Veg*n ideology

Chapter 19:

On the day of the races at Krasnoe Selo, Vronsky had come earlier
than usual to eat beefsteak in the common messroom of the
regiment. He had no need to be strict with himself, as he had
very quickly been brought down to the required light weight; but
still he had to avoid gaining flesh, and so he eschewed
farinaceous and sweet dishes. He sat with his coat unbuttoned
over a white waistcoat, resting both elbows on the table, and
while waiting for the steak he had ordered he looked at a French
novel that lay open on his plate. He was only looking at the
book to avoid conversation with the officers coming in and out;
he was thinking.

He was thinking of Anna's promise to see him that day after the
races. But he had not seen her for three days, and as her
husband had just returned from abroad, he did not know whether
she would be able to meet him today or not, and he did not know
how to find out. He had had his last interview with her at his
cousin Betsy's summer villa. He visited the Karenins' summer
villa as rarely as possible. Now he wanted to go there, and he
pondered the question how to do it.

"Of course I shall say Betsy has sent me to ask whether she's
coming to the races. Of course, I'll go," he decided, lifting
his head from the book. And as he vividly pictured the happiness
of seeing her, his face lighted up.

"Send to my house, and tell them to have out the carriage and
three horses as quick as they can," he said to the servant, who
handed him the steak on a hot silver dish, and moving the dish up
he began eating.

From the billiard room next door came the sound of balls
knocking, of talk and laughter. Two officers appeared at the
entrance-door: one, a young fellow, with a feeble, delicate
face, who had lately joined the regiment from the Corps of Pages;
the other, a plump, elderly officer, with a bracelet on his
wrist, and little eyes, lost in fat.

Vronsky glanced at them, frowned, and looking down at his book as
though he had not noticed them, he proceeded to eat and read at
the same time.

"What? Fortifying yourself for your work?" said the plump
officer, sitting down beside him.

"As you see," responded Vronsky, knitting his brows, wiping his
mouth, and not looking at the officer.

"So you're not afraid of getting fat?" said the latter, turning a
chair round for the young officer.

"What?" said Vronsky angrily, making a wry face of disgust, and
showing his even teeth.

"You're not afraid of getting fat?"

"Waiter, sherry!" said Vronsky, without replying, and moving the
book to the other side of him, he went on reading.

The plump officer took up the list of wines and turned to the
young officer.

"You choose what we're to drink," he said, handing him the card,
and looking at him.

"Rhine wine, please," said the young officer, stealing a timid
glance at Vronsky, and trying to pull his scarcely visible
mustache. Seeing that Vronsky did not turn round, the young
officer got up.

"Let's go into the billiard room," he said.

The plump officer rose submissively, and they moved towards the
door.

http://www.publicbookshelf.com/romance/anna-two/day-races

After a spiritual crisis around the time of his 50th birthday, the Russian literary giant gave up smoking, drinking, eating meat and even the rights to his own work. He became a staunch advocate of pacifism and a vocal supporter of vegetarianism.

Unfortunately for Tolstoy, 19th-century Russia was short on quinoa and Quorn. Instead he became obsessed with eggs, living off a rotating menu of 12 egg dishes including poached eggs with croutons, eggs with Brussels sprouts and beans, and omelette in soup. Sweet pastries and baked items were off-limits – except on birthdays and special occasions when Mrs Tolstoy would prepare a very sour lemon pie.

As I put the finishing touches to the table, I imagine myself bustling around the kitchen at Yasnaya Polyana, being occasionally interrupted by one of the Tolstoys’s 13 children or Tolstoy wandering in wearing his two hats (in his later years he got very sensitive to cold on his head). The recipe book’s main protagonist is Tolstaya herself who, aside from catering to all of her husband’s vegetarian wishes (she remained a staunch meat-eater until just before her death) and putting up with him turning up late to every meal, also transcribed by hand the entirety of War and Peace in its original form – seven times longer than the multi-tome version we know today.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/06/war-and-no-pieces-of-cake-dining-from-the-tolstoy-family-cookbook

In the morning, I do a little reading on Tolstoy’s dietetics. The benefit of this is twofold: first, I can learn a little bit about why I’m eating what I’m eating, and second, I can fill the time before I’m allowed to have anything at all, which isn’t until mid-afternoon. Here’s what I learn: While most of us know Leo Tolstoy as the writer of books too long to suffer through, few are aware of the contributions the prolific Russian made to the world of dieting. Yes, amid the splendor of nineteenth-century Slavic cuisine — fish eggs, pork jelly, and veal topped with béchamel sauce — Tolstoy had the gall to extoll vegetarianism. Not only did he condemn carnivorous man as inevitably inert and amoral but he said that eating too much at all was a sign of lack of self-discipline and an impious nature.

But what I want to know is: what can rigid beliefs do for one’s waistline? Tolstoy’s manifestos on vegetarianism convinced Gandhi to adopt a plant-based diet, and he eventually got a body so trim he strutted about confidently on the international stage in nothing but a loincloth. Could a staunch belief in the nourishing power of bread, water, and egomania do the same for me?

For a moment, I pine for a few strips of bacon, but then I remember that Tolstoy insisted a man who ate an animal took on its characteristics, and also risked exciting carnal passions. “A man who eats too much,” he wrote in the introduction to The Ethics of Diet, “cannot strive against laziness, while a gluttonous and idle man will never he able to contend with sexual lust.”

Today I am fasting. Tolstoy believed that abstaining from meat eating is a step toward fasting, which is the key to living a Christ-like life and recreating the Kingdom of God here on earth.

https://www.thehairpin.com/2016/09/i-tried-tolstoys-diet/

Recent studies of the dietetics of diabetes have clearly demonstrated the great danger involved in the use of an exclusive meat diet. The rapid tissue disintegration taking place in severe cases of diabetes results in flooding the system with waste matters, which are, of course, toxic in character. When to these are added the toxic substances contained in the flesh of animals under the best conditions, together with the ptomains resulting from the decomposition which always takes place to a greater or less extent in flesh food before it is eaten, and still further by the urea and other excrementitious products resulting from the excess of nitrogenous material contained in the system when meat is largely used, it becomes apparent that the diabetic who makes use of an exclusive meat diet or a diet consisting largely of flesh foods, is in a state of chronic auto-intoxication. Such a person is constantly on the verge of diabetic coma; if he escapes, it is simply because his liver and kidneys are still able to do a sufficient amount of work in the destruction and elimination of poisons to save his life ; but sooner or later he will certainly reach a point at which a failure of these important organs to do the excessive amount of work demanded of them will result in the accumulation of toxic substances to such a degree as to produce the universal poisoning which is so graphically pictured in diabetic eoma.

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]

A Fleshless Diet. 

Vegetarianism as a Rational Diet. 

By J. L. Buttner, M. D. Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York, 1910. 12mo. 287 pages. $1.35 net.

 Those interested in the scientific investigation of diet which has recently engaged many of our most noted chemists will find this book a ready means of getting at the common arguments in favor of vegetarianism. It is largely a collection and resume of the work of Chittenden, Fisher and others. The author shows that anatomically man is prepared for a fleshless diet, that meat is unnecessary, and that it is unwholesome and dangerous. He suggests a rational dietetic, outlining it for a week and then shows by ergographic records and the tests of Fisher and endurance records the greater value of vegetarianism in practical life. The tendency for disease to decrease with the fleshless diet is shown. The book is not original. It is to be commended for bringing together in a readable form a considerable amount of recent dietetic work. It fails to show scientific discretion in the selection of this material. It will therefore be helpful as a popular presentaton of vegetarianism but will be unconvincing to careful students.

-E. B.