Fruits and Farinacea the Proper Food of Man (1854)

AUTHOR: Trall, Russell Thacher

PUBLICATION: Smith, John. Fruits and Farinacea the Proper Food of Man: Being and Attempt to Prove, from History, Anatomy Physiology, and Chemistry, that the Original, Natural, and Best Diet of Man Is Derived from the Vegetable Kingdom. With Notes and Illustrations, by R. T. Trall, M. D. New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1854.
https://archive.org/details/fruitsfarinaceap00smit 

Trall provides illustrations and notes to this 1854 American edition of John Smith's book (first published also in 1845), advocating for veganism. The summary below deals only with Trall's contributions.

KEYWORDS: animals, diet, food, health

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In his book, John Smith presents arguments drawn from the Bible, history, physiology, anatomy, and chemistry to show that humans are vegan by nature. Trall adds illustrations and notes to the American edition published in 1854. In his short preface, Trall maintains that the question of food relates directly to “the progress, improvement, and destiny of the human race”; he strongly recommends the book “to the American people, and to all truth-seekers everywhere,” and explains that his notes “are intended mainly to elucidate such of the more difficult and most disputed propositions as the general reader may not have time or opportunity to explore by the ordinary method of scientific investigation” (n. pag.).

In his notes, Trall points out that to criticize the brutality of butchery must entail abstention from meat-eating: “If the slaughtering of animals for food is the brutalizing and demoralizing occupation it is so generally represented to be, no one should pursue it. And if the butchery is wrong, I cannot understand how those who patronize the wrong by eating the flesh of the slaughtered animals can absolve themselves from the charge of being accessaries in wrong-doing” (42). He compares human indulgence in tobacco and alcohol to sheep and cows being taught to eat meat: both are cases of acquired taste and “depraved" instincts (54). He makes an anatomical argument that is based not only on “the digestive apparatus” but on a general “comparative anatomy,” according to which, for example, “in all herbivorous animals, the limbs, mouth, features, expression, and, in short, the entire organization, is in striking contrast with both the carnivorous and omnivorous group” (62). These physical differences extend to mental ones: whereas in carnivora, “secretiveness and destructiveness are leading propensities,” herbivora display “cautiousness and combativeness” (62). He then presents a hierarchy of human "races" and their dietary habits, with which he correlates their relative propensity towards violence, “cunning, avarice and superstition” (65), or, conversely, rational thought and civilization, concluding that humans, just

like predacious animals, riot upon and tyrannize over the more amiable and more lovely, as the wolf preys upon the lamb, and the vulture upon the dove. And I can see no end or remedy for this seeming cruelty, save in that law of benevolence and progress which permits suffering for a season, and as a means of development, and overrules all for good, by that law which, in due process of time, will not only exterminate from the face of the earth the beasts of prey, but also all the appetences of human beings for preying on other animals (70-71).

Trall insists that “animal fat,” contrary to what physiologists often affirm, has barely any “nutritive value” (136). He refutes assertions that "vegetarians" suffer from poor health as being based on misconceptions. In fact, veganism prevents many ailments: Trall writes that he has “never known a consistent vegetarian to be troubled with costive bowels, sick headache, dysentery, nor piles; nor a well-fed child of vegetarian parents to be afflicted with dysentery, nor cholera infantum” (168). He also contends that “vegetarians are seldom troubled with toothache or rotting teeth; and those who are vegetarians physiologically are almost entirely exempt from decaying teeth or spongy gum” (217).