it is, by all odds, 
the simplest and most convenient diet 
in the world. 

I have been accustomed all my life 
to think of meat as a very " heavy " 
article of food, an article of food 
suited for men doing hard physical 
labour; it is a curious fact that the 
view I am setting forth here is pre- 
cisely the opposite. So long as I am 
doing hard physical labour, whether it 
is walking ten miles a day, or playing 

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THE PASTING CURB 

tennis, or building a house, I get along 
perfectly upon the raw food ; but when 
I settle down for long periods of 
thinking and writing — often sitting 
for six hours without moving from one 
position — I find that I need something 
else, and nothing has answered that 
purpose quite so well as beef -steak. It 
appears to be, so far as I am con- 
cerned, the most easily digested and 
most easily assimilated of foods. And 
because the work that I am doing 
seems to me to be important, I am will- 
ing to make the sacrifice of money and 
time and trouble which it necessitates. 
My diet at such times will consist of 
beef or chicken, shredded wheat bis- 
cuit, and a little fruit. If any one is 
disposed to follow my example and 
make this experiment, I beg to call his 
attention especially to the fact that I 
name these three kinds of food, and 

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THE USE OF MEAT 

none others; and that I mean these 
three kinds and none others. The main 
trouble with advising anybody to eat 
meat is that he proceeds to eat it in the 
everyday world, where it means not 
the eating of broiled lean beef, but also 
of bacon and eggs, and of bread and 
butter, and of potatoes with cream 
gravy, and of rice pudding and 
crackers and cheese and coffee. Please 
do not proceed to eat these things and 
then hold meat-eating responsible for 
the consequences. 

I do not for a moment wish to give 
the impression that I believe that 
meat-eating is necessary to a normally 
active person, or that humanity will 
always continue to eat meat. No in- 
vention of science can ever make meat 
as cheap a food as nuts and fruit, and 
nothing can ever make it as beautiful 
or attractive a food, nor as clean a 

1G9 U 



THE FASTING CURE 

food, nor as easily prepared a food. I 
believe that children can be brought 
up without knowing the taste of meat, 
and can be trained to lead normal and 
active lives from the very beginning, 
and can live on the raw- food diet and 
thrive. What I am discussing here 
are my own experiences, and I do not 
regard myself as a normal specimen of 
humanity, because I work a great deal 
harder than anybody has a right to 
work. I do that because there are so 
many idle and useless people in the 
world at present — and some have to 
make martyrs of themselves, until con- 
ditions of injustice and cruelty have 
been done away with. 



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