It is no part of my purpose to argue in detail the possibility of a Vegetarian diet; nor is there any need to do so. The proofs of it are everywhere–in the history of races, in the rules of monastic orders, in the habits of large numbers of working populations, in biographies of well-known men, in the facts and instances of every-day life. The medical view of Vegetarianism, which at first (as in the similar case of teetotalism) was expressed by a severe negative and ominous head-shake, has very largely changed during the past ten or twenty years, and, in so far as it is still hostile, dwells rather on the superiority of the “mixed” diet than on the insufficiency of the other, while the solemn warnings which used to be addressed to the venturesome individual who had the hardihood to leave off eating his fellow-beings, have now lapsed into more general statements as to the probable failure of Vegetarianism in the long run, and on a more extended trial. Well, we know what that means. It is what has been said of every vital movement that the world has seen. It means that ordinary people, and dull people, and learned people, and specialists, need time to envisage new truths; but they do envisage them, some day. Already the medical preference for a flesh diet may be summed up under two heads–that flesh is more digestible, more easily assimilated, than vegetables, and that it is unwise to limit the sources of food which (to quote Sir Henry Thompson) “Nature has abundantly provided.”
Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) Excerpted from “The Humanities of Diet” (Manchester: The Vegetarian Society, 1914), serialised on The Grumpy Vegan and available in full at the Animal Rights Library. Learn more Henry Salt.
