Twixt Desk and Shelves
by James Leatham
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE TEN – Food and World Politics.
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE TEN – Food and World Politics.
First published in The Gateway a century ago.
“What do you mean by ‘a guiltless feast’?” asked a keen, upstanding young gentlewoman not native to the part. They had touched upon the food question, and the printer had referred to the great many wastes in connection with the flesh-eating habits of European countries, and especially the waste of feeding cattle in the fields, where they trampled down more than they ate. In fairly well ordered agricultural countries, such as Denmark, cattle were largely stall-fed, unless there happened to be rough pasture land, unsuitable for cultivation, upon which they could be turned. A great many more cattle could be kept on a given area, he said, if meadow grass were cut for the beasts, instead of being trampled and lain upon and fouled. Exercise they could get on rough ground, or in a yard, or in fields that had just been cleared. “But,” he had added, half-jocularly, “all this devotion of the lives of men and women to the breeding, feeding, milking, nursing, driving, selling, transporting, and killing of cattle might be saved if we would be content with a guiltless feast.”
And then the young gentlewoman asked the question.
Printer: A guiltless feast is a feast for which no blood has been shed – otherwise a vegetarian, fruitarian, or farinaceous meal, or one compounded of all three elements. Have you never been to a vegetarian restaurant?
Young Lady: No, I can’t say I have.
Printer: Have you ever seen any of those shops with V.E.M. over the door?
Lady: No. V.E.M! What does it stand for?
Printer: Vegetables, eggs, milk. But they have a great many attractive things besides these . In fact, vegetables is not an attractive word at all. It suggests swallowing the leek. I remember how as a boy I used to detest leeks – and parsnips. Badly nourished people dislike simple, natural food. They like sweets and savouries and aromatics – something pungent, that touches the gastric spot and sets the juices flowing. Porridge they turn from with disgust, as if it were food for animals – like grass or raw oats. The palate is like every other faculty of appreciation – it has to be educated; and sometimes the process is a long one. Many people have their metabolism all wrong.
Lady: Metab–?
Printer: Yes, metabolism means the whole adjustment of the flesh-cells of which the body is composed. A person with a red nose or a tuberculose body has the blood and the tissue wrongly adjusted. The sum of the processes of assimilation and decomposition is out, is wrong, just as a person recovering from an illness has not enough red and too many white corpuscles in his blood. Such a person will not only have to eat in excess to get the necessary value out of his food, but he may very well have a distaste for certain kinds of food which do not tickle him violently.
Lady (who is really keen): But you said guiltless feast: why guiltless?
Printer: Do you know anything about slaughtering cattle? Have you never stopped to consider what was necessary before you could have the dead flesh of animals on your plate? I have known many butchers who were quite kindly men; but they were so by the sheer ineradicable goodness of their human nature. Butchering is a brutalising business, and it leaves its marks. There is usually a public house, or a few of them, in the neighbourhood of the abattoirs, and one feels that it is only natural – cause and effect. I have seen something of the inner life of the slaughter house; as a boy in a great city, one knocked about, and you couldn’t help seeing things. One of my early recollections is of hearing discussed a stabbing case that had taken place at a slaughter-house in our neighbourhood. We knew the man who had used the knife. My people spoke of it as if it were almost a matter of course that the angry butcher should turn his knife from sheep or bullock to his fellow-man.
The lady looked pained but interested.
Printer (continuing with some reluctance): The bullock is tied up, is hit on the head and knocked down, stunned; its side is pierced and the blood drained off into shallow pans, the butcher stepping on it to squeeze out the last few drops, and then it is flayed, and the still reeking carcase is hung up to firm and cool.
Lady (shocked): Horrible.
Printer: Well, that’s what you eat a day or two later. I was once looking in at a slaughter-house gate, and a butcher had just cut a sheep’s throat. The poor baa-baa was tied by the feet, and place on a stool, and of course it wriggled violently. The man wanted to go off somewhere for a few minutes and he called me to hold it. I went in very unwillingly, picking my way over the blood-stained cobbles of the yard. I could not look at the beastie and therefore I couldn’t hold it on the stool. It presently flopped down on the dirty paving-stones, and the butcher arriving at the moment, he chivvied me off as being no use.
Lady (fascinated): I never thought of all that.
Printer: I have seen a pig run about the yard, squealing, with the knife sticking in it. And one day I saw a sight which seemed to me the natural outcome of all the others. A butcher or drover (I don’t know which he was) had in some way offended the other men about the slaughter-houses. They were shouting at him and pelting him with the filthy offal and garbage which lay about, and, although a bit man, he was crying, and staggering about blinded and confused by the stuff that was swishing and bursting over him.
Lady: Don’t please. Not any more. I had never given a thought to these things. It seems as if I had gone through life with my eyes shut. Of course it should have been perfectly obvious to one that all that sort of thing must go on in connection with such a business. But one doesn’t think.
Printer: No, it is a saying of the man in the street: ‘I don’t think!’
Lady: Are you a vegetarian?
Printer: No. I should like to be. But it isn’t convenient. One person in a household who doesn’t accept the general ménage causes a lot of trouble. And when you go to a hotel or go visiting there is no provision for the anti-carrion person. Besides that, of course, there is the fact that flesh-food is stimulative and easily digested. The ox has done part of the work for you, transforming the grass or turnips into a more highly concentrated food. We live and work, moreover, in unnatural conditions – in hot rooms, for over long hours, and we have inherited a flesh-nourished physique.
Lady: But even assuming that we could do without flesh as food, what would we do for milk if we did not keep cattle? And then there is butter – and cheese?
Printer (smiling): Oh, are you sure you eat butter? I find I prefer margarine myself. In this cold weather butter is hopeless. It comes in hard balls which break in to fragments that will do anything except spread. And often it tastes badly of turnips, as indeed the milk itself does. One can get margarine, or better still, nut butter, which is always beautifully workable, spreadable, and which has just the faintest pleasant flavour of the nuts of which it is composed. I know households where nothing else has been used for years, and everybody in the house knows except the servants. They would probably turn up their noses if they became aware that they were eating a substitute; though, as it is, they wonder how their mistress is able to get such fine Danish butter at a time like this.
Lady (smiling): Well, you can’t get the milk of nuts in sufficient quantities anyhow. But I confess you surprise me about margarine. I always thought of it as something quite impossible.
Printer (holding out his hand): A guinea!
Lady: What for?
Printer: For advice worth many pounds a year. The nut butter is elevenpence, the turnip variety is one and six, I believe.
Lady: Tell me how to save half as much on milk and you shall have a fee – sixpence at least.
Printer: Ah, you want too much, and would give too little. However… it is not necessary to do without the lacteal fluid of the cow merely because we don’t eat butcher-meat.
The lady is too well-bred and class-minded to blush; but she is evidently in some mental confusion over the problem, nevertheless.
Lady: But am I very ignorant? – can we have cow’s milk without having calves? And if we can’t, what’s to be done with the calves?
Printer (still smiling) How absolute you are! If a thing is not ideally right – if there is any element of danger or undesirableness in connection with it – you would cut it off altogether. We can’t do that. Too much exercise shortens the lives of cab-horses and working men; too much food or drink kills the glutton or the drunkard; but moderation means long life, health and happiness. There may always be a less and a more. Our cultivators may give their attention mainly to the raising of crops, as they did in the heyday of British agriculture, before the great imports of grain set in from Russia, America and the Argentine; or they may give their attention to beef-production as they do now. Changes are not made all at once in matters of that kind. If people could be induced to eat less meat, less meat would be produced, and farmers would turn to crop-raising instead. This would mean fewer calves would be produced.
Lady: But it would be a great loss to do without the milk.
Printer: A lot of milk is wasted. There is scarcity in the cities; but in the country, pigs are fed with skimmed milk, and the cream is made into butter which is often indifferent enough. It is, moreover, notorious that a great deal of the milk hawked in the cities is very dirty. Sir James Crichton Browne, the eminent medico, has referred to ‘the filth sold as milk’ and I have heard a healthy cattle dealer speak of milk as ‘the dirtiest thing you can put on the table’.
Lady (gasping a little): Well, milk-fed pigs are surely good food?
Printer: I like pig in all its forms but I cannot think it good food. It is forbidden by the Levitical law, and the Jews were and are very good judges when it comes to eating. Authorities say that swine’s flesh breed trichonoma. One cannot help recalling that the Germans are devoted to the pig in all its forms. A certain swinish ferocity and perversity are reflected in their ways. Even their airship is just a great floating sow.
Lady: But what, then, would you feed on?
Printer: Vegetables, fruit, nuts, the grain foods, will carry one a long way even as things are, and no particular attention has been given by science in the evolving or adapting of graminivorous foods. The world has been homely to the carnivore. The two nations that made the war – Servia which gives the pretext and Germany which seized on it – are both great pig-breeders and pig-eaters. The eating of flesh makes the eater fierce. Mrs Humphrey Ward has a keeper of vegetarian restaurant in one of her novels who confesses that a desire for the fleshpots of Egypt comes upon him at intervals. And when he eats meat he wants to drink alcohol. The one craving begets the other… at a time when the peoples of the world are tearing each other to bits, it would seem that some less provocative food than animal’s flesh would be a good thing for mankind…
Needless to say, my fruit trees will carry more food to the acre than any kind of ground crop; they will need less labour; orchards are more picturesque than turnip fields; and excessive tree-planting has a climactic value – it gives shelter and tames the temperature… And now I’ll take my sixpence and away ye wag!
“What do you mean by ‘a guiltless feast’?” asked a keen, upstanding young gentlewoman not native to the part. They had touched upon the food question, and the printer had referred to the great many wastes in connection with the flesh-eating habits of European countries, and especially the waste of feeding cattle in the fields, where they trampled down more than they ate. In fairly well ordered agricultural countries, such as Denmark, cattle were largely stall-fed, unless there happened to be rough pasture land, unsuitable for cultivation, upon which they could be turned. A great many more cattle could be kept on a given area, he said, if meadow grass were cut for the beasts, instead of being trampled and lain upon and fouled. Exercise they could get on rough ground, or in a yard, or in fields that had just been cleared. “But,” he had added, half-jocularly, “all this devotion of the lives of men and women to the breeding, feeding, milking, nursing, driving, selling, transporting, and killing of cattle might be saved if we would be content with a guiltless feast.”
And then the young gentlewoman asked the question.
Printer: A guiltless feast is a feast for which no blood has been shed – otherwise a vegetarian, fruitarian, or farinaceous meal, or one compounded of all three elements. Have you never been to a vegetarian restaurant?
Young Lady: No, I can’t say I have.
Printer: Have you ever seen any of those shops with V.E.M. over the door?
Lady: No. V.E.M! What does it stand for?
Printer: Vegetables, eggs, milk. But they have a great many attractive things besides these . In fact, vegetables is not an attractive word at all. It suggests swallowing the leek. I remember how as a boy I used to detest leeks – and parsnips. Badly nourished people dislike simple, natural food. They like sweets and savouries and aromatics – something pungent, that touches the gastric spot and sets the juices flowing. Porridge they turn from with disgust, as if it were food for animals – like grass or raw oats. The palate is like every other faculty of appreciation – it has to be educated; and sometimes the process is a long one. Many people have their metabolism all wrong.
Lady: Metab–?
Printer: Yes, metabolism means the whole adjustment of the flesh-cells of which the body is composed. A person with a red nose or a tuberculose body has the blood and the tissue wrongly adjusted. The sum of the processes of assimilation and decomposition is out, is wrong, just as a person recovering from an illness has not enough red and too many white corpuscles in his blood. Such a person will not only have to eat in excess to get the necessary value out of his food, but he may very well have a distaste for certain kinds of food which do not tickle him violently.
Lady (who is really keen): But you said guiltless feast: why guiltless?
Printer: Do you know anything about slaughtering cattle? Have you never stopped to consider what was necessary before you could have the dead flesh of animals on your plate? I have known many butchers who were quite kindly men; but they were so by the sheer ineradicable goodness of their human nature. Butchering is a brutalising business, and it leaves its marks. There is usually a public house, or a few of them, in the neighbourhood of the abattoirs, and one feels that it is only natural – cause and effect. I have seen something of the inner life of the slaughter house; as a boy in a great city, one knocked about, and you couldn’t help seeing things. One of my early recollections is of hearing discussed a stabbing case that had taken place at a slaughter-house in our neighbourhood. We knew the man who had used the knife. My people spoke of it as if it were almost a matter of course that the angry butcher should turn his knife from sheep or bullock to his fellow-man.
The lady looked pained but interested.
Printer (continuing with some reluctance): The bullock is tied up, is hit on the head and knocked down, stunned; its side is pierced and the blood drained off into shallow pans, the butcher stepping on it to squeeze out the last few drops, and then it is flayed, and the still reeking carcase is hung up to firm and cool.
Lady (shocked): Horrible.
Printer: Well, that’s what you eat a day or two later. I was once looking in at a slaughter-house gate, and a butcher had just cut a sheep’s throat. The poor baa-baa was tied by the feet, and place on a stool, and of course it wriggled violently. The man wanted to go off somewhere for a few minutes and he called me to hold it. I went in very unwillingly, picking my way over the blood-stained cobbles of the yard. I could not look at the beastie and therefore I couldn’t hold it on the stool. It presently flopped down on the dirty paving-stones, and the butcher arriving at the moment, he chivvied me off as being no use.
Lady (fascinated): I never thought of all that.
Printer: I have seen a pig run about the yard, squealing, with the knife sticking in it. And one day I saw a sight which seemed to me the natural outcome of all the others. A butcher or drover (I don’t know which he was) had in some way offended the other men about the slaughter-houses. They were shouting at him and pelting him with the filthy offal and garbage which lay about, and, although a bit man, he was crying, and staggering about blinded and confused by the stuff that was swishing and bursting over him.
Lady: Don’t please. Not any more. I had never given a thought to these things. It seems as if I had gone through life with my eyes shut. Of course it should have been perfectly obvious to one that all that sort of thing must go on in connection with such a business. But one doesn’t think.
Printer: No, it is a saying of the man in the street: ‘I don’t think!’
Lady: Are you a vegetarian?
Printer: No. I should like to be. But it isn’t convenient. One person in a household who doesn’t accept the general ménage causes a lot of trouble. And when you go to a hotel or go visiting there is no provision for the anti-carrion person. Besides that, of course, there is the fact that flesh-food is stimulative and easily digested. The ox has done part of the work for you, transforming the grass or turnips into a more highly concentrated food. We live and work, moreover, in unnatural conditions – in hot rooms, for over long hours, and we have inherited a flesh-nourished physique.
Lady: But even assuming that we could do without flesh as food, what would we do for milk if we did not keep cattle? And then there is butter – and cheese?
Printer (smiling): Oh, are you sure you eat butter? I find I prefer margarine myself. In this cold weather butter is hopeless. It comes in hard balls which break in to fragments that will do anything except spread. And often it tastes badly of turnips, as indeed the milk itself does. One can get margarine, or better still, nut butter, which is always beautifully workable, spreadable, and which has just the faintest pleasant flavour of the nuts of which it is composed. I know households where nothing else has been used for years, and everybody in the house knows except the servants. They would probably turn up their noses if they became aware that they were eating a substitute; though, as it is, they wonder how their mistress is able to get such fine Danish butter at a time like this.
Lady (smiling): Well, you can’t get the milk of nuts in sufficient quantities anyhow. But I confess you surprise me about margarine. I always thought of it as something quite impossible.
Printer (holding out his hand): A guinea!
Lady: What for?
Printer: For advice worth many pounds a year. The nut butter is elevenpence, the turnip variety is one and six, I believe.
Lady: Tell me how to save half as much on milk and you shall have a fee – sixpence at least.
Printer: Ah, you want too much, and would give too little. However… it is not necessary to do without the lacteal fluid of the cow merely because we don’t eat butcher-meat.
The lady is too well-bred and class-minded to blush; but she is evidently in some mental confusion over the problem, nevertheless.
Lady: But am I very ignorant? – can we have cow’s milk without having calves? And if we can’t, what’s to be done with the calves?
Printer (still smiling) How absolute you are! If a thing is not ideally right – if there is any element of danger or undesirableness in connection with it – you would cut it off altogether. We can’t do that. Too much exercise shortens the lives of cab-horses and working men; too much food or drink kills the glutton or the drunkard; but moderation means long life, health and happiness. There may always be a less and a more. Our cultivators may give their attention mainly to the raising of crops, as they did in the heyday of British agriculture, before the great imports of grain set in from Russia, America and the Argentine; or they may give their attention to beef-production as they do now. Changes are not made all at once in matters of that kind. If people could be induced to eat less meat, less meat would be produced, and farmers would turn to crop-raising instead. This would mean fewer calves would be produced.
Lady: But it would be a great loss to do without the milk.
Printer: A lot of milk is wasted. There is scarcity in the cities; but in the country, pigs are fed with skimmed milk, and the cream is made into butter which is often indifferent enough. It is, moreover, notorious that a great deal of the milk hawked in the cities is very dirty. Sir James Crichton Browne, the eminent medico, has referred to ‘the filth sold as milk’ and I have heard a healthy cattle dealer speak of milk as ‘the dirtiest thing you can put on the table’.
Lady (gasping a little): Well, milk-fed pigs are surely good food?
Printer: I like pig in all its forms but I cannot think it good food. It is forbidden by the Levitical law, and the Jews were and are very good judges when it comes to eating. Authorities say that swine’s flesh breed trichonoma. One cannot help recalling that the Germans are devoted to the pig in all its forms. A certain swinish ferocity and perversity are reflected in their ways. Even their airship is just a great floating sow.
Lady: But what, then, would you feed on?
Printer: Vegetables, fruit, nuts, the grain foods, will carry one a long way even as things are, and no particular attention has been given by science in the evolving or adapting of graminivorous foods. The world has been homely to the carnivore. The two nations that made the war – Servia which gives the pretext and Germany which seized on it – are both great pig-breeders and pig-eaters. The eating of flesh makes the eater fierce. Mrs Humphrey Ward has a keeper of vegetarian restaurant in one of her novels who confesses that a desire for the fleshpots of Egypt comes upon him at intervals. And when he eats meat he wants to drink alcohol. The one craving begets the other… at a time when the peoples of the world are tearing each other to bits, it would seem that some less provocative food than animal’s flesh would be a good thing for mankind…
Needless to say, my fruit trees will carry more food to the acre than any kind of ground crop; they will need less labour; orchards are more picturesque than turnip fields; and excessive tree-planting has a climactic value – it gives shelter and tames the temperature… And now I’ll take my sixpence and away ye wag!
About the Author
James Leatham was born in Aberdeen in 1865 and apprenticed to a printer aged 13½. Over his life he worked for a range of papers/periodicals in the North East of Scotland and England, including the St Nicholas Press, The Workers Herald and The Peterhead Sentinel (editorship of which he took over from David Scott in 1897). He wrote for radical socialist papers throughout his life at a time when socialism and the Labour Party were a febrile battleground of theory and practice. He more than once lost his job because of his political views. In his 50’s he moved back to Aberdeenshire, setting up the Deveron Press in 1916 from his Turriff base. He published many ‘penny pamphlets’ and in book form his publications include the political work Socialism and Character (1897); William Morris: A Master of Many Crafts (1900); and a tribute to David Scott, Daavit (1912).