Vegetable Substitutes for Flesh-Food (1899)

AUTHOR: Kellogg, Ella Ervilla

KEYWORDS: food, health, veg*nism

Trall, Russell Thacher.

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

This article proposes a number of plant-based substitutes for animal food; parts of the article are integrated into Kellogg's Healthful Cookery, which contains an eponymous chapter. Materials not included in the book chapter but discussed in the article concern eating habits and practices in other parts of the world (particularly Asia) and the nutritional value of different kinds of vegetables. The most important substitutes for animal food are “nuts and leguminous seeds” (534). What needs to be substituted are “the nitrogenous and fatty food elements” of animal food (533). The former can primarily be obtained from leguminous plants, which work well in conjunction with “non-nitrogenous” elements like “lentils and rice, this combination constituting the staple food of many millions in India, China, and Japan” (534). The Chinese, she emphasizes, produce “cheese from peas and beans” (534). Apart from beans, Kellogg thinks leguminous plants – she explicitly mentions peas and lentils – are under-used in the United States.

She explains in some detail how best to process and prepare different kinds of legumes, before turning to the advantages of nuts, which are “analogous in composition to milk, and still better adapted to human consumption than is cow’s milk” (535). She writes: “The cream of the coconut, ingeniously extracted, furnishes a satisfactory substitute for cow’s milk to the millions of inhabitants in tropical countries. The cow tree of South America provides a liquid so rich in fatty matter that it might properly be termed a vegetable cream. All nuts contain fats in a state of emulsion, and also a large percentage of nitrogenous material” (535). Kellogg thinks that “nut milk” is “preferable for many reasons” to  “cow's milk” (536). She ends the article by pointing out, as, indeed, she does in Healthful Cookery, that “[d]ifferent nuts reduced to a fine meal and thoroughly cooked are now manufactured into a variety of palatable, wholesome, and easily digestible products which serve as an excellent substitute for meats and butter, and may be prepared in numberless tasty and appetizing dishes” (536). The issue contains a number of recipes relying on such products – these are also included in Kellogg's cook books.