Uncooked Foods & How to Use Them - Soil and Health Library

FLESH FOODS.
THERE is no disputing the fact that many thousands of people
appear to attain a very fine physical development and seem to
maintain good health who subsist upon a mixed diet,
including meat. It is unquestionably true that meat will
sustain life, and it is equally true that life can be sustained
without it.
The objections to meat are: First, it is laden with the
poisons that come from the torn-down tissue and urea of the
animal, all of which must be taken into the blood and
disposed of by the excretory organs of the body which are
always worked to their normal capacity to carry off the waste
products that come from our own body; and when laden with
that of another animal, they are often taxed beyond their
power.
Second, recent experiments in the States of Ohio and
Illinois developed the fact that about 36 per cent. of the best
cattle in these two States are diseased. The majority of them
have tuberculosis. All readers of this book may not be willing
to wholly eschew the juicy sirloin, or even the fat pork chop;
but we do believe that when they have thought the matter
seriously over without the consultation of appetite, they will
decide that the flesh of another animal is not only hazardous,
but wholly unnecessary as an article of food.
If one decides that meats are absolutely necessary, it
should be his object to take it in its best and most nutritive
form. Cooking cannot possibly improve it. The only change
that heat could possibly make would be to convert part of its
nutritive value into heat and pass it off into the atmosphere.
Inasmuch, therefore, as heat is merely an expression of
energy, the energy or heat lost in cooking might be applied to
the body if the meat were eaten without the application of
fire.
The most popular reason given for cooking meat is that it
kills disease germs. In the first place, nothing should be eaten
that contains disease germs, and in the second place, heat
does not kill them. The germs cannot be destroyed until the
meat is destroyed of which they are a part. In partly cooked or
rare meats no germs are destroyed, and it is admitted by all
authorities that rare meats are more easily digested and far
more nutritious than those well done. There is no reason why
the rare meat idea should not be carried to its logical end, and
the food served entirely raw.
In the form of meat there is nothing more nourishing than
beefsteak a la Tartar (see recipe), or Hamburger steak,
uncooked, dried beef, jerked venison, etc. All of these are
much to be preferred to the cooked article.
If cooking were abolished the taste and requirements of
the body would very soon solve the meat question. People
would eat shell fish, dried and smoked meat, and possibly
beefsteak a la Tartar so long as the body called for or
demanded them, and no longer. This would also solve several