7th Day Adventist Church

Eating by the Book?

SDA vegetarianism is rooted in the Bible, according to which for food God gave humans "all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth, and every tree bearing fruit that yields seed" (Genesis 1:29). Meat is said to have become a part of the human diet after the Flood, when all plant life had been destroyed: "Every creature that lives and moves shall be food for you" (Genesis 9:3). Adventists are taught that the introduction of meat into the human diet at that time decreased the human life span from the more than 900 years of the first humans to today's "three-score and ten."

However, the Bible warns against confusing dietary practices with moral behavior:

For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace. (Romans 14:17)Let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink. (Colossians 2:16)One believes he may eat anything, while the weak man eats only vegetables, let not him who eats despise him who abstains, and let not him who abstains pass judgment on him who eats. (Romans 14:2-4)

It also seems to condemn vegetarianism:

The Holy Spirit tells us clearly that in the last times some in the church will turn away from Christ and become eager followers of teachers with devil inspired ideas. These teachers will tell lies with straight faces and do it so often that their consciences won't even bother them. They will say that it is wrong to be married and wrong to eat meat, even though God gave these things to well-taught Christians to enjoy and be thankful for. For everything God made is good, and we may eat it gladly if we are thankful for it. ( I Timothy 4:1-4, Living Bible)

SDA Church pioneer Ellen G. White (1827-1915) was a proponent of vegetarianism even though she did not practice it herself. Like the Grahamites of her time, she taught that gradually the earth would become more corrupted, diseases and calamities worse, and the food particularly animal foods unsafe. In 1902 she wrote that the time might come when the use of milk should be discontinued. Although White was an advocate of science and chiefly responsible for making SDA healthcare a science-based enterprise, clearly she did not anticipate twentieth-century advances in public health and medical science. Despite the record longevity now enjoyed by people in the developed nations, vegetarian zealots within the church caught up in the doomsday hysteria of the 1990s have decided that the time has come to give up all animal foods and are fervidly preaching veganism.

Ellen G. White's visions prompted several books by one of her followers, George McCready Price, leading to the 20th-century revival of flood geology.[43] After years selling White's books door-to-door, Price took a one-year teacher-training course and taught in several schools. When shown books on evolution and the fossil sequence which contradicted his beliefs, he found the answer in White's "revealing word pictures" which suggested how the fossils had been buried. He studied textbooks on geology and "almost tons of geological documents", finding "how the actual facts of the rocks and fossils, stripped of mere theories, splendidly refute this evolutionary theory of the invariable order of the fossils, which is the very backbone of the evolution doctrine". In 1902, he produced a manuscript for a book proposing geology based on Genesis, in which the sequence of fossils resulted from the different responses of animals to the encroaching flood. He agreed with White on the origins of coal and oil, and conjectured that mountain ranges (including the Alps and Himalaya) formed from layers deposited by the flood which had then been "folded and elevated to their present height by the great lateral pressure that accompanied its subsidence". He then found a report describing paraconformities and a paper on thrust faults. He concluded from these "providential discoveries" that it was impossible to prove the age or overall sequence of fossils, and included these points in his self-published paperback of 1906, Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory. His arguments continued this focus on disproving the sequence of strata, and he ultimately sold more than 15,000 copies of his 1923 college textbook The New Geology.[46][47] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_geology

George McCready Price (26 August 1870 – 24 January 1963) was a Canadian creationist. He produced several anti-evolution and creationist works, particularly on the subject of flood geology. His views did not become common among creationists until after his death, particularly with the modern creation science movement starting in the 1960s.

Price was born in Havelock, New Brunswick, Canada.[3][4] His father died in 1882, and his mother joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Price attended Battle Creek College (now Andrews University) between 1891 and 1893. In 1896, he enrolled in a one-year teacher training course at the Provincial Normal School of New Brunswick (now the University of New Brunswick), where he took some elementary courses in some of the natural sciences, including some mineralogy.[5]

Price taught at a series of small-town schools from 1897 onwards, including at a high school in Tracadie between 1899 and 1902. While there, socially, he met Alfred Corbett Smith (head of the medical department at a local leprosarium) who loaned him scientific literature. Believing the Earth was young, Price concluded that geologists had misinterpreted their data. In 1902, Price completed the manuscript Outlines of Modern Christianity and Modern Science before leaving Tracadie to serve brief stints as an Adventist evangelist on Prince Edward Island and the head of a new Adventist boarding academy in Nova Scotia. He briefly returned to book-selling in 1904, and then moved to New York City in an attempt to become a magazine and newspaper writer.[5]

In a response to a plea from his wife, the Adventist church first employed Price as a construction worker in Maryland. He then was principal of a small Adventist school in Oakland, California, before becoming a construction worker and handyman at a newly purchased Adventist sanitarium in Loma Linda, California, where he published Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory in 1906.[5] In Illogical Geology, Price offered $1000 "to any one who will, in the face of the facts here presented, show me how to prove that one kind of fossil is older than another."[6]

From 1907 to 1912, Price taught at the Seventh-day Adventist-run College of Medical Evangelists, now known as Loma Linda University, which awarded him a B.A., based partially on his authorship and independent study. From 1912 to 1914, he taught at the San Fernando Academy in San Fernando, California, and from 1914 to 1916 at Lodi Academy, Lodi, California.[7]

Beginning in 1920, Price taught at Pacific Union College, Angwin, California,[7] where he was awarded an M.A. (described by Ronald L. Numbers as a "gift").[8] From 1924 to 1928, Price taught at Stanborough Missionary College in Watford, England, where he served as president from 1927 to 1928. He then taught at Emmanual Missionary College (now Andrews University) in Berrien Springs, Michigan from 1929 to 1933, and Walla Walla College near Walla Walla, Washington from 1933 to 1938.[7]

While Price claimed that his book-selling travels gave him invaluable "firsthand knowledge of field geology", his "familiarity with the outside world" remained rudimentary, with even his own students noting that he could "barely tell one fossil from another" on a field trip shortly before he retired.[8]

In 1943, he moved to Loma Linda, California, where he died 20 years later at the age of 92.[9]

"Dr. Kellogg appointed Lenna as the Chief Dietitian of the Battle Creek Sanitarium and the Director and Dean of the Battle Creek Sanitarium School of Home Economics. The School of Home Economics began in 1906, offering a one- year course for matrons and housekeepers. In 1907, a two- year course to instruct teachers and lecturers was offered. All courses included training in the Sanitarium’s philosophy of health through “biologic living.” The growing demand for trained dietitians for hospitals led to the school’s development of a two-year comprehensive course in dietetics to be included in its curriculum. Vegetarian nutrition and cooking was the foundation of the dietetics courses taught at the school under Lenna’s supervision. More than 500 dietitians graduated from Battle Creek under her tenure. Lenna became a leading proponent for health care through diet and a pioneer in the field of vegetarian nutrition and dietetics."

Lenna’s first book, The New Cookery (Good Health Publishing, 1913), featured nutritionally balanced, attractive, and palatable vegetarian recipes, most of which were served at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Many of these unique recipes incorporated innovative nut, wheat gluten, and legume- based meat substitutes, whole grain cereals, and other vegetarian food products that were originally created at The New Cookery (Good Health Publishing, 1913) the Sanitarium. Working closely with Dr. Kellogg, Lenna developed the vegetarian cuisine medical nutrition therapy menus that were served to the Sanitarium’s patients.Because of her multifaceted talents and accomplishments in dietetics at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Lenna’s reputation gradually became recognized on a national level as a leader in her field. Those early days of training and experience working at Battle Creek gave her a strong foundation in nutritional science that paved the way to an illustrious career.

An article by American dietitian Lenna Cooper printed in 1917 suggested that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”. The article appeared in Good Health, a magazine published by the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which was run by Dr John Harvey Kellogg.

Both Cooper, through her catchy saying, and Kellogg, through the invention of flaked cereal — 124 years ago today — have had a major influence on breakfast in the western world. Cooper, who was mentored by Dr Kellogg and conducted nutrition classes at his sanatorium, was influenced by Kellogg’s food philosophy. In August 1917 she wrote that “less attention is usually paid to breakfast … yet in many ways it is the most important meal of the day, because it is the meal that gets the day started”.

Dr Kellogg would have been dismayed, because he and his protege Cooper had very definite ideas about the first meal of the day. Yet before Kellogg arrived some societies had never bothered with breakfast.