The Gluttony Plague (1868)

AUTHOR: Jackson, James Caleb

KEYWORDS: animals, food, Temperance

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, revised Deborah Madsen):

Though Jackson hints that there are reasons beyond human health not to eat “the flesh of animals,” he sets out the dietetic practices which Jackson believes will improve human health, mental acuity, and prevent intemperance. He argues that the US is distinctly favored in its geography to allow its citizens to live long and healthy lives, but the prevalence of disease among these people indicates “artificial causes at work”; namely, poor diet (3). Other causes are: overwork, insufficient sleep, unhealthy dress, lack of recreation, and ignorance of the relationship between the mind and body.

Current methods of raising animals for meat in fact make them unfit and unhealthy for consumption. “Whatever may be said for or against the flesh of animals as food for man, one thing is certain, that to subject them to conditions or states of living on order to fatten them, which violate the laws on which their healthy existence depends, is to make them unhealthy, and so far unfit for nutriment to us” (5). Jackson argues that, while bison and wild boar may not be particularly appetizing as food, they are far healthier because of their lifestyle. He advises that readers learn to eat their meat raw if they can, or “rare-done, with no fixings – as a trapper in the west would eat it …” (11). “But the stye-fed pig and stall-fed ox, especially if they have been kept so confined as to make them take on high condition, i.e. become very fat, – are diseased in all their tissues, these being overloaded with waste matter, which for want of opportunity under natural habits of the animal, their excretory organs have been unable to expel, and which matters therefore have undergone vital changes, and from substances which formerly had life in them and so helped keep the bodies of these animals in health, have become effete, useless, deleterious, and very poisonous in their effects, thus rendering the flesh into every cell of which they are infiltrated decidedly objectionable as food for men” (5-6).

Gluttony “creates an appetite for alcoholic drinks, tobacco, and narcotic drugs and beverages” (21). Intemperance is “born of Gluttony” (21).

 

Last updated on June 17th, 2024

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