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 labor; it is a curious fact that the view I am setting forth here is precisely the opposite. So long as I am doing hard physical labor, whether it is walking ten miles a day, or playing 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 concerned, 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 willing 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 biscuit, 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 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 invention 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 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 conditions of injustice and cruelty have been done away with.
APPENDIX
Some Letters from Fasters
London, Ontario, May 2, 1910.
Dear Sir,—Your article in a recent magazine very greatly interested me. My sister, on her way home from a five-and-a-half-weeks' visit in Boston and New York, where she had been endeavoring to discover the causes of her frightful headaches, bought that number of the magazine and read your experience, with, as you can well imagine, a deep interest. In Boston she had consulted one of the two physicians supposed to head the profession (as consultants) in that city. This man told her she had Bright's disease and leakage of the heart, and he gave her ten years to live—if she was very careful. As she has five children under twelve years of age, this was a sad outlook. She weighed 122 pounds when she left—and this was the lowest weight since early girlhood—but on her return, weighed on the same scales in the same clothing, she was only 108 pounds. She looked very bad, and her spirits were at zero.
Your article appealed to her, and she would have unhesitatingly tried your remedy, but that she was pregnant, and thought it would probably mean the child's death. The Boston obstetrician, who was consulted, said, if the other doctor's diagnosis was correct, the child would have to be taken at eight months.
After reading your experience, I said to my sister: "You cannot perhaps follow Mr. Sinclair's example, but you can approximate to it. If you go to your own doctor he will undoubtedly send you to some sanatorium where the patients are fairly stuffed. Suppose you come over to my place each noon and take dinner, having eaten only a very light breakfast; then rest from two to five, take a long bath when you rise, go for a walk from six to six-thirty, and then to your own home for tea, taking only a shredded wheat biscuit for that meal."