Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery

human nature--best for the whole interests of the whole race--best for time, and best for eternity. Startle not, reader, at this assertion. If West could properly say, "I paint for eternity," the true disciple of Christ and truth can say, "I eat and drink for eternity." And a higher authority than any that is merely human has even required us to do so. This places the subject of preparing food on high ground. And were I to carry out my plan fully, I should exclude from a Christian system of food and cookery all mixtures, properly so called, and all medicines or condiments. Not that all mixtures are equally hurtful to the well-being of the race, nor all medicines. Indeed, considering our training and habits, some of both, to most persons, have become necessary. I know of many whose physical inheritance is such, that salt, if not a few other medicinal substances, have become at least present necessaries to them. And to those mixtures of substances closely allied, as farina with farina--meal of one kind with meal of another--I could scarcely have any objection, myself. Nature objects to incompatibles, and therefore I do; and medicine, and all those kinds of food which are opposed one to another, are incompatible with each other. When one is in the stomach, the other should not be. I have spoken of carrying out my plan, but this I cannot now fully do. It would not be borne, till, as Lord Bacon used to say, "some time be passed over." But, on the other hand, I am unwilling to give directions, as I did ten or twelve years ago, in my Young Housekeeper, such as shall pander to a perverted--most abominably perverted--public taste. Man is made for progress, and it is high time the public standard were raised in regard to food and cookery. Although grains and fruits are the natural food of man, yet there are a variety of shapes in which the grains or farinacea may be presented to us; and there are a few substances fit for food which do not properly