THE MORAL INFLUENCE OF FOOD

The infinite probability’s that food has no effect whatever on the moral qualities. The subject has never been fairly investigated, and we will, by and by point out one apparent exception, but that is the conclusion to which all the known facts seem to point. Judged by them, both the vegetarians and the anti-vegetarians are alike hopelessly in the wrong. Comines, who said that the English were fierce because they fed on great shins of beef, expressed an idea still universal, but wholly opposed to facts. Man has never been braver than the Roman soldier, who lived upon the bread and vinegar. The highest powers of endurance were displayed in the seventeenth century by the Dutch, whose main food then, as now, was stewed vegetables and bread. The English peasant, who is one of the bravest men existence, lives upon bread, with bacon, perhaps, on Sundays; and Irishman, who fights the battles of the Saxon in every quarter of the globe, is reared on potatoes and milk. The converse, however, is just as true. The Hindoo Sepoy, who will not touch flesh, is a coward compared to the English officer, who rises flushed with beefsteak to pursue him; and the Chinese, who will eat any thing, from a rat to a peach, is on the whole, not a fighting character. The vegetarians think that animal food inflames the passions, but the men who perpetrated the massacres of Cawnpore were all strict vegetarians, and the worst orgies of an obscure worship are still perpetrated by Sivaites, to whom bread is too “strong” a diet. The civilised classes of Europe eat meat, and the uncivilised classed do not; and, on the whole, the former are the milder of the two; but in India the case is reversed, and the Brahmin who accepts Mr. Brotherton;s fancies is a gentleman by the side of the Mehter, who eats the English gentleman’s dinner. The mass of mankind everywhere, except for the United States, are vegetarians from poverty; in the few countries where they are not, we have in the United States perhaps the best average peasantry; in Tartary, an almost uncivilised race; in South America, a thoroughly savage people; and in Lapland, one of the most inoffensive of all the tribes of men. We cannot enter into the effect of separate articles of diet, for that would require a volume; but the most popular of all human food prejudices, the dislike for port, seems to have no foundation. Whole classes of Americans live on it, and it is the meat most eaten by our agricultural labourers. The Chinese of the tropics scarcely get any other; and we believe it is the only flesh which reaches the Southern slaves. None of them suffer; and the notion was we believe, first born of the dislike of all men to the dirty habit of the pig – who, by the way, is not half so dirty a feeder as the duck – and, secondly, of the dyspeptic prejudices of an over-cultivated, much-writing class. We mentioned a possible exception to this theory, or rather denial of the right to theorise, and we give it for fairness’ sake. The races which live on rice seem to lose some of their manliness. But the exception, though often quoted, only proves the rule, for the Mussulman of Bengal, who eats any thing, is just as unmanly at the Hindoo, who eats rice; and the same people, while still eating rice in the Mauritius, develop in one generation into a fine independent race of labourers. The cause of the feebleness is climate and race, not exclusively food, though rice is, of all the things eaten as staples, the one most prejudicial to health.

Spectator.