THE FRUITARIAN REVOLUTION.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXXIII, Issue 15920, 4 May 1912, Page 10

THE FRUITARIAN REVOLUTION.

About a generation ago a little company of "faddists" invited tho, ready jeers of carnivorous Philistia by | proclaiming themsolves to bo "vege-j tarians." These pioneers of a great social • movement were not taken seriously, except as tho objects of cheap humour and rather senseless derision.'j But, during the last decade, they have, won their way to recognition as food| reformers, and havo attracted wide at-.! tention to their creed of "fruitarian-, ism." In their new guiso the anti-| flesh food crusaders have made way against tho kreophagous British Philistine as undeniably as have those meek and lowly "Socialists" who plunged into the cleansing waters of respectability to emerge as "Fabians." The Philistine was not silenced, it may be said, by anything superior in the logic * of the fruitarians. There had been no demonstrable weakness in the old\ vegetarian argument save that thcro was so little of it. Nor was success dependent on the academic element imparted by later adherents to tho reform. Tho old vegetarians had been intellectuals, too, but tho Western Demos is proud to remain sublimely unaffected by the forces of mere mentality. [The. Briton, however, is always

impressed by action, and tho modern fruitarians are avowedly i>eoplc who do things, and do them well. When athletes trained for victory on vegetarian diet, when dramatists like Granville Barker, painters like Herbert Herkonier, and philosophers liko G. B. Sl'.aw conquered their period on the same modest regimen, when surgeons and physicians from their own experience began to point back to nuts and Nature as the surest road to the lost Eden of human vitality, Philistia toned down its gibes appreciably. But when the very gods of British and American Philistia were captured, when earls and dukes began to forswear beef and beer for cereals and grape juice, and queens of society renewed their looks and vivacity on hot milk and spinach, Philistia searched its heart in silence. Fruitarians have invaded the very sanctum sanctorum of Vanity Fair, as well as the platform and the laboratory. The spread of vegetarian restaurants in London and New York testifies to the growth of the cult. Fruitarians recognise that now is the time to press statistics on tho proved connection v between flesh-eating and alcoholism, dyspepsia, rheumatism, gout and cancer. Moralists drive home uncomfortable facts ..bearing on the ghastly and degrading conditions that oan never ba eliminated from the preparation of animal food. Biologists point out that 'man's alimentary structure is frugivorous, not carnivorous, and that our innumerable diseases have largely originated in the coarse and dangerous constituents of our perverted diet. Psychologists and philosophers urge that we teud to become that which we live upon, and that in eating death for ages past, we have been thinking death, and rooting ourselves on a lowered moral and physical plane. While this mass of evidence has been gathering on the fruitarian side, the kreophagous argument has been faring poorly. It has had to jettison its theology, and revise its science. The records of vegetarian hospital treatment in London and Paris, the low percentage of disease among vegetarians and the correspondingly high standard of efficiency and morality, all militate against conservative views on diet. In America two unexpected impulses have recently been givon to food reform. " The Jungle," in which Mr Upton Sinclair revealed the secrets of Chicago meat-packing, made thousands of indignant converts. Then the exactions of the moat trusts drove another host into a food revolt. Altogether, it may be said that in the older lands the fruitarian movement is rapidly approaching the form of a revolution, and can no longer bo dismissed as a passing craze.