One object of this work, therefore, is in the interests of health and morality, to educate people out of meat eating rather than into it; and to supply such a variety of recipes for good, wholesome, palatable, and nutritious dishes, prepared from natural food elements, that meat eating will be practically unnecessary.
Moreover, so many animals at the present time are becoming so greatly diseased that it is not a little dangerous to eat largely of their flesh. As a matter of safety the use of flesh-meats might very consistently be dispensed with altogether.
The fact, therefore, that meat may be cheap, or that it may be easily or quickly prepared, should count for little with those who have the best interests of their families in view.
From every standpoint from which the subject may be viewed, the reasons for discontinuing the use of flesh-meats are more imperative now than ever before.
1. This is an age of disease. Animals are coming to be greatly diseased. The use of their flesh, therefore, tends to increase disease in mankind, and thus to shorten life.
2. This is an age of intemperance. Flesh-meats are all more or less stimulating. Their use, therefore, tends to increase this evil.
3. This is an age of surfeiting. Meat eating is, to a large degree, responsible for this. A well-known English writer on cookery says: “No one will deny that the foods we are apt to eat too much of are those absent from a purely vegetarian fare, such as meat, game, fish, eggs, etc., upon which materials the culinary art seems exercised to tempt us beyond the satisfying of the appetite.”
4. This is an age of vice and immorality. A meat diet tends greatly to increase this terrible evil.
5. This is an age of violence and murder. The practise of killing and eating animals tends to harden men’s hearts, to destroy their finer sensibilities, and thus to increase violence and crime.
In the beginning God gave man no flesh foods to eat. And after the Exodus, when he had his own way with his own people, he gave them no flesh to eat. Before taking them into the promised land, for forty years he fed them on “manna,” a purely vegetarian food. Ex. 16:31; Num. 11:7, 8. And when they “fell a lusting,” and said, “Who shall give us flesh to eat?” he was displeased with them, and, with the giving of the quails, brought a great plague upon them. Numbers 11; Ps. 78:18-31.