p. 111 | Good Health

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Apr 3, 1879

Good Health.

Pork;

OR THE DANGERS OF PORK EATING EXPOSED.

(Concluded.)

APOLOGIES FOR PORK-EATING EXAMINED.

4. ON every hand we are met by all sorts of excuses for continuing to make swine's flesh an article of diet in spite of the striking evidence of its dangerous character which we have presented, and the truth of which no one can gainsay. Let us examine a few of the most common of these apologies and test their value.

PORK IS NECESSARY AS A HEAT-FORMING FOOD IN WINTER.

Are there not plenty of more healthy animals than hogs to supply all the animal oil necessary? Certainly there are. And, better still, we have the various grains and farinaceous vegetables which are abundantly sufficient to furnish all the heat required by man in any latitude.

OUR FATHERS AND GRANDFATHERS ATE PORK AND YET LIVED TO VERY OLD AGE.

Ah! yes; my good friend, and you are suffering the penalty of their transgressions. You may not be well aware of it as yet; but more than likely as not, your old age will not be so free from ills as was theirs. And quite as probably you may even now see in your children the results of your own, as well as your father's, disregard of the dictates of sound sense in feasting upon the hog. Their frequent sore eyes, sore mouths, tetter, erysipelas, and other eruptions, are all evidences of the scrofula which they have inherited.

Neither can you urge the plea, "Pork does not hurt me." No man ever became a drunkard who did not make the same excuse for liquor. You may not feel it now; but the future will expose your delusion.

THE HOG IS CLEANLY IF YOU GIVE HIM A CHANCE TO BE SO.

It is surprising to us that any person who knows anything of the real nature of a hog can make such an assertion. Who has not seen many a hog wallowing in the foulest mire right in the middle of a green, fragrant clover pasture? The dirty creature will turn away from the nicest bed of straw to revel in a stagnant, seething mud-hole. If one of his companions dies in the lot or pen, he will wait until putrefaction occurs, and then greedily devour the stinking carcass. The filthy brute will even devour his own excrement, and that when not unusually pressed by hunger.

The hog is by nature a scavenger, and is especially adapted for that purpose. Let him pursue his natural calling.

SUFFICIENT HEAT WILL KILL THE TRICHINÆ AND INCIPIENT TAPE-WORMS.

Surely, dead worms cannot kill any one; but it must be delightful for the pork-eater to contemplate his ham or sausage with the reflection that he will find it a diet of worms. The Frenchman sometimes eats earth worms; the African relishes lizards; and one philosopher so far overcame his natural prejudices as to eat spiders. How disgusting, you say; and yet shut your eyes and swallow a million monsters at a meal, because they are cooked, and so cannot bite. The louse-eating Patagonian cannot equal that.

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE HOG?

Stop raising him. Turn him loose. He will soon find his place, like the five thousand which ran down into the sea in the days of Christ. If he must be raised, use him for illuminating our halls and houses. Lubricate our car and wagon axles with his abundant fat. Do anything with him but eat him. It would be dangerous to adopt the principle that we must devour everything which is in the way, or which cannot be otherwise utilized. Adam Clarke thought of one appropriate use to make of him. He said that if he was going to make an offering to the devil he would employ a hog stuffed with tobacco.

Reader, what will you do? Can you continue to use as food such an abominable article as pork, and in so doing run so many risks as you must do? And if you decide that the animal is unfit to claim a place upon your own table, can you conscientiously raise and sell him, to your neighbor's injury?

ONE of the New York papers, commenting upon an estimate that 15,000 persons died from yellow fever last summer, and that the losses in money trade aggregated from $175,000,000 to $200,000,000, remarks that negligence is the worst kind of political economy, since an expenditure of one twentieth part of what the fever has cost might have prevented it altogether.