Fruits and Farinacea the Proper Food of Man (1854)

AUTHOR: Trall, Russell Thacher

KEYWORDS: animals, diet, food, health

Alcott, A. Bronson
Alcott, William
Allen, James Madison
Bergh, Henry
Brotherton, Martha
Clubb, Stephen Henry
Dodds, Susanna Way
Freshel, M. R. L.
Graham, Sylvester
Kellogg, Ella Ervilla
Kellogg, John Harvey
Lovell, Mary Frances
Metcalfe, William
Moore. J. Howard
Mussey, Reuben Dimond
Nichols, Thomas Low
Nichols, Mary Sargeant Gove
Nicholson, Asenath
Rumford, Isaac
Shew, Joel
Stow, Marietta
Trine, Ralph Waldo

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 also entails 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:

[T]he great majority of those who are the subjects of notice and comment are invalids who are restricted to a vegetable diet, because they can recover health in no other way; and many of them are living on a strict vegetable regimen, because it is the only way they can live at all. At the various hydropathic establishments in this country the most desperate cases are put on a vegetable diet, simply because it affords them the best chance for getting well. The casual observer, who judges by appearances, will always find an argument in favor of flesh-eating in the fact that the best-looking persons, physiologically, are those who eat meat.

There are, however, in this country, particularly amongst the Bible Christians of Philadelphia, many persons of adult age who have never tasted animal food, and who will not suffer, as respects mental and bodily development, with the best specimens of flesh-eaters that can be found.

There are also, scattered over the United States here and there, specimens of humanity whose bodily vigor and mental capacity are conclusive in favor of vegetarianism, so far as the experimental evidence is concerned (163).

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). He also promotes his own cookbook (308).