“Sometimes, when I think how perfectly ridiculous as well as sad this carnivorous tooth blunder is, on the part of doctors of learning and unlearned people, I am reminded of that very beautiful experiment of a dog running after his own tail. Take a dog, give his head a sudden twist round towards his tail, at the same time holding his tail in the line of his mouth, and say ‘catch it,’ and the poor, deluded dog will run round and round with all his might, till he falls down dizzy and exhausted, all the while fancying himself going the straightest possible road in pursuit of his tail. And after he has rested a little, and recovered a little breath, he will up and at it again.
“It is very much so with our flesh-eaters. The doctors have given their heads a roundabout twist; told them they had carnivorous teeth; set them agoing; pointed to the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea, and said ‘catch them.’ And the whole world has gone to hunting and fishing and fattening and butchering and salting and pickling, and smoking and broiling, and frying and eating, until they have become filled with morbid humours, scrofula, cancer, erysipelas, gout, rheumatism, biliousness and putrid fevers; then they have rested a while, lived on vegetable food until they have measurably recovered, and then resumed their carnivorous raid in the animal kingdom!
“And sickness has not taught them the lesson it ought to have done. Instead of regarding their maladies as the necessary consequences of their eating habits, they have looked upon them as the arbitrary inflictions of chance, or of a mysterious Providence. Even when, in the middle ages, the great pestilences prevailed over Europe, at a period of the world’s history when for three hundred years the people literally rioted and revelled in the abundance of flesh blood and alcoholic beverages; and when, during those three centuries, the terrible plague—the ‘Black Death’ and the ‘Great Mortality,’ as it was then called—desolated London, Paris, and other great cities—sweeping off one hundred millions of the earth’s inhabitants—the medical profession, and the people with them, wholly mistook the lesson it taught.
“And so it is now. People eat all manner of animal products, with their morbid humours, foul secretions, diseases, impurities and corruptions; and when their bodies become so obstructed and befouled that they retch, and vomit, and spit, and expectorate, and go into fever and inflammation, and gripes and spasms, they wonder what the matter is! And then they send for the family physician, and he wonders also. Why, the only wonder is that they are not all matter!”
Throughout the whole of the above argument, I have assumed that the meat eaten is from healthy animals, and have assumed that no diseased meat finds its way upon the table of the average meat-eater—an assumption which is certainly not warranted by facts. I wished, however, to give my adversaries every advantage in this discussion, and for that reason have assumed throughout that the meat was obtained from healthy animals, and was not adulterated before coming to the table. As a matter of fact, however, neither of these two conditions are invariably fulfilled. We might say that the second condition is very rarely fulfilled. It is generally known that meat is inoculated with chemicals of all kinds before it is placed upon the market, and for that reason it is enabled to be shipped from place to place, and to hang in the butcher’s shop by the hour without being kept upon ice—for how, otherwise, could this be? We know that meat decomposes very rapidly—especially in moist or warm weather—but it is apparently enabled to hang, nevertheless, for hours at a time in the butcher’s shop! If chemicals of various kinds were not injected into the meat, this would be impossible. Most graphically does Upton Sinclair describe this process of “pickling” in his book, “The Jungle,” where he says:
“Jonas has told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any colour and any flavour which they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time, and increased the capacity of the plant—a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle m a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be found ham spoiled, some of them with an odour so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odour—a process known to the workers as ‘giving them thirty per cent.’ Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as ‘Number Three Grade,’ but later on, some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Number Two, and Number Three Grade—there was only Number One Grade! The packers were always originating such schemes. They had what they called ‘boneless hams,’ which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and ‘California Hams,’ which were the shoulders, with great knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy ‘skinned hams,’ which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them—that is, until they had been cooked, and chopped fine and labelled ‘head cheese’!”
This question of diseased meat is, therefore, one which deserves our close attention, largely because it has been treated so ineffectually in the past, in other books dealing with this subject. The defect has been due to the fact that, until recently, no definite facts have been available; and, although everyone knew in a general way that much of the meat said to be “inspected” and found free from disease was, as a matter of fact, unfit for human food, there were no data to which the vegetarian could point, and say: “Here are facts and figures incontrovertible! What have you to say in defence now?”
Lately, however, several such exposures have been published. It would be well for us to summarise the facts; and I cannot do better, in this connection, than to turn to Dr Albert Leffingwell’s book, “American Meat.” (I would refer all those interested to its fascinating pages.) A very brief summary must suffice. This will be enough, however, for our purpose:
“During the period of 1901-1906 inclusive, over 660,000 post-mortem inspections were made of animals, which before slaughter had been rejected in the stock yards as apparently diseased. Of these, only 85,000—less than one in eight—were finally condemned as wholly unfit for food purposes.... What is it that the United States inspector is required by his regulation to condemn as unfit for human food? The carcasses of animals which he might find affected by cancer or malignant tumours? No. He is directed to condemn the tumour, the part of the carcass which was affected, the organ which was infiltrated by disease! The remainder of the carcass—what becomes of that? Is there anything which prevents it from being turned into the food supply of the poorer classes? There is sometimes a silence which accords assent.... Suppose the entire liver of a hog to be a mass of cancerous disease; what is there in these regulations of the Department of Agriculture to prevent transmuting the muscular tissues and unaffected organs into various food delicacies or food products, which in due time should find their way to the tables of rich and poor in England and America? Not a word!...
“The United States Department of Agriculture advances yet another step, and, under certain circumstances, requires the inspector’s approval of the flesh of tuberculous animals as fit food for human beings: