Brain-Workers & Pork

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

According to George Orwell …

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

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The past includes Food Science.

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According to George Beard (1839-1883) …

“Delicacy of digestion is one of the best known and first observed effects of civilization upon the nervous system. The history of the rise and fall of pork as an article of food is itself, without any re-enforcing fact, most instructive on this point. In America pork, like the Indian, flees before civilization. In all the great cities of the East, among the brain-working classes of our large cities everywhere, pork, in all its varieties and preparations, has taken a subordinate place among the meats upon our tables, for the reason that the stomach of the brain-worker cannot digest it. Three times a day, and every day in the year almost, the flesh of swine in some form was, in the last generation, the dependence of our fathers, who could eat it freely without ever asking themselves whether it was easy or hard to be digested. This dethronement of pork has had, and is still having on one side, a disastrous effect upon the American people; for, as yet, no article of food with a sufficient amount of fat has been generally substituted; and fat in our dietaries is, if it can be assimilated, one of the imperative needs.

“The demand for the pork of America is extensive in Europe, the exports reaching annually the value of one hundred millions, and the attempt made this very year to stop this exportation was an alarm to an immense body of capitalists. In our own country, pork is yet freely and in some districts almost exclusively employed, but chiefly in farming districts, and especially in the sparsely settled region of the South and West.”

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I was an ovo-lacto-vegetarian for 14 years.

The hardest meats for me to forego were (1) bacon and (2) anchovies.

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