I will, however, just add one more example for comparison—viz. the Highlander’s porridge. The following is the composition of oatmeal—also from Pavy’s table:
| Water | 15·00 |
| Albumen | 12·60 |
| Starch | 58·40 |
| Sugar | 5·40 |
| Fat | 5·60 |
| Salts | 3·00 |
Compare this with the beef and potatoes above, and it will be seen that it is superior in every item excepting the water. One hundred ounces of oatmeal contain 1·9 ounce more of albumen than is contained in 100 ounces of beef and potatoes mixed in equal proportions. The 100 ounces of oatmeal supplies 39·6 ounces more of carbo-hydrate (starch). The 100 ounces of oatmeal is superior to the extent of 3·8 ounces in sugar. It has the advantage by 3·7 ounces in fat, and 0·9 ounce in salts, but the mixed diet beats the oatmeal by containing 58½ ounces more water; nearly four times as much. This deficiency is readily supplied in the cookery.
These figures explain a puzzle that may have suggested itself to some of my thoughtful readers—viz. the smallness of the quantity of dry oatmeal that is used in making a large portion of porridge. If we could, in like manner, see our portion of beef or mutton and potatoes reduced to dryness, the smallness of the quantity of actually solid food required for a meal would be similarly manifest. An alderman’s banquet in this condition would barely fill a breakfast cup.
I cannot at all agree with those of my vegetarian friends who denounce flesh-meat as a prolific source of disease, as inflaming the passions, and generally demoralising. Neither am I at all disposed to make a religion of either eating, or drinking, or abstaining. There are certain albuminoids, certain carbo-hydrates, certain hydro-carbons, and certain salts demanded for our sustenance. Excepting in fruit, these are not supplied by nature in a fit condition for our use. They must be prepared. Whether we do all the preparation in the kitchen by bringing the produce of the earth directly there, or whether, on account of our ignorance and incapacity as cooks, we pass our food through the stomach, intestines, blood-vessels, &c., of sheep and oxen, as a substitute for the first stages of scientific cookery, the result is about the same as regards the dietic result.
Flesh feeding is a nasty practice, but I see no grounds for denouncing it as physiologically injurious, excepting in the fact that the liability to gout, rheumatism, and neuralgia is increased by it.
In my youthful days I was on friendly terms with a sheep that belonged to a butcher in Jermyn Street. This animal, for some reason, had been spared in its lamb-hood, and was reared as the butcher’s pet. It was well-known in St. James’s by following the butcher’s men through the streets like a dog. I have seen this sheep steal mutton-chops and devour them raw. It preferred beef or mutton to grass. It enjoyed robust health, and was by no means ferocious.
It was merely a disgusting animal, with excessively perverted appetite; a perversion that supplies very suggestive material for human meditation.
My own experiments on myself, and the multitude of other experiments that I am daily witnessing among men of all occupations who have cast aside flesh food after many years of mixed diet, prove incontestably that flesh food is quite unnecessary; and also that men and women who emulate the aforesaid sheep to the mild extent of consuming daily about two ounces of animal tissue combined with six ounces of water, and dilute this with such weak vegetable food as the potato, are not measurably altered thereby so far as physical health is concerned.[21]