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The Ministry of Healing
Reasons for Discarding Flesh Foods
Those who eat flesh are but eating grains and vegetables at sec-
ond hand; for the animal receives from these things the nutrition
that produces growth. The life that was in the grains and vegetables
passes into the eater. We receive it by eating the flesh of the ani-
mal. How much better to get it direct, by eating the food that God
provided for our use!
Flesh was never the best food; but its use is now doubly objec-
tionable, since disease in animals is so rapidly increasing. Those
who use flesh foods little know what they are eating. Often if they
could see the animals when living and know the quality of the meat
they eat, they would turn from it with loathing. People are continu-
ally eating flesh that is filled with tuberculous and cancerous germs.
Tuberculosis, cancer, and other fatal diseases are thus communi-
cated.
The tissues of the swine swarm with parasites. Of the swine God
said, “It is unclean unto you: ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch
their dead carcass.”
Deuteronomy 14:8
. This command was given
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because swine’s flesh is unfit for food. Swine are scavengers, and
this is the only use they were intended to serve. Never, under any
circumstances, was their flesh to be eaten by human beings. It is
impossible for the flesh of any living creature to be wholesome when
filth is its natural element and when it feeds upon every detestable
thing.
Often animals are taken to market and sold for food when they
are so diseased that their owners fear to keep them longer. And some
of the processes of fattening them for market produce disease. Shut
away from the light and pure air, breathing the atmosphere of filthy
stables, perhaps fattening on decaying food, the entire body soon
becomes contaminated with foul matter.
Animals are often transported long distances and subjected to
great suffering in reaching a market. Taken from the green pastures,
and traveling for weary miles over the hot, dusty roads, or crowded
into filthy cars, feverish and exhausted, often for many hours de-
prived of food and water, the poor creatures are driven to their death,
that human beings may feast on the carcasses.