The Natural Diet of Man (1923)

AUTHOR: Kellogg, John Harvey

KEYWORDS: diet, ethics, health, veg*ism

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In addition to promoting veg*ism for reasons of health, in this book Kellogg explicitly defends ethical veg*ism. He positions the book as a counter weight to the misleading propaganda of the meat industry which, he notes, has embarked on “a vigorous and nation-wide 'Eat-More-Meat' campaign” (7) following “a decline of 24 per cent” in the consumption of meat between 1902 and 1921.

In the Preface, Kellogg states his aim as follows: “this book attempts to find through an inquiry into the facts and principles developed by modern laboratory research and clinical observation the answer to the question, What is the natural diet of man?” (4-5). To answer this question, the book promotes “the immense advantages of the fleshless regimen” (5). Specifically, Kellogg lists “fruits, nuts, soft grains, tender shoots, and succulent roots, eggs, and milk” as the natural human diet (59, 294). While he includes animal products in this list, he explicitly notes that “the human bill of fare may be made up exclusively from the vegetable kingdom. It is even possible for human beings to subsist and to maintain the highest degree of strength and vigor upon a diet consisting of uncooked vegetable products, if sufficient care is taken in making up the bill of fare” (306-307). Kellogg describes his book as “a contribution to the cause of race betterment, by which alone will it be possible successfully to combat the tide of race degeneracy which is rapidly sweeping on towards race extinction every civilized nation of the world” (8).

The book is wide ranging: individual chapters debunk the myth that humans are natural meat eaters, refute generally held beliefs about meat, present scientific evidence against eating meat, and discuss all kinds of diseases resulting from the use of flesh foods. Kellogg surveys historical sources that argue against the use of meat from the Bible to Henry David Thoreau, from ancient Greek, Sumerian, and Roman treatises and customs to Sylvester Graham, from Chinese authorities to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and he discusses the eating habits of various peoples from such places as Latin America, Africa, India, and the Pacific Islands. Kellogg directly addresses how misinformation is spread through newspapers and magazines, and he provides practical tips to embark on a meatless life. Notably, the book also contains a chapter devoted to the ethical argument against carnism, which is the focus of the summary that follows.

Having established that veg*ism is the most natural means of human subsistence, Kellogg notes that “the Biblical account of the dietary of the first man agrees” with veg*ism (216). He goes on to emphasize “that lower animals are, in common with man, sentient creatures” and not mere “things,” even though humans tend to treat them as such (217). He remarks that “[t]he gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-utan, are, in fact, adhering more closely to the divine order in diet than is civilized man, with all his intelligence and knowledge” (218). Earlier, Kellogg pronounced that “a stupid pig knows more about dietetics than the average college professor” (20).

Importantly, a change in diet would put a stop to the suffering that humans inflict on animals “in cold blood” (219):

When animal eats vegetable, there is no pain, no sorrow, no sadness, no robbery, no deprivation of happiness, no sunlight shut out from eyes that were made to see, no sweet melodies forever shut away from ears that were made to hear, no simple delights denied to beings that God made, if not in his own image, at least so nearly like his image, man, that the man whose eyes have been enlightened by the study of nature may look down and see in the millions of beings that God has made to share with him the divine spirit, the breath of life, some traits of himself that must now and then bring blushes to his cheek or strike deep into his soul barbed arrows of remorse (220).

Kellogg bluntly calls the butchering of animals “murder in an aggravated form” (222), describing it as follows:

Man rears his cattle, his sheep, and his poultry much like household pets. His children make his lambs their playmates. Side by side his oxen toil with him in the field. In return for kindness, they give affection. What confidence they repose in him! how faithfully they serve! With winter's frost an evil day arrives, – a day of massacre, of perfidy, of assassination and bloodshed. With knife and ax he turns upon his trusted friends, – the sheep that kissed his hand, the ox that plowed his field. The air is filled with shrieks and moans, with cries of terror and despair; the soil is wet with warm blood, and strewn with corpses (221).

Kellogg insists on a correlation between veg*ism and musicality, which he sees confirmed in the animal realm: songbirds “subsist upon grains, fruits, and nuts. Carnivorous birds do not sing; they croak and caw” (223). In addition to historical figures like Pythagoras and Lord Byron, he refers to several notable public intellectuals of the nineteenth century who were “friendly to the meatless diet” (224), including Wendell Phillips, Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Horace Greeley. He also favorably mentions the “Brook farm experiment” in this context (224).

Kellogg rehearses the argument that a meat eater “must expect to find himself more nearly related to the animal in his instincts than the man who satisfies his palate with nuts, fruits, and farinaceous seeds, the primitive diet of the human family” (224). He even links colonial violence to the habit of meat-eating when he writes that “[t]he ancient vegetarian races of Mexico and Peru had attained to a high degree of civilization when discovered by Cortez, and were certainly far more gentle and amiable in character than were their flesh-eating conquerors, whose treachery and cold-blooded atrocities so nearly resulted in the complete extinction of a noble race” (225-226). Similarly, drawing on a magazine article on the issue, he contrasts “the domestic peace and happiness that prevail in the homes of the rice-eating Japanese” with “the unhappy, miserable home life” in England, which is “due to the free use of flesh foods” (226). Kellogg has no doubt that “[t]he business of slaughtering animals is a training school for murderers” (227); hence the widespread “recognized custom to exclude butchers from juries in the trial of cases of murder” (227). Thus, for Kellogg, meat clearly is murder.