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Counsels on Diet and Foods
truth were known, it would bear testimony it was the flesh of animals
that have passed through death. The thought of feeding on dead flesh
is repulsive, but there is something besides this. In eating meat we
partake of diseased dead flesh, and this sows its seed of corruption in
the human organism.
I write to you, my brother, that the giving of prescriptions for
the eating of the flesh of animals shall no more be practiced in our
sanitarium. There is no excuse for this. There is no safety in the
afterinfluence and results upon the human mind. Let us be health
reformers in every sense of the term. Let us make known in our
institutions that there is no longer a meat table, even for the boarders;
and then the education given upon the discarding of a meat diet will
be not only saying but doing. If patronage is less, so let it be. The
principles will be of far greater value when they are understood, when
it is known that the life of no living thing shall be taken to sustain the
life of the Christian.—
Letter 59, 1898
A Second Letter Meeting the Issue
723. I received your letter, and will explain as best I can in refer-
ence to the meat. The words you mention were in a letter to _____ and
some others at the time Sister _____ was at the Health Retreat [720]. I
had these letters hunted up. Some letters were copied and some were
[413]
not. I told them to give dates to the time of the statements made. At
that time the meat diet was being prescribed and used very largely.
The light given me was that meat in a healthy condition was not to be
cut off all at once, but talks were to be given in the parlor in regard to
the use of dead flesh of any kind; that fruits, grains, and vegetables,
properly prepared, were all the system required to keep it in health;
but that they must first show that we have no need to use meat, where
there was an abundance of fruit, as in California. But at the Health
Retreat they were not prepared to make abrupt moves, after using meat
so abundantly as they had done. It would be necessary for them to
use meat very sparingly at first and finally discontinue it entirely. But
there must be only one table called the patients’ meat-eating table. The
other tables were to be free from this article....
I labored most earnestly to have all meat discarded, but this difficult
question must be handled discreetly and not rashly, after meat had been