Protein

            Proteins are necessary to maintain all forms of life – plant, animal, and human. They are complex substances made up of amino acids (twenty-two are needed by the human body; eight of them essential) and are indispensable to the building, growth, and repair of human body cells. They play an immensely important role during pregnancy, lactation, and childhood; it is absolutely necessary to ingest adequate protein at these times. Inadequate amounts can result in permanent body and brain damage.

            The American diet has tended to emphasize meat as its prime source of protein. It is perhaps the easiest way to be sure of getting adequate protein, but there are many reasons to look for one’s protein elsewhere – meat today is often tainted with additives and pesticides, and from moral or nutritional points of view it is distasteful to some people.

            A vegetarian diet successfully requires a good amount of nutritional knowledge. Do not undertake vegetarianism lightly. For it is not only the quantity of protein that is important but also the quality; many plants contain incomplete proteins that must be properly matched with just the right companion plant or the protein is of little use to the body.

            Prime sources of protein are meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese, soybeans, brewer’s yeast, some nuts, and wheat germ. Beans and many seeds and nuts are high in incomplete protein. There are any number of powdered protein supplements on the health food market. They have their place, perhaps; but there seems no reason why with a modicum of knowledge and planning one cannot obtain adequate protein in a more pleasurable and interesting manner!

Meat

            The idea of a herd of beef cattle grazing on a grassy hillside on a warm summer day is delightful, but sadly not very realistic. Today a larger percentage of our cattle than anyone would care to admit are raised in the quickest, cheapest, least healthful, and most unnatural manner possible. Probably no food on the market is altered as much as meat. Nutrition and even the modicum of health – either of animal or of human consumer – are ignored, and money is the motivation in the meat-producing business.

            Most beef cattle are now conceived through artificial insemination, immediately weaned on foods loaded with drugs, pesticides, antibiotics, and synthetic vitamins (so much for the old-fashioned virtues of mother’s milk and verdant pastures!), and finally shot full of tranquilizers and meat tenderizers before being led to the slaughter. The woeful lives of unfortunate pigs, veal calves, lambs, and chickens follow the same maleficent pattern. Pigs are fed processed garbage; veal calves are kept in a state of acute anemia and absolute immobility in order to produce pale, muscleless meat; lambs may be shorn chemically, with the chemical then penetrating into the flesh, while “spring” lamb is now produced twice yearly by manipulating the light of an artificial environment; chickens are raised in windowless superstructures, with their arsenic-doused food (for yellower skin) passing by on conveyer belts. Other problems we are faced with in our meats are coloring to make the meat look fresher longer, and chemicals (such as cancerous nitrates and nitrites) to make it last longer without obvious spoilage. Commercially raised chicken is rife with salmonella and disease. Lunchmeats are thick with preservatives.

            If you are not prepared to make the leap to organic meat for monetary reasons, there are certain precautions that can be taken to ensure more health and less contamination for you and your family. Choose your butcher carefully; find out where he gets his meat and how it has or has not been treated; watch to make sure the ground meat is freshly ground in a well-cleaned grinder; have as much fat as possible trimmed off the meat, for it is in the fat that the pesticides leave a great deal of their residue. There is controversy over whether liver is still fit for human consumption. Some contend that because the liver is the body’s “clearinghouse”, as it were, all of the chemicals the animal has been exposed to are deposited there in concentrated form. Others claim that the health value and vitamin B content of liver are so high that liver remains one of the healthiest of meats. For this reason it is supremely important to purchase both beef and chicken liver that comes from organically raised, antibiotic-free, free-range animals.