Flesh Foods
159
Unpublished Testimonies, November 5, 1896 (Healthful Living,
97.2)
The diet of animals is vegetables and grains. Must the vegetables
be animalized, must they be incorporated into the system of an animal,
before we get them? Must we obtain our vegetable diet by eating the
flesh of dead creatures? God provided food in its natural state for our
first parents. He gave Adam charge of the garden, to dress it and to
care for it, saying, “To you it shall be for meat.” One animal was not
to destroy another animal for food.
The Ministry of Healing, 313-315
Those who eat flesh are but eating grains and vegetables at second
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 animal. 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 objection-
able, 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 continually eating
flesh that is filled with tuberculous and cancerous germs. Tuberculosis,
cancer, and other fatal diseases are thus communicated.
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.” 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 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,