Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/342

326 it is unnecessary to say, of a choice, and some of it in a concentrated form. To call a person thus fed a vegetarian is a palpable error; to proclaim one's self so almost requires a stronger term to denote the departure from accuracy involved. Yet so attractive to some, possessing a moral sense not too punctilious, is the small distinction attained by becoming sectarian, and partisans of a quasi-novel and somewhat questioned doctrine, that an equivocal position is accepted in order to retain if possible the term "vegetarian" as the ensign of a party, the members of which consume abundantly strong animal food, abjuring it only in its grosser forms of flesh and fish. And hence it happens, as I have lately learned, that milk, butter, eggs, and cheese are now designated in the language of "vegetarianism" by the term "animal products," an ingenious but evasive expedient to avoid the necessity for speaking of them as animal food!

Let us, for one moment only, regard milk, with which, on Nature's plan, we have all been fed for the first year, or thereabout, of our lives, and during which term we made a larger growth and a more important development than in any other year among the whole tale of the life which has passed, however long it may have been. How, in any sense, can that year of plenty and expansion, which we may have been happy and fortunate enough to owe—an inextinguishable debt—to maternal love and bounty, be said to be a year of "vegetarian diet"! Will any man henceforward dare thus to distinguish the source from which he drew his early life? Unhappily, indeed, for want of wisdom, the natural ration of some infants is occasionally supplemented at an early period by the addition of vegetable matter; but the practice is almost always undesirable, and is generally paid for by a sad and premature experience of indigestion to the helpless baby. Poor baby! who, unlike its progenitors in similar circumstances, while forced to pay the penalty, has not even had the satisfaction of enjoying a delightful but naughty dish beforehand.

The vegetarian restaurant at the Health Exhibition last summer supplied thousands of excellent and nutritious meals at a cheap rate, to the great advantage of its customers; but the practice of insisting with emphasis that a "vegetable diet" was supplied was wholly indefensible, since it contained eggs and milk, butter and cheese in great abundance.

It is not more than six months since I observed in a well-known weekly journal a list of some half-dozen receipts for dishes recommended on authority as specimens of vegetarian diet. All were savory combinations, and every one contained eggs, butter, milk, and cheese in considerable quantity, the vegetable elements being in comparatively small proportion!

It is incumbent on the supporters of this system of mixed diet to find a term which conveys the truth, that truth being that they abjure the use, as food, of all animal flesh. The words "vegetable" and