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The Ministry of Health and 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 directly, 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 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 continually
eating flesh that is filled with tuberculosis and cancerous germs. Tu-
berculosis, cancer, and other fatal diseases are thus communicated.
The tissues of the swine swarm with parasites. God said, “‘The
swine is unclean for you ...; you shall not eat their flesh or touch
their dead carcasses.’”
Deuteronomy 14:8
. This command was given
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 on 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.
To reach the market, animals are often transported long distances
and subjected to great suffering. Taken from the green pastures, and
traveling for weary miles over hot, dusty roads, they become feverish
and exhausted. Often, crowded into filthy railroad cars or trucks and
for many hours deprived of food and water, the poor creatures are
driven to their death that human beings may feast on their carcasses.
In many places fish become so contaminated by the filth on
which they feed as to be a cause of disease. This is especially the
case where fish come in contact with the sewage of large cities.