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

 

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   141     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 "   142     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   143     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-   144     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 —   145     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.   uc     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   U7     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   148     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   149     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   150     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  161     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  \6&     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   153 L     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   154     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   155     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   156     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.   157     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-   m     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-   159     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   160     » i     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   161     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.   162     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 :   163     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   161     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   165     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   166     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   167     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   168     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.