The natural tendency for love  to spread out into non-sexual 
directions gives an indication of how sexual love itself should 
evolve among lovers, in a form the most congenial and useful to society. The pristine rapture of sexual love cannot last, and is not designed to do so, but rather to be progressively replaced by compassion, in the teaming of procreation, with interests shared, 
and, with advancing years, in a heightening social and spiritual 
involvement. Living, loving and ageing in such an atmosphere of evolving love, the human being is assured of a meaningful participation in the function and structure of family and society. And most other cultures have believed that human society symbolically reflects the underlying structure of Creation. Such a definition of sexual love is so contradicted by the usual 
expression of sex in industrial societies, that it must appear as unreal and Utopian. Yet there is sufficient evidence that sexual love, rather than just sex, is the normal human pattern among simpler peoples, and among those few fortunate primiti es still surviving in the more 
benevolent habitats. Having a top biological priority in humanization, one can 
understand why the joys that attend the achievement of sexual love are the highest that can come to  the human being, and why the 
failure to achieve love is accompanied by the most terrible misery and frustration, anger and hatred. Contrary to what the Freudians 
have claimed, guilt is a biologica lly implanted reprimand for sexual 
patterns which fail to comply with the needs of humanization. Since the precarious wholeness of the mind depends on the unifying forces of love, beauty and harmony, the failure to find love is punished by the most satanic of afflictions—an unwhole and 
disturbed mind. The failure to achieve sexual love, more evident today than 
ever before, is to be seen in the breakup of the family, in selfish sexual opportunisms in the common uncaring for the young, and, as 
a result of this dehumanization of sexuality, in a soaring juvenile destructiveness and anger, in a general feeling of having been 
cheated of life's promise. Neglected, unloved, without the guidance 
which only genuine loving is entitled to provide, it is not surprising that the young have rebelled against the prurient standards set by callous and insensitive adults. The generation gap is the inevitable 
result of an older generation felt to  be corrupt and lewd, the makers 
of a civilization which has become inhuman in its materialistic and 
opportunist preoccupations. While it is true that many young subscribe in their own ways 
still to this civilization—imitation is after all the Simian way of learning—there are also those who have managed to recover something of the lost innocence, even  if drugs have played their part 
in this recovery. So demented is the sexual demand, so blind the preoccupation 
with orgasmic relief, that the c onclusion one is dealing with a 
pathological process appears irresi stible. And there can be no doubt 
that the increase of social violen ce has gone hand in hand with an 
increase in this ferocious sexua l pursuit, with an increase in 
uncaring and promiscuity. The association of sex with violence and human depravity is patent in ente rtainment, in pornography, as it is 
in group outlets from gang behaviour to revolution and warfare. For the past century, psychologists and sociologists have loudly 
proclaimed that guilt and repression are responsible for the 
frustrations and angers of the age. Sexual freedom has thus become 
the panacea for the ravaged modern soul. Many people have come to believe that the pursuit of the orgasm is a virtual duty, a recipe for healthfulness, in spite of the f act that the ability to contain the 
physical urge of sex, and find pleasu re in so doing, must have been 
a necessity from the first steps in human evolution, without which 
an effective integration of the family and social group would have been quite impossible. That frustration, the ally of anger and hatred, are the 
consequences of lust, of sexualit y pursued without love, can be 
observed in the backwash of dissatis faction that invariably follows 
the purely physical preoccupations of sexuality. This is particularly 
marked in the young; outburst s of violence, destructiveness, 
aggressiveness often follow periods  of extreme licence among the 
youth gangs of large cities. One must therefore conclude that a socially disturbed mind is especially prone to any other disturbing 
influences that may impinge upon it, such as the abnormal mind-
affecting amines in an abnormal diet. The manner in which the higher aspects of the mind become 
sabotaged by the lower, is as yet little understood. Arthur Koestler, contemplating the overwhelming fa ilure of human beings to be 
human, and the periodical insanity of human history, concludes that 
something must have gone wrong in the evolution of the brain. Others have speculated that viruses as yet undetected have infected parts of the brain controlling the sexual motivations. But there is a less far searching explanation in the virtually universal prevalence of the abnormal mind-affecting amines, which does not require such 
a bungling on the part of nature in the making of its highest work, 
the brain. The 'lower emotions' such as fear, aggressiveness, and the blind 
copulatory drives, are known to originate in the limbic system, a region a few centimetres thick which encapsulates the dilated end of 
the brain stem. The 'higher emotions' such as the humanizing 
sensibilities arise in a most comp licated interplay between the 
cortex and the brain stem. It would seem that the role of the cortex is to transmute an ancient ma mmalian capacity for effective 
emotional experiences; some interchange between the limbic system and the most highly evolved humanizing aspects is accordingly 
natural and normal. But to conclude, as does P. D. Maclean, that 
this points to an evolutionary failure to wall off the primitive from the human, which would account for an ingrained paranoid streak, seems unjustified. The problem is functional,—the wrong 'colour' of 
the affective processes due to abnormal amine stimulation. The 
same faulty amines responsible for an overall disturbance of the 
mind and an arousal of its more primitive aspects, could account for the near demonic sexual drives of most humans, inducing a pattern of sexuality the very opposite of th at intended by nature as .the main 
agent in humanization. This suggestion, that wrong foods can account for the 
pathology of sex, would find confirmation in the ancient belief that foods had aphrodisiac properties, an aphrodisiac being defined as a substance able to stimulate and titillate the lower sex emotions. Aphrodisiac foods are indeed those which have the highest amount of the extractives giving rise to the purines and amines. 9. Need or Greed 
 
 
Besides the protein excesses involved in a so called 'mixed' dietary, 
the Industrial Revolution, entailing profound changes in the world 
production of food and in food habits , has led to an excessive eating 
of calorie foods, while some of the more minute requirements of the 
mind and body have gone in short supply, resulting in the 
malnutrition of abundance. This disturbing greed for the grosser 
items of foods, proteins and calories, has been achieved at the 
expense of the poorer, primary producers, making the greed of the 
so called best-fed nations a planetary affront. Gluttony is never possible in nature, for food is never so 
plentiful as to permit a continual overeating. Occasional orgies may 
occur, the result of a lucky find, bu t they are inevitably interspersed 
by longer periods of scarcity. The only overfed animals are the pets of overfed people. The bodies of all animals are better adapted to scarcity than to abundance, which is what one would expect, given 
the geological and climatic restlessness of the earth. As food 
supplies become more scarce, reserves are mobilized, the body becomes more sparse, more active, and clutter vanishes. One finds people in the poorer parts of the world existing in apparent health, skinny but very active and smiling, on much less than the authorities consider should bring about starvation. While living on such low 
levels is to be deplored, it does show that the human body is 
remarkably well adapted to advers ity, in fact thrives on it. Some 
degree of it, at least occasionally, may be indispensable for health, for the body seems to have beco me adapted to profit from such 
periods in order to get rid of ol d stock, of accumulated wastes, the 
means also of resharpening the senses and the efficiency of 
functioning, taking in the sl ack and repairing damage. The sense of well-being, of elation and purification which 
follows a period of abstinence from food shows that this is natural, biologically beneficial. Such benefits may not be immediately 
apparent in the chronically overfed or the diseased, for in them the 
respite from abuse is taken advantage of by the body for a massive, and often disturbing broom sweeping. But even then, persistence is rewarded by a remarkable quickenin g of all the faculties, by a sense 
of reawakening and rejuvenation and a simple joyfulness which 
most people have not known since childhood. Scents and colours, 
feelings and tastes long lost are magically revived, and simple 
pleasures, which seemed boring to the surfeited mind and body, return with a pristine intensity. The humanizing sensitivities are particularly revived, bringing a bout an awareness of harmony and 
beauty in things and creatures previously neglected. It is remarkable to observe how the reactivity of the body as a 
whole is heightened. Long established chronic ailments may disappear overnight, and blights that have haunted and humiliated for years, itches and bodily odours, vanish as with a magician's wand. This is not surprising, for contrary to the usual assumption that even a temporary abstinence is dangerous, the body is designed 
for it and thoroughly enjoys it. The common supposition that even a skipped meal is a calamity boosts the common gluttony. It is not 
found among the simpler peasantries. Hard work and thrift ensure 
lithe bodies and alert minds into old age. There are still such examples surviving, peasants setting out for a long hard day's work 
with no more than a few dried figs or dates, a chunk of coarse bread dipped in olive oil, a garlic or two and an occasional piece of cheese. The Chinese peasants will perform feats of endurance and 
labour on what seems to the overfed European diminutive bowls of 
rice with scatterings of beans. The scramble for food originated with the rise of the cities, for 
while the peasants could always eke some sustenance from their 
land in the worst of times, the cities often starved, as a consequence 
of plunder, famine, and pestile nce. When good times came, city 
people stuffed themselves, so that overeating became the mark of prosperity and privilege. As privileged classes arose, ruling the cities and taking over the 
land, with power over supplies, glu ttony became their habit, while 
the masses often knew hunger. The situation grew worse with the 
rise in power of the city states in  the Middle Ages, and very much 
worse with the Industrial Revolution. Its initial impact brought such disorder that starvation often overtook the cities. As a result of this background of general scarcity, the demand 
for food, and ever more food, was the pivot of all the movements of 
emancipation which began actively in  the seventeenth century. This 
demand was eventually met by the agricultural revolution, the use 
of chemical fertilizers, the importation of foreign foods in exchange for industrial products and the refining of cereals, which enabled prolonged storage and easy trans portation. Food production was 
thus geared to quantity rather than quality. A century ago, every reasonable person would have praised the 
measures taken by the authorities and the industrialists, and blessed the scientists who were increasingly responsible for processed natural foodstuffs, increasing their size and yield, introducing preservation, colouring, conditioners and a soaring list of chemicals. But in a rising spiral of disaster, the arrogant interferences with 
nature have become apparent in the recent decades, in a planetary ecological collapse. Excessive applications of chemical fertilizers, with insufficient 
or absent organic contributions, have led to a breakdown of some of 
the world's most fertile soils, calling for ever higher applications in 
a desperate attempt to keep up the yield, and ending in disasters like the American Dust Bowl. More recently it has been found that excess nitrate fertilizers are accumulated in food plants, and, when eaten, are converted to the highly cancerous nitrosamides. The overspill of nitrates into rivers a nd lakes, encouraging the prolific 
growth of toxic blue-green algae,  has sterilized many waters with 
once abundant fish life. Mineral nitrates are manufactured into proteins by plants, the 
source of all animal protein. Too much nitrate abnormally stimulates plant growth, just as too much protein abnormally 
stimulates the growth-rate and size of animals. Superficially, this 
increase in growth and body size seems nothing but good, although 
the loss of taste of the overgrown  vegetables, and the diseases which have increased as human stature has increased in the last decades in 
the most prosperous countries, should have warned that something was wrong. In the stampede for quantity, a basic biological principle has 
been forgotten, namely, that any pl ant or animal has a specific size 
and weight, written down in its gene tic constitution, the result of a 
long evolution. Only within this range of size is optimal efficiency or health possible. Insufficiency or excess are bound to levy a physiological price. In the course of evolution, insufficiency has 
occurred frequently enough for animals to become equipped with 
guidelines of reaction, in restlessness and hunger—plants, alas, cannot move. But excess has been so rare, that neither plants nor animals have any defences against it. Fed to excess, they get bigger 
and bigger, the physiological tax increasing proportionately. As the 
yield and the size of plants have been artificially stimulated, so the 
plant disease and the plant parasites have increased, calling for an ever increasing array of the most poisonous chemicals in an attempt to control the scourge. In animals and men, the excessive stimulation of growth has also been attended by an increasing 
recourse to drugs of one kind or another. Just as over-fed rats get bigger and suffer increasingly from 
heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, so do humans. Athletes appear particularly prone to certain diseases, and their life-span is less than average, not b ecause of the physical strain they 
subject themselves to—the body thrives on that—but because of 
their thoroughly abnormal and excessive feeding. It is undeniable that chronic malnutrition since the Dark Ages 
in Europe, led to a stunting of the population. The over-fed 
privileged classes were probably oversized, a factor no doubt in their often brutal domination of the masses. While it is difficult to 
define the specific range of the human species—racial difference are 
important—it is in all likelihood significantly less than the size attained by the so called 'best fed'  nations, which has increased for a 
century as the quantity of animal foods increased in the diet. Plant breeding has been size and calorie conscious. Foods new 
to the West, high in calories like the potato, and sugar, joined in the 
rush for quantity, much helped by a cheapening of flour by refining, 
with the result that, by the clo se of the nineteenth century, the 
masses in the industrial countries not only ate to their full, but had become gluttons, overeating daily. The evil of the new abundance in calorie foods lies in the 
excessive provision of calories without a sufficiency of the other 
essentials, the vitamins and minerals , many of them needed for the 
efficient use of the calories. So it is that foods like white flour and sugar, and indeed potato and other preponderantly starchy foods, can only be properly metabolized by tapping into the body's reserves of certain vitamins and minerals. When these reserves run 
low, zeal and efficiency fall, and ultimately, disease results. With the new abundance, in a few decades, diseases which had 
formerly largely attacked the privileged, became the common affliction of the masses—diseases of the blood vessels, of the heart, strokes, kidney diseases, and the increasing list of diseases 
associated with over-weight. While this abundance gives to youth a 
greater appearance of health in increased stature, maturity and old age are increasingly associated w ith the functional, degenerating diseases, of which cancer and heart disease now claims the largest 
number of victims. But the young are also becoming affected by such disease. Although hygiene overcame premature death due to infections, 
and so increased the life-span from the beginning of the nineteenth 
century, the virus diseases have in creased steadily. The virus barely 
deserves the designation of being alive: it is no more than a minute cluster of protein molecules, ve ry closely related to the DNA and 
RNA proteins manufactured by the genes in the cells of all plants 
and animals. There is increasi ng evidence that viruses can arise 
within the body, owing to faulty manufacture of RNA by the genes. Once manufactured, they continue replicating their kind by forcing the genes of other cells to manufacture the mistake that brought them into being, so that viruses assume an apparent independence. The demarcation between unnatura l virus and natural gene is 
becoming all the more blurred, as the protein processes of the cell are unravelled. It may well turn out that viruses are the result of faulty protein metabolism, which could mean faulty protein feeding. It is certainly striking that as the amount of high protein animal 
foods has increased in the diet of the prosperous communities, so 
have the virus diseases. Some cancers are now suspected of being virus induced. Although the eye is easily deceived by size, assuming that large 
size is the right size, many people are now sensing the deception. This illusion is a part of the quantity bias of quantity-geared, 
materialistic industrial civilizati on. Once sensitivity is restored, 
there is an inherent aversion to the oversized, just as the oversized 
flowers produced by horticulturists are felt by the more sensitive to be vulgar and monstrous. There is a 'feel' about the large fruits and vegetables which is wrong. Perhaps those closer to the soil have 
retained something of this sensitivity, for the more canny farmers do 
not use chemicals or insecticides on the crops they will consume themselves. More people are realizing that the risk of a maggot is preferable to an invisible puff of arsenic. Until the full momentum of the industrial revolution was felt in 
the furthest lands, the varieties of human dietary were infinite. Some 
were no doubt as deviant as the modern diet, but many others were 
more humanly compatible. In many parts of the world, especially in the more congenial and benevolen t environments, human beings 
abandoned the ways acquired in the Ice Ages for patterns of life closer to the human norm, in soil-respecting farming communities 
and in peaceful relationship with their neighbours. This was largely 
the case in India before the popul ation stampede and nutritional 
failures of modern times, in the Polynesian islands, among the native tribes of South America. Possibly these more gentle and humane peoples escaped the worst onslaught of the Ice Ages; the 
full anger against nature seems to be  particular to the more Northern 
peoples, in Europe as in the Far East, and it is these peoples, 
particularly the Europeans, who are responsible for what has become an unwhole, and a denaturing planetary civilization. It is this planetary influence wh ich is so distressing, for the few 
remaining instances of a more humanizing situation are being 
rapidly assaulted. Soon, there will be no evidence left of a once 
happier and fairer condition. The de leterious influence of the West 
on the more benign peoples of the earth, in the guise of colonialism, of warfare, of alcoholism, of comme rcial exploitation, of disease, is 
well known. What is as yet not realized, is that the gluttony of the West, which may well have fed its  restlessness and anger, and so 
prompted its planetary dominance, h as been largely paid for by the 
misappropriation of planetary resources and the further impoverishment of the poorer peoples of the earth. 10. The Impoverishmen ts of Prosperity 
 
 
The Industrial Revolution was prec eded, and has been accompanied, 
by a frantic commercial adventuring, which has brought the 
European with his trading practi ces all over the world. The essential 
feature of European trading is the exclusive priority it places on 
profits. Profitability has conditione d, and still conditions, practice, 
often at the detriment of the less easily definable human values. The 
introduction of rice refining in India is an example. Previously, the 
removal of the husk, the sifting away of the chaff, left much of the 
germ behind, the ritualized preoccupation of women, a labour of 
love and gratitude. Mildew, insects and rats no doubt took a 
considerable toll of the rice stores, but this was taken as one of the 
inevitables of existence; the rats also had a right to live! The 
European influence brought in qu ite another mentality, and a new 
class of European and Indian merc hants, who set about correcting 
these wastes, by proper storage follo wing the refining of the rice. In 
an age when the merits of hygiene were being widely promoted, 
white rice could be put over as a superior, cleaner product; with the 
losses due to spoilage overcome, the refined rice could be sold more 
cheaply while still leaving large profits to the merchants. There was at first much resist ance against these changes, which 
the Indian felt was a dismantling of a ritualized act of immense 
importance, but cheapness, and the withdrawal of whole rice by the 
merchants, forced the habit upon the Indian masses, aided perhaps 
by the fact that the European, because of his 'mixed diet', found the fibreless white rice more congenial to his taste. But the consequences were soon calamitous . Deficiencies of the B vitamins 
had been virtually unknown in India before. Now they became 
rampant, affecting whole communities, resulting in an apathy which in return affected the labour ava ilable to the colonial powers. An 
attempt was made, as soon as it w as realized that the essential 
vitamins were contained in the e ndosperm and germ, to remedy this 
state of affairs by parboiling the rice before it was refined. Thereby 
some of the B vitamins penetrated the white grain. This not only added to the cost of the eventual product, but left behind an unpleasant soggy taste and smell. When the British Government attempted to make the eating of parboiled rice compulsory, there were riots. The effect of rice refining in India, as elsewhere, has been 
utterly disastrous, leading to a chronic malnutrition that has debased the enterprise and the viability of the people. It is unfortunately true that a vegetarian is all the more damaged by eating refined cereals than a mixed eater, for the latter obtains considerable amounts of the 
B vitamins from the animal ingredient in his diet, whereas the 
vegetarian depends very largely on the B vitamins in cereals. Sugar is another example of an impoverishment in the name of 
technical progress. By itself, sugar should not be considered a food. Although the natural fuel of all anim al life, it is offered in nature with other essentials—particularly Vitamin C in the case of fruits—
and is intended to be part of a whole dietary which supplies the essentials needed by the body for the proper metabolism of sugar, 
chiefly the B vitamins and certain minerals. Taken by itself, sugar is 
an anti-food. In combination with other refined foods, deprived of 
the B vitamins and minerals, it becomes a pernicious and evil 
ingredient in the diet, especially in one already inadequate and impoverished, the case in many parts of the world today. It is depressing to contemplate how a delightful inducement, 
the primate love of sweetness, which is the natural demand for 
fruits, should have become so deceived, with deleterious consequences only now becoming better understood. Besides the well established responsibility for dental caries, sugar has recently been incriminated in a particular  form of listlessness in children, 
often with fit-like attacks and destructive behaviour, seriously 
affecting the ability of such children to learn and to behave in a socially constructive manner. Sugar has been also invoked in heart 
attacks, in diseases of the skin and eye, in diabetes and other metabolic disturbances, as well as being the main contributor to the 
diseases of overweight. Although other questionable crops, such as the vine, are grown 
on lands often inappropriate to the production of primary foods, 
beet sugar has become an established rotational crop on some of the best lands in Europe. Easy to gr ow and profitable, the acreage under 
beet has had to be limited, but it is a perversion of land use to grow 
sugar beet at all. Its place could be better taken by other rotational 
crops which could be used as a primar y food. As for cane sugar, it is 
true that it is the most efficient means of fixing solar energy—were it not for the present clamour for sugar, converted into alcohol it could rival petrol at present prices—but human food is much more 
than calories. With the increasing world pressure on the primary 
foods, there is no doubt that the cane producing lands would do better to grow primary foods ra ther than sugar—less cars and 
gadgets, and less foreign exchange, but better health, and a happier 
people. But it is the use of lands, capable of growing primary human 
foods like cereals, for meat production, that constitutes the greatest 
economic folly. It requires some tw elve to fifteen times more land 
to produce a pound of meat than a pound of cereal, which means that some two to three thousand million more people could be fed if the world became vegetarian. It is not suggested that the world 
population should so increase. Rather, the aim is to emphasize how 
wasteful it has become to use land for the production of animal food, a wastefulness which the planet can no longer tolerate. Since the power of demand is still largely in the hands of the 
industrial communities, and their clamour for meat, far from being satiated, is for ever increasing,  and since much of the animal 
feeding stuffs is produced in the po orer parts of the world, it means 
that the nutrition of the poorer two thirds of the planet is being increasingly sacrificed so that the gluttony of the more prosperous communities can be met. One can doubt that such a situation will be tolerated for much longer, for more  than oil, the West has been 
meeting its protein surfeits at the expense of a planetary majority. The situation is already threatening. The shortage of animal 
food is boosting prices, a main factor in the inflationary costs of feeding. Those countries formerly exporting animal foods are now 
consuming it themselves. And there is no unexploited land left on the planet. If the industrial communities do succeed in even 
maintaining their present levels of consumption of animal foods, it 
can only be at the cost of a deteriorating world situation, leading inexorably to worldwide starvation. And starving people are desperate people. With the means of making atomic weapons now well within the capacity of the poorer, increasingly more poorly fed peoples of the world, it is not impossible that the planetary 
holocaust will be the result of greed. Wisdom would conclude that a worldwide adoption of a 
vegetarian dietary is the proper means of planetary justice and 
survival. Wisdom would also prepar e for this inevitable change in 
good time, so that it came about in good order, without the 
widespread disaster which such momentous change will exact if it 
comes about in violence and chaos. Unfortunately, it is not only the greed of the presently prosperous countries that is involved. Many of the poorer peoples have come to imitate the dietary habits of the West, as they have attempted to catch up with its industrial 
advantages. Former peasantries, only eating animal foods on rare 
festive occasions, now insist on a daily intake, as the mark of emancipation. And many of the poorer peoples are, by culture and tradition, the opposite of vegetarian. The prospects are undoubtedly grim. Success is only likely to 
be achieved if the overall bad habits of civilization, as well as the 
mounting pressure of population, can become corrected. In all 
probability, all these problems are interconnected. Wrong eating must in some way at present unrealized, play its part in the population stampedes of recent times, just as this stampede has its reverse influence on world food resources. The challenge of a world 
food reform calls for a better understanding of the forces at work 
behind the extraordinary rise in the human population of this planet. II. The Unloving Crowd 
 
 
Although the earth could support a considerably larger number 
of people than exist at present on a vegetarian dietary, congestion is fast becoming a dehumanizing influence. Human society differs from the often vast aggregations of individuals one finds among 
other animals, wherein the individual is subordinate to the group 
structure, in that society is the radiation of the humanizing predispositions engendered within each  individual. It  is only when 
such conditions* are fulfilled in the individual that society is itself a humanizing force. Constraint, limitation of individual freedom, subordination of the individual to the needs of vast societies are thus 
inherently antihuman. Human love is so powerful a force, that it can no doubt be 
exercised in large social groupings, possibly extending to a planetary scale. But this requires first of all the reality of love and its achievement between individuals, as well as a social structure 
which preserves individual liberty, in the sense of allowing and 
encouraging every individual to develop along humanizing lines. Unfortunately, the larger the social groupings in human history, the greater the interferences in such  liberty. The rise of the first 
civilizations were attended by such dehumanizing devices as slavery, and although slavery has been condemned for over a 
hundred years, human beings have become increasingly subordinate 
to the vast social groups, with the crises of coercion expressed in the totalitarian regimes. Under such conditions, humanization is thwarted. If human 
beings are not thugs and bullies, they become passive and uncaring, 
which is a form of dehumanization. But the effects of overcrowding, 
inevitable with the rise of the gigantic modern metropolis, are more insidious. Even in rats, spared the precarious balance of the human mind, overcrowding results in an tihuman parallels—in killing and 
maiming without reason, in a neglect of the young, in queer sexual 
practices, and in inexplicable bursts of communal madness. In its 
over-plentifulness, human life is becoming dangerously cheap. The 
calculations of over-kill, in the event of a nuclear war, are symptomatic of such cheapening. Quite apart from the increasing pressure on the resources 
offered by nature, the impact of overcrowding on the environment 
has the antihuman consequence of  leading to a disorderly, ugly 
environment. This is evident enough even where order prevails—in architecture, where the pressure of economics and maximal utilization of space has filled the cities with concrete and glass boxes devoid of human meaning. Where the population pressure 
results in a breakdown of order, the results are appalling, in the 
clutter and dirt of modern cities, in the noise and enervating bustle, in the congestions of crowd and traffic, in the pollution of the air, in the loss of sunlight, not. to mention those hideous consequences of urban disorder, the slums and semi-slums that fester around all 
cities, and increasingly within them. As the crowded cities have spread, forever consuming more of 
the countryside, so nature has become increasingly devastated, and 
rendered meaningless. It is one of the most depressing observations to find the degree to which city inhabitants, including the young, come to lose all contact with nature, to the point where they feel lost 
and awkward, if not actually listless and violent, when brought into 
contact with what is precariously le ft of nature. The fact is that 
unless nature is free and uncorrupted, it does lose much of its 
meaning to the human being. For one thing, the sense of an invigorating purity one can experience in unspoilt and beautiful scenes, is ruled out—by as little as a carelessly discarded wrapper! Since the appreciation of purity, as much as beauty and harmony, 
are essential Humanizing attributes, this loss of environmental 
purity results in an impure human being, necessarily more callous, more able to accept the hideousness of the environment in which he finds himself. Anthropologists are agreed about few things, but most of them 
concur that large-scale conflict—what has come to be known as 
war—is a relatively recent occurren ce. It has increased in severity 
and extent, and in its dehumani zation, as population pressure has 
increased. What then is the reason fo r this extraordinary soaring in 
the human population, itself a recent phenomenon? If the human species has existed for hundreds of thousands of years, and a 
human-like primate for millions, this crisis of over-population is all 
the more extraordinary. The hominids of the Palaeolithic roamed over most of the 
world. If it was only a matter of food, then surely they would have stumbled upon conditions in some part of the world where the kind 
of rapid increase we are witnessing would have occurred. All the 
evidence indicates that the hominids,  like the higher primates, have 
never known a population explosion. They have been as a group, restricted breeders. Gorillas a nd chimpanzees maintain stable 
populations; overcrowding only comes from human encroachment into their habitats. It cannot be disease, in the form of the sweeping 
and devastating epidemics known in the crowded and unsanitary 
conditions of the urban past, that kept their numbers down, for the 
surviving bands of gorillas, already seriously menaced by human intrusion, are superbly healthy. One way in which population stability is maintained in such 
primates, is by varying the length of nurture. Nursing mothers are 
not sexually harassed by the males, so that if nurture is prolonged, the occasions for breeding are reduced. The males are not inconvenienced, for although ever-ready to mount a receptive female, they only become sexually aroused on signals of one kind or another from the females, and can spend a life of bachelor 
uninvolvement if no such signals come. More usually, nursing persists long enough after birth to cut 
down the breeding cycles for a particular female so that not more than a few offspring result. With  the hazards of babyhood in the 
wild, this maintains a stable population. If the population increases, 
mothers nurture their young for longer, to such an extent that the 
number of offspring can be considerably reduced. In all primates, including the human, there is in fact a clash between the hormones involved in suckling and nursing, and those of breeding, so that the 
female has no interest in sex during nurture, a device of obvious biological advantage, for if female mammals were more interested 
in sex than in breeding, the line would have become extinct early, 
an interest which little girls with their little dolls still demonstrate, no matter how they behave later. Is the human an exception to this primate breeding control. Could it not be that the stampede of over population is the outcome of a deranged breeding pattern, as abnormal as the patterns of eating 
and sex already mentioned? It is commonly assumed, with the 
support of scientific authority, that the human female has lost the cyclical nature of the oestral cycl e, and thereby the female decision 
regarding the time of coitus. The human female is described as 'open'. This is a cultural falsification, a device to provide the human 
male with the ready access to sexual relief he has come to require, 
for there is definite evidence that  women have a peak desire for 
coitus during the oestral cycle, which implies that it is in such peaks 
that the woman would best accept th e man. In thus complying with 
the other primates, it would follow that the woman would also 
follow the primate device of extending nurture as a means of 
population control. The way in which the natural woman would do this is probably 
through the pituitary gland. As population pressure increases, so the 
social environment becomes less assured, anxiety increases, and child care intensified. It requires no conscious observation, no 
reasoning. Intuitively, the woman senses the threat of population 
pressure to the species. There is some indication that primitive groups, such as those in the Amazon basin, had achieved stability by such means, before the interrupti ons of civilized men. But it is to 
be noted that this control depends on a sufficient degree of human 
sensitivity, both on the part of  the woman, in order to sense 
intuitively the social situation, and on the part of the man to respect her increased preoccupation with child  nurture. A loss of sensitivity, 
and the device breaks down. The situation is complicated by the fact that the woman, unlike 
the other primate females, is largely conditioned by her cortex. If 
she exists in a society wherein th e woman is considered 'open', so 
she acts, and believes herself to be  open to male whim and fancy. This is true also regarding the orgasm, which is an essentially male preoccupation forced upon the gene ral sexual pattern, to the point 
where orgasmically harassed women become bad mothers, failing in 
what is after all the pre-eminent fe male biological duty. The fact of 
the situation is that while na ture has placed the essential 
responsibility of breeding on the female, it is the male in the human situation who has come to decide the sexual pattern, and this pattern 
is essentially geared to male sexual pleasure, freed from the entanglements of love, and even of breeding care, which is as good 
a definition of lust as one can find. Rejecting the existential evid ence, one can suppose that 
humanization occurred in humanly congenial conditions, and that 
sexual restraint on the part of the male was a natural human ability, not the psychological liability it has been claimed to be, in which 
case the size of the human population in terms of the environment 
would be controlled as it is in other primates—by a greater preoccupation with breeding and l ess with sex. Under existential conditions, the reverse seems to apply; the more anxious and 
harassing the times, the more peopl e breed. Evidently, something 
has happened which has inflamed sexual desire, to the point where 
it overrides the biological perimeters of the species, and this 
something may well be traceable to the amines already mentioned as originating in a faulty and inhuman diet, combined with a general humanizing impoverishment characteristic of civilization. Premature sexual interests in children can often be simply traced to wrong feeding, especially in animal foods. Since the Ice Ages, the abnormal amines have been affecting 
the mind, but on the whole, human beings have not become beset by a demented sexual urge. A hard life, and a hard faith, no doubt helped. In fact, in early times, human breeding may have been so restrained, that religion intervened to boost breeding in order to 
meet a changed society, one increasingly determined by a more 
congested existence. The stampede only got under way with the rise of civilization, and its adverse effe ct of sexual love, combined with 
an increase in the pathological st imulation of the lower aspects of 
the mind. The incidence of child neglect and of promiscuity, 
indicate the severity of the dementia. With some 18 per cent of 
births the result of transient unions in the big cities of civilization, and a much higher proportion of unl oved children, the condition is 
an advanced one, threatening human survival. Food has been in league with this situation, for unless the food 
supplies were increased to meet the ever-increasing harvest of 
babies, population control would ha ve been long ago affected by 
starvation and pestilence. So it is that intensive agriculture, the abuse of artificial fertilizers, the mechanization of meat, milk and egg production, the adulteration, refining and preservation of food, 
the intensifying exploitation of the oceans, and the complex 
chemical and poisonous parapherna lia of civilized food technology 
are as guilty as lust, the reverse side of the same counterfeit coin. 12. The Deceits of Lucullus 
 
 
When one considers that all other animals consume food as nature 
presents it to them, and that virtually no food is now eaten in a 
natural condition, one is entitled to  ask how such an extraordinary 
recourse to artificiality could have arisen. It is not always hunger 
that drives people to eat the extraordinary foods like maggots, birds' 
nests, barnacles and tripe, but some curious perversion of taste, and 
the endless, often unnecessary adulterations and interferences with 
foods point to a related assault against the simple and natural, 
symptoms of man's revulsion against the natural world. The artificialities of food, the endless search for the titillation of 
a jaded palate, are also the results of frustration and boredom. Lucullus was a Roman general who never lost a battle, but was eventually betrayed by the politicians at home. In disgust, he retired to gourmandize, inventing sumptuous dishes and gastronomic orgies never before imagined, with an army of cooks instead of centurions. Faced with the frustrations of living some people take to the way of 
Lucullus. The business magnate gorges himself to death, not because he is successful, but because he is humanly frustrated, secretly cheated of meaning and value to life, in the ruthless 
acquisitiveness of a materialistic jungle. As a result, since the Romans, and in fact long before them, there has been a succession 
of able food inventors and artificers. Such enticements to gluttony become self-perpetuating. The 
glutton's preoccupation with food has much the same features as that of the compulsive addict, with ever more varied and outrageous titillations needed, until the ludicrous is reached as in the food 
fantasies of Lucullus. Fire was probably first used for cooking in 
order to overcome the nauseating smell and taste of raw meat and it was used by the early food collector s to soften the hard fibres of 
vegetable foods that could not be eaten raw. For a long, long time, cooking was thus primarily utilitarian. It was only with the use of 
more sophisticated culture that the cook became an acrobat. The softening of vegetable fibres enables vegetables to be 
better digested in a mixed diet. Over-coarse vegetable foods interfere with protein absorption and result in putrefaction, nausea and general gastric disquiet which can  end in an actual dislike of all 
vegetables, commonly observed in big flesh eaters. This explains 
why many people insist that vegetables which can perfectly well be 
eaten raw, be thoroughly cooked. But a price is paid for this emasculation of vegetable food. Not only the common constipation, 
but more serious diseases like diverticulitis result from a prolonged insufficiency of vegetable fibres in the diet. The softening of the food also  enables the normal mechanism 
of satiety to be cheated. A slice or two of wholemeal bread will induce a feeling of satisfaction, while a whole loaf of white bread still leaves a sense of dissatisfaction. The extraordinary ability of the stomach to expand is no doubt a natural provision enabling the primate to gorge when food is abundant; but this is rarely the case in 
nature, so that the stomach is not continuously distended to its fullest, as it is among the civilized. Big eaters have the highest 
incidence of stomach cancer. There are also stimulants in  abnormal foods, such as meat, 
which cause the stomach to over-secrete. Many hours after a meal of meat, peristaltic contractions persist, even when the stomach contents have emptied into the duo denum. It is these contractions 
which account for the common 'hunger pangs', a pathological 
demand for more food due to wrong  feeding, often exacerbated by 
spices added to foods. Unlike a ppetite, this is not pleasant; relief 
only comes, transiently, as more food is taken in, a vicious circle at times leading to a visibly pathological gorging. The real reason why many people prefer cooked to raw food is 
that it is much easier to overeat the cooked. Romans insisted on 
over-cooked foods, for they were easi er to regurgitate. Hot food is 
also easier to abuse of than co ld. When the overworked stomach 
cries for mercy, and seizes up when given cold food, it will be induced to open out with hot food, one more device for fooling 
nature. The insistence on 'piping hot ' dishes is a sure sign that the 
natural gastric functions have been thoroughly sabotaged, the stomach, an over-irritated, beaten, humiliated organ, capable of accepting any abuse. The association of ulceration and cancer with hot, particularly fried food, seems clear. Boiling not only softens vegetable fibres and overcomes the 
reek of raw animal food, but subtly alters proteins, dissolves out 
minerals, and makes the starches and sugars more quickly absorbable, by no means an advantage, for the continuous flooding of the blood with too easily absorb ed sugars is probably the cause of 
an ultimate breakdown of sugar meta bolism, resulting in diabetes, in 
abnormal fat deposition in tissues, in blood vessel degeneration, 
especially when combined with satur ated animal fats. But frying is 
undoubtedly much worse, for heat forms extremely irritating substances, many of which are carcinogenetic. The oil used again and again in restaurant kitchens, in many fish-and-chip shops, is as 
potent a cancer producing brew as one can find in any laboratory. The art of cooking means replacing the natural flavours lost by 
the action of heat, of solution, of dissipation and storage, and today, of intensive agriculture and the industrialization of food production. A battery of flavours, spices, condi ments is always ready to hand in 
every kitchen. But it is salt which is the pivot of gastronomy, so 
much so, that everyone accepts that salt is a natural and necessary 
addition to food. Since the basal needs of salt arc no more than two or three grains, and most people add twenty to thirty times this amount to their daily foods, one is evidently dealing with a dietary perversion. Salt craving in man and in animals is probably the craving for minerals, due to a deficiency in the food, or disease, 
when the body can waste phenomenal amounts of minerals. In 
nature, animals drawn to the rare  saltlicks are invariably diseased. Normal animals will not touch salt,  although salt hunger is common 
in animals associated with man, no doubt due to mineral-defective food. In the human diet, mineral deficiency is most probably due to 
losses in cooking. Raw foods often have a discernible mineral tang, 
which is rapidly lost in cooking. Th ere is a further reason in the fact 
that if salt is added to the food, the body is so disturbed as to become very wasteful of it, often overspilling large amounts of salt 
in the urine and sweat. Animal foods are rich in salt, so that on a mixed diet, even without added salt, there is a mineral disturbance, 
leading to salt craving. It is at last becoming realized that the 
common, virtually universal abuse of salt is incriminated in a long list of diseases, more particularly involving the heart, the kidneys, changes in the lens of the eye, blood pressure and oedema. Cooking has not only facilitated the eating of animal foods, but 
has enabled the eating of many food articles which could not be 
eaten in a raw condition, a fact which should make any such food 
suspect in the first place, however palatable it may become after cooking and preparation. Take the case of the potato. Available in 
Europe from the sixteenth century, it played a leading part in the 
population increases. Not only is it unpleasant in the raw, but it 
contains a poisonous alkaloid, wh ich is enormously increased 
during the formation of the 'eyes' in storage. This alkaloid, solanin, reduces the oxygenerating capacity of the blood, blocks enzyme systems, and poisons the nerves. Recently it was discovered with considerable alarm, that foetuses could be permanently damaged if 
pregnant mothers ate spoiled or germinating potatoes. Possibly all 
members of the solatium group should  be considered suspect, for all 
have alkaloids, some immediately fatal, such as deadly nightshade. That the Aztecs ate large quantities of solanum vegetables is hardly 
a recommendation. In the case of spinach or rhubarb, cooking shows how 
dangerous foods can be made so pa latable as to be eaten to excess. Man is not ideally adapted to most  mature green leaves, but rather 
to tender shoots, and in moderation, for shoots are not over-abundant in nature. Some shoots, ho wever, and many mature leaves, 
have large amounts of oxalic acid, which the liver cannot efficiently 
metabolise. When eaten, the aci d base balance of the body is 
threatened, calcium mobilized and wasted. In the raw state, such 
foods are unpleasantly acid, and no mo re than a bite would be taken. Cooked, dressed with butter and bechamel, spinach becomes delectable and rhubarb delicious, good examples of the dangers of 
gastronomy. Children, however, are often wiser, for in spite of such 
subterfuge, they appear to have an innate aversion to such foods. Many people would be prepared to defend the art of cooking 
for the pleasure that it brings to  a usually boring and frustrated 
existence. Unfortunately, these pl easures are transitory. After many 
a good meal, the bodily disquiet is all too apparent, in the flushed 
face and the beating heart. Only a few lucky people get away with it 
for any time. Usually, the price is paid depressingly early, when one should still be in the prime of life, at fifty, sixty, young still for a creature evidently designed for a very long existence. The trouble is that most people cannot conceive that simple, natural foods can afford pleasure. Only an overall reform of life attitudes, a revival of 
the meaning of purity, of beauty, can enable the sensing of the 
arcadean joys to be had in natural eating. Natural eating does not mean crude, unattractive, unimaginative 
eating. On the contrary, the natural appeals of natural food can be enormously extended, if not by cooking, by presentation and 
preparation. The raw components need not be limited and dull, and 
with a minimum amount of cooking, a thoroughly satisfactory and humanly enhancing diet presents itself. The art of it remains, and has the beauty and purity which all art should bestow upon the 
human. By comparison, the art devices of gastronomy are no different from the false beauty of lipstick and pancake makeup. 13. The Costs of Confusion 
 
 
Living in an age when the human being is looked upon as an 
accidental production of a Universe without meaning, subject to a 
nature prone to catastrophe, man is  seen as no more than a cunning, 
randy naked ape. It would seem re asonable that people should grab 
for the immediate pleasures and sa tisfactions that existence can 
provide, without asking too many questions, particularly those 
involving right or wrong, good or bad. Philosophers themselves, 
who in the past have preoccupied themselves with the ideal, have 
come to the conclusion that only existence counts, that ideals are 
one more manifestation of illusion. For those who believe that ma n is naturally an idealizing 
creature, however opportunistic and existentialistic he may appear, 
the modern situation can only be interpreted as the crisis of blindness and atrophy brought about by long ages of confusion, originally initiated by nature's own hostilities in the trials of the Ice 
Ages, but perpetuated ever since by an inability to feel and think 
clearly again. After many thousands of years of endeavouring to find the lost wisdom of which every one feels his due, the modern age has come to accept the impossib ility of wisdom. It is a tragic 
situation, all the more tragic in that science has come to confirm the 
apparent futility of man. Although most people do not like the effort involved in feeling 
and thinking deeply about such problems, and prefer to take life as it comes, clearly the way out of the present confusions, with their 
roots in the most distant past, can only be found by some very deep and passionate thinking indeed. In facing the problem examined in 
this book—the question of right eating—a practical resolution it not 
enough. To have any effect, it must be backed by belief that man has meaning, that essence is what primarily matters, for existence 
can only have meaning when it complies with essence, with the rules set by nature for human existence, the opposite of the usual 
opportunism. The problem is a circuitous one; living existentially, one comes 
to believe that only existence matters. In the case of food and feeding, it is simply not felt po ssible that there can be any ideal 
pattern; like all things, food is an occasion for the natural 
opportunist scramble. It is generally believed that the gory, 
gluttonous, promiscuous Primal Horde is only held down by social 
censure, by the primitive law of an eye for an eye, and today, law and censure in themselves are being dismantled in a rising, officially backed opportunism. We have all become petty criminals, 
and no longer much troubled by the fact. This turn of events is not only disastrous in its inhuman 
consequences, but is irrational, for the most elementary lesson that biology should have to teach is th at nature not only favours the fit 
and eliminates the unfit, but rewards only the fit, mercilessly punishing the unfit. This does not depend on any ulterior meaning or morality in the working of nature. It is a purely practical, 
indispensable provision in the functioning of things. If reward and punishment are not a built-in provision, as fundamental as the 
particular ways in which atoms combine with one another to form 
the myriad substances of nature and of living things, the whirling 
clouds of hydrogen gas, which appeared at the beginning of the universe some fifteen billion years ago, would still be whirling around, having accomplished nothing. Modern existentialism has been the work of thinkers with no 
scientific training. Scientists, biol ogists in particular, could easily 
dismantle their systems; their guilt should be that so few of them have had the courage to speak out against the falsities of so many of the widely advertised and accepted conclusions of the age. Accepting that nature works on the principles of rewards and 
punishments, it should be evident that the modern opportunist, 
existentialistic attitudes cannot possi bly bring genuine gratification. If there are apparent pleasures in the purely random ways in which people live, then they can but amount to illusions, certain to carry a backwash of retribution. The impartial examination of any aspect of 
modern living shows this to be true, whether it be politics or sex, 
medicine or feeding. The apparent rewards of power invariably bring with them the attendants of insensitivity, and the joys of so 
called freedom in sex disappointments and painfulness. The trouble is that so hollow has life become, that people will not face the emptiness of the only rewards to livi ng which they believe exist, the 
pleasures of the palate, of the bed, of money, of material gadgetry 
and power, of the bogus communalism of urban living, of the mechanically expressed restlessness of the disturbed modern soul. So it is that most people would probably contend that the 
satisfactions of the ordinary life, admitting that they involve many 
departures from normality, are worth the while, the price worth 
paying, if indeed there is a price at all. Almost everyone believes that it is not all that important what one eats, as long as one has variety and amount enough. There has to be something very wrong with a meal for one to be punished with a stomach ache. Uncomplainingly, the body accepts the legions of daily 
transgressions of a lesser kind without protest. When catastrophe 
eventually occurs—and many a ppear to escape altogether—in a 
burst blood vessel, in a seizing arthritic joint, the long abuse of natural law seems quite inappare nt. Bad luck, accident, nature's 
inherent imperfections seem the more likely causes. But if the majority are the victims of such confusion, it seems 
hardly believable that science, and medicine in particular, do not more frequently protest against the common waywardness. Over the past two or three decades, the ev idence has been mounting, enough 
to leave no doubt that man's misfortunes are largely self-inflicted, by carelessness, by greed, by stupidity, and that the price paid in 
suffering is astronomical. Science clearly serves the particular 
culture in which it exists; it is no independent impartial overseer. The common assumption that disease is 'natural' and naturally 
inevitable, the consequences of a wayward and imperfect nature, to 
be remedied only by human interference, is at the heart of much of 
the confusion. One must admit that nature is not perfect, but nature 
does quite often achieve perfection, even if to appreciate the refinements of this perfection, one has to go beyond the realm of appearances, as science has discovered. As insisted upon in the 
course of this book, humanization must have occurred initially under ideal conditions, even if things went wrong subsequently. Health and happiness should therefore be natural possibilities, 
provided the original humanizing conditions can be restored. For transgressions which have recurrently occurred in the 
history of life, the cataclysms of climate and food change, of earth movements, of floodings and dessi cations, living things have an 
inexhaustible reservoir of experience to call upon. Given time, 
readaptation to change follows, a nd the animal survives. But if the 
transgression is unnatural, as in the case of laboratory or industrial products, there is not only a complete absence of past experience to be drawn upon, but no symptom of distress following the ingestion of such substances, for symptoms  to some offending agent take 
millions of years to evolve. So it is that the causes of the most 
terrible, life-destroying diseases remain ignored, and syptomless, calling for no readjustments, until the body is literally overwhelmed, as is the case in many cancers. Today, every contact with the environment is contaminated 
with such unnatural substances. A re cent attempt to draw up a list of 
such substances ran into tens of thousands. Every year, hundreds are 
being added. The official attitude  to such a dangerous situation—
that a substance cannot be conde mned until it is proved harmful—
shows a complete disdain of biological principles. Those relying on this test are mostly guilty men, often aware of the harm ultimately 
likely, but more concerned with  expediency than with human 
wholeness. It is often contended that the situation cannot be as bad as the 
pessimists claim, for has not the human life span been extensively 
increased, and are not many, once crippling diseases conquered? Medical and scientific journalists, often not scientists themselves, 
are in the habit of hinting that such achievements are thanks to science's conquest over nature's natural infirmities, implying that the 'natural' life-span has been extended,  that a naturally sick nature has 
been corrected. This is biological nonsense. Every species of animal 
has a genetically set life-span, a setti ng closely related to its rate of 
growth. If this correlation is applied to man, the most slowly 
developing of all creatures, then the human life-span should be well over a hundred years. All that science has in fact achieved is the removal of unsanitary conditions and the control of diseases inherent in such conditions. The unhealthiness of Ice Age 
Palaeolithic humans can be seen in the pathological torturings of 
their bones, but the worst ravag es of unhealthiness probably only 
came with the urbanization of livi ng, in the earliest civilizations. There are hints that when the Ice Ages ended, and before the rise of 
the first civilizations, human beings lived long, whole lives, a length which has not been fully recovered. There are still isolated 
peasantries in which many indivi duals live well over the century. Quite recently, as the functional collapse intensifies in soaringly degenerative diseases, the cancers and heart diseases in particular, there has been a dip in the life- span. Far from confidence in the 
apparent successes of science and medicine, there should be alarm, 
for while the diseases that have b een corrected, due to pathogenic 
organisms, only affect individuals , the degenerative diseases entail a 
definite genetic impoverishment. Here again, one is faced with a barrage of propaganda, 
optimistic and pontifical, that some  success has been achieved, that 
cancers can be cured. But for one case surviving a number of years 
after operation and treatment, dozens die, for all the vast agitations 
of worldwide research. Some cancers undoubtedly begin quite locally, as in the case of radiation damage, and if removed in time, survival is assured. But in most cases, the localized appearance of a 
cancer is only a stage in what is a general underlying pathology, involving the entire body, so evident in the leukaemias. Medicine 
has yet to admit that most diseases of such a nature are not 
localized, but entail a failure of the entire organism, an admission which would entail a revolution in medical philosophy, away from its present mechanical concepts, to more holistic ones. There are at the moment indications that something in this direction is 
happening, in the admission that exercise and diet are the best ways 
of preventing heart attacks, that years of over-eating are likely to 
end in diabetes, and that possibly the best if not the only way of combating many kinds of cancer is through the body's own abilities to react. But evidently, before ther e can be a real change of heart, 
there has to be a fundamental change  in ideology, in the world-view 
of science, in its attitudes to man and nature, and judging the slowness of progress in this dir ection, one can be excused for 
doubting that there is sufficient survival time. 14. Food Fit for Humans 
 
 
Basing oneself on the humanizing aesthetic criteria, and making use 
of the scientific evidence that co mplies with them, one can define 
the ideal human diet as one beautiful and refreshing, consisting of 
fruits in abundance, of seeds a nd nuts, of cereals and tender shoots 
and leaves, of flowers, eaten in the raw. Unfortunately, given the 
present-day interferences in natural fo ods, it is unlikely that such an 
ideal dietary is possible, for almost all foods available today, are 
produced from unnatural, variously disturbed soils. Sadly therefore, 
no longer is a purely simple wisdom adequate. This is where a 
science, serving the human condition rather than undermining it, 
can help. Treating the soil as nothing but a physical medium is the result 
of a materialistic, mechanical attitude to life and nature generally. While at first this seemed justified by the enormously increased yields which resulted from chemical fertilizers, it has become ever 
more apparent that the soil is a living medium, seriously 
undermined by such crude stimuli, and that foods grown on such disturbed soils lack substan ces indispensable to animals. Since the work of McCarrison in India over half a century ago, 
it has been known that organically defective soils produce crops with a lowered vitamin B content. One of these vitamins in 
particular, Vitamin B
12, is more or less completely absent in such 
crops. Vitamin B 12 is an exceptional and extraordinary substance, 
still something of a mystery although its chemical nature is fully known.
Food_Fit_For_Humans_by_Frank_Wilson.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        The natural tendency for love  to spread out into non-sexual 
directions gives an indication of how sexual love itself should 
evolve among lovers, in a form the most congenial and useful to society. The pristine rapture of sexual love cannot last, and is not designed to do so, but rather to be progressively replaced by compassion, in the teaming of procreation, with interests shared, 
and, with advancing years, in a heightening social and spiritual 
involvement. Living, loving and ageing in such an atmosphere of evolving love, the human being is assured of a meaningful participation in the function and structure of family and society. And most other cultures have believed that human society symbolically reflects the underlying structure of Creation. Such a definition of sexual love is so contradicted by the usual 
expression of sex in industrial societies, that it must appear as unreal and Utopian. Yet there is sufficient evidence that sexual love, rather than just sex, is the normal human pattern among simpler peoples, and among those few fortunate primiti es still surviving in the more 
benevolent habitats. Having a top biological priority in humanization, one can 
understand why the joys that attend the achievement of sexual love are the highest that can come to  the human being, and why the 
failure to achieve love is accompanied by the most terrible misery and frustration, anger and hatred. Contrary to what the Freudians 
have claimed, guilt is a biologica lly implanted reprimand for sexual 
patterns which fail to comply with the needs of humanization. Since the precarious wholeness of the mind depends on the unifying forces of love, beauty and harmony, the failure to find love is punished by the most satanic of afflictions—an unwhole and 
disturbed mind. The failure to achieve sexual love, more evident today than 
ever before, is to be seen in the breakup of the family, in selfish sexual opportunisms in the common uncaring for the young, and, as 
a result of this dehumanization of sexuality, in a soaring juvenile destructiveness and anger, in a general feeling of having been 
cheated of life's promise. Neglected, unloved, without the guidance 
which only genuine loving is entitled to provide, it is not surprising that the young have rebelled against the prurient standards set by callous and insensitive adults. The generation gap is the inevitable 
result of an older generation felt to  be corrupt and lewd, the makers 
of a civilization which has become inhuman in its materialistic and 
opportunist preoccupations. While it is true that many young subscribe in their own ways 
still to this civilization—imitation is after all the Simian way of learning—there are also those who have managed to recover something of the lost innocence, even  if drugs have played their part 
in this recovery. So demented is the sexual demand, so blind the preoccupation 
with orgasmic relief, that the c onclusion one is dealing with a 
pathological process appears irresi stible. And there can be no doubt 
that the increase of social violen ce has gone hand in hand with an 
increase in this ferocious sexua l pursuit, with an increase in 
uncaring and promiscuity. The association of sex with violence and human depravity is patent in ente rtainment, in pornography, as it is 
in group outlets from gang behaviour to revolution and warfare. For the past century, psychologists and sociologists have loudly 
proclaimed that guilt and repression are responsible for the 
frustrations and angers of the age. Sexual freedom has thus become 
the panacea for the ravaged modern soul. Many people have come to believe that the pursuit of the orgasm is a virtual duty, a recipe for healthfulness, in spite of the f act that the ability to contain the 
physical urge of sex, and find pleasu re in so doing, must have been 
a necessity from the first steps in human evolution, without which 
an effective integration of the family and social group would have been quite impossible. That frustration, the ally of anger and hatred, are the 
consequences of lust, of sexualit y pursued without love, can be 
observed in the backwash of dissatis faction that invariably follows 
the purely physical preoccupations of sexuality. This is particularly 
marked in the young; outburst s of violence, destructiveness, 
aggressiveness often follow periods  of extreme licence among the 
youth gangs of large cities. One must therefore conclude that a socially disturbed mind is especially prone to any other disturbing 
influences that may impinge upon it, such as the abnormal mind-
affecting amines in an abnormal diet. The manner in which the higher aspects of the mind become 
sabotaged by the lower, is as yet little understood. Arthur Koestler, contemplating the overwhelming fa ilure of human beings to be 
human, and the periodical insanity of human history, concludes that 
something must have gone wrong in the evolution of the brain. Others have speculated that viruses as yet undetected have infected parts of the brain controlling the sexual motivations. But there is a less far searching explanation in the virtually universal prevalence of the abnormal mind-affecting amines, which does not require such 
a bungling on the part of nature in the making of its highest work, 
the brain. The 'lower emotions' such as fear, aggressiveness, and the blind 
copulatory drives, are known to originate in the limbic system, a region a few centimetres thick which encapsulates the dilated end of 
the brain stem. The 'higher emotions' such as the humanizing 
sensibilities arise in a most comp licated interplay between the 
cortex and the brain stem. It would seem that the role of the cortex is to transmute an ancient ma mmalian capacity for effective 
emotional experiences; some interchange between the limbic system and the most highly evolved humanizing aspects is accordingly 
natural and normal. But to conclude, as does P. D. Maclean, that 
this points to an evolutionary failure to wall off the primitive from the human, which would account for an ingrained paranoid streak, seems unjustified. The problem is functional,—the wrong 'colour' of 
the affective processes due to abnormal amine stimulation. The 
same faulty amines responsible for an overall disturbance of the 
mind and an arousal of its more primitive aspects, could account for the near demonic sexual drives of most humans, inducing a pattern of sexuality the very opposite of th at intended by nature as. the main 
agent in humanization. This suggestion, that wrong foods can account for the 
pathology of sex, would find confirmation in the ancient belief that foods had aphrodisiac properties, an aphrodisiac being defined as a substance able to stimulate and titillate the lower sex emotions. Aphrodisiac foods are indeed those which have the highest amount of the extractives giving rise to the purines and amines. 9. Need or Greed 
 
 
Besides the protein excesses involved in a so called'mixed' dietary, 
the Industrial Revolution, entailing profound changes in the world 
production of food and in food habits, has led to an excessive eating 
of calorie foods, while some of the more minute requirements of the 
mind and body have gone in short supply, resulting in the 
malnutrition of abundance. This disturbing greed for the grosser 
items of foods, proteins and calories, has been achieved at the 
expense of the poorer, primary producers, making the greed of the 
so called best-fed nations a planetary affront. Gluttony is never possible in nature, for food is never so 
plentiful as to permit a continual overeating. Occasional orgies may 
occur, the result of a lucky find, bu t they are inevitably interspersed 
by longer periods of scarcity. The only overfed animals are the pets of overfed people. The bodies of all animals are better adapted to scarcity than to abundance, which is what one would expect, given 
the geological and climatic restlessness of the earth. As food 
supplies become more scarce, reserves are mobilized, the body becomes more sparse, more active, and clutter vanishes. One finds people in the poorer parts of the world existing in apparent health, skinny but very active and smiling, on much less than the authorities consider should bring about starvation. While living on such low 
levels is to be deplored, it does show that the human body is 
remarkably well adapted to advers ity, in fact thrives on it. Some 
degree of it, at least occasionally, may be indispensable for health, for the body seems to have beco me adapted to profit from such 
periods in order to get rid of ol d stock, of accumulated wastes, the 
means also of resharpening the senses and the efficiency of 
functioning, taking in the sl ack and repairing damage. The sense of well-being, of elation and purification which 
follows a period of abstinence from food shows that this is natural, biologically beneficial. Such benefits may not be immediately 
apparent in the chronically overfed or the diseased, for in them the 
respite from abuse is taken advantage of by the body for a massive, and often disturbing broom sweeping. But even then, persistence is rewarded by a remarkable quickenin g of all the faculties, by a sense 
of reawakening and rejuvenation and a simple joyfulness which 
most people have not known since childhood. Scents and colours, 
feelings and tastes long lost are magically revived, and simple 
pleasures, which seemed boring to the surfeited mind and body, return with a pristine intensity. The humanizing sensitivities are particularly revived, bringing a bout an awareness of harmony and 
beauty in things and creatures previously neglected. It is remarkable to observe how the reactivity of the body as a 
whole is heightened. Long established chronic ailments may disappear overnight, and blights that have haunted and humiliated for years, itches and bodily odours, vanish as with a magician's wand. This is not surprising, for contrary to the usual assumption that even a temporary abstinence is dangerous, the body is designed 
for it and thoroughly enjoys it. The common supposition that even a skipped meal is a calamity boosts the common gluttony. It is not 
found among the simpler peasantries. Hard work and thrift ensure 
lithe bodies and alert minds into old age. There are still such examples surviving, peasants setting out for a long hard day's work 
with no more than a few dried figs or dates, a chunk of coarse bread dipped in olive oil, a garlic or two and an occasional piece of cheese. The Chinese peasants will perform feats of endurance and 
labour on what seems to the overfed European diminutive bowls of 
rice with scatterings of beans. The scramble for food originated with the rise of the cities, for 
while the peasants could always eke some sustenance from their 
land in the worst of times, the cities often starved, as a consequence 
of plunder, famine, and pestile nce. When good times came, city 
people stuffed themselves, so that overeating became the mark of prosperity and privilege. As privileged classes arose, ruling the cities and taking over the 
land, with power over supplies, glu ttony became their habit, while 
the masses often knew hunger. The situation grew worse with the 
rise in power of the city states in  the Middle Ages, and very much 
worse with the Industrial Revolution. Its initial impact brought such disorder that starvation often overtook the cities. As a result of this background of general scarcity, the demand 
for food, and ever more food, was the pivot of all the movements of 
emancipation which began actively in  the seventeenth century. This 
demand was eventually met by the agricultural revolution, the use 
of chemical fertilizers, the importation of foreign foods in exchange for industrial products and the refining of cereals, which enabled prolonged storage and easy trans portation. Food production was 
thus geared to quantity rather than quality. A century ago, every reasonable person would have praised the 
measures taken by the authorities and the industrialists, and blessed the scientists who were increasingly responsible for processed natural foodstuffs, increasing their size and yield, introducing preservation, colouring, conditioners and a soaring list of chemicals. But in a rising spiral of disaster, the arrogant interferences with 
nature have become apparent in the recent decades, in a planetary ecological collapse. Excessive applications of chemical fertilizers, with insufficient 
or absent organic contributions, have led to a breakdown of some of 
the world's most fertile soils, calling for ever higher applications in 
a desperate attempt to keep up the yield, and ending in disasters like the American Dust Bowl. More recently it has been found that excess nitrate fertilizers are accumulated in food plants, and, when eaten, are converted to the highly cancerous nitrosamides. The overspill of nitrates into rivers a nd lakes, encouraging the prolific 
growth of toxic blue-green algae,  has sterilized many waters with 
once abundant fish life. Mineral nitrates are manufactured into proteins by plants, the 
source of all animal protein. Too much nitrate abnormally stimulates plant growth, just as too much protein abnormally 
stimulates the growth-rate and size of animals. Superficially, this 
increase in growth and body size seems nothing but good, although 
the loss of taste of the overgrown  vegetables, and the diseases which have increased as human stature has increased in the last decades in 
the most prosperous countries, should have warned that something was wrong. In the stampede for quantity, a basic biological principle has 
been forgotten, namely, that any pl ant or animal has a specific size 
and weight, written down in its gene tic constitution, the result of a 
long evolution. Only within this range of size is optimal efficiency or health possible. Insufficiency or excess are bound to levy a physiological price. In the course of evolution, insufficiency has 
occurred frequently enough for animals to become equipped with 
guidelines of reaction, in restlessness and hunger—plants, alas, cannot move. But excess has been so rare, that neither plants nor animals have any defences against it. Fed to excess, they get bigger 
and bigger, the physiological tax increasing proportionately. As the 
yield and the size of plants have been artificially stimulated, so the 
plant disease and the plant parasites have increased, calling for an ever increasing array of the most poisonous chemicals in an attempt to control the scourge. In animals and men, the excessive stimulation of growth has also been attended by an increasing 
recourse to drugs of one kind or another. Just as over-fed rats get bigger and suffer increasingly from 
heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, so do humans. Athletes appear particularly prone to certain diseases, and their life-span is less than average, not b ecause of the physical strain they 
subject themselves to—the body thrives on that—but because of 
their thoroughly abnormal and excessive feeding. It is undeniable that chronic malnutrition since the Dark Ages 
in Europe, led to a stunting of the population. The over-fed 
privileged classes were probably oversized, a factor no doubt in their often brutal domination of the masses. While it is difficult to 
define the specific range of the human species—racial difference are 
important—it is in all likelihood significantly less than the size attained by the so called 'best fed'  nations, which has increased for a 
century as the quantity of animal foods increased in the diet. Plant breeding has been size and calorie conscious. Foods new 
to the West, high in calories like the potato, and sugar, joined in the 
rush for quantity, much helped by a cheapening of flour by refining, 
with the result that, by the clo se of the nineteenth century, the 
masses in the industrial countries not only ate to their full, but had become gluttons, overeating daily. The evil of the new abundance in calorie foods lies in the 
excessive provision of calories without a sufficiency of the other 
essentials, the vitamins and minerals, many of them needed for the 
efficient use of the calories. So it is that foods like white flour and sugar, and indeed potato and other preponderantly starchy foods, can only be properly metabolized by tapping into the body's reserves of certain vitamins and minerals. When these reserves run 
low, zeal and efficiency fall, and ultimately, disease results. With the new abundance, in a few decades, diseases which had 
formerly largely attacked the privileged, became the common affliction of the masses—diseases of the blood vessels, of the heart, strokes, kidney diseases, and the increasing list of diseases 
associated with over-weight. While this abundance gives to youth a 
greater appearance of health in increased stature, maturity and old age are increasingly associated w ith the functional, degenerating diseases, of which cancer and heart disease now claims the largest 
number of victims. But the young are also becoming affected by such disease. Although hygiene overcame premature death due to infections, 
and so increased the life-span from the beginning of the nineteenth 
century, the virus diseases have in creased steadily. The virus barely 
deserves the designation of being alive: it is no more than a minute cluster of protein molecules, ve ry closely related to the DNA and 
RNA proteins manufactured by the genes in the cells of all plants 
and animals. There is increasi ng evidence that viruses can arise 
within the body, owing to faulty manufacture of RNA by the genes. Once manufactured, they continue replicating their kind by forcing the genes of other cells to manufacture the mistake that brought them into being, so that viruses assume an apparent independence. The demarcation between unnatura l virus and natural gene is 
becoming all the more blurred, as the protein processes of the cell are unravelled. It may well turn out that viruses are the result of faulty protein metabolism, which could mean faulty protein feeding. It is certainly striking that as the amount of high protein animal 
foods has increased in the diet of the prosperous communities, so 
have the virus diseases. Some cancers are now suspected of being virus induced. Although the eye is easily deceived by size, assuming that large 
size is the right size, many people are now sensing the deception. This illusion is a part of the quantity bias of quantity-geared, 
materialistic industrial civilizati on. Once sensitivity is restored, 
there is an inherent aversion to the oversized, just as the oversized 
flowers produced by horticulturists are felt by the more sensitive to be vulgar and monstrous. There is a 'feel' about the large fruits and vegetables which is wrong. Perhaps those closer to the soil have 
retained something of this sensitivity, for the more canny farmers do 
not use chemicals or insecticides on the crops they will consume themselves. More people are realizing that the risk of a maggot is preferable to an invisible puff of arsenic. Until the full momentum of the industrial revolution was felt in 
the furthest lands, the varieties of human dietary were infinite. Some 
were no doubt as deviant as the modern diet, but many others were 
more humanly compatible. In many parts of the world, especially in the more congenial and benevolen t environments, human beings 
abandoned the ways acquired in the Ice Ages for patterns of life closer to the human norm, in soil-respecting farming communities 
and in peaceful relationship with their neighbours. This was largely 
the case in India before the popul ation stampede and nutritional 
failures of modern times, in the Polynesian islands, among the native tribes of South America. Possibly these more gentle and humane peoples escaped the worst onslaught of the Ice Ages; the 
full anger against nature seems to be  particular to the more Northern 
peoples, in Europe as in the Far East, and it is these peoples, 
particularly the Europeans, who are responsible for what has become an unwhole, and a denaturing planetary civilization. It is this planetary influence wh ich is so distressing, for the few 
remaining instances of a more humanizing situation are being 
rapidly assaulted. Soon, there will be no evidence left of a once 
happier and fairer condition. The de leterious influence of the West 
on the more benign peoples of the earth, in the guise of colonialism, of warfare, of alcoholism, of comme rcial exploitation, of disease, is 
well known. What is as yet not realized, is that the gluttony of the West, which may well have fed its  restlessness and anger, and so 
prompted its planetary dominance, h as been largely paid for by the 
misappropriation of planetary resources and the further impoverishment of the poorer peoples of the earth. 10. The Impoverishmen ts of Prosperity 
 
 
The Industrial Revolution was prec eded, and has been accompanied, 
by a frantic commercial adventuring, which has brought the 
European with his trading practi ces all over the world. The essential 
feature of European trading is the exclusive priority it places on 
profits. Profitability has conditione d, and still conditions, practice, 
often at the detriment of the less easily definable human values. The 
introduction of rice refining in India is an example. Previously, the 
removal of the husk, the sifting away of the chaff, left much of the 
germ behind, the ritualized preoccupation of women, a labour of 
love and gratitude. Mildew, insects and rats no doubt took a 
considerable toll of the rice stores, but this was taken as one of the 
inevitables of existence; the rats also had a right to live. The 
European influence brought in qu ite another mentality, and a new 
class of European and Indian merc hants, who set about correcting 
these wastes, by proper storage follo wing the refining of the rice. In 
an age when the merits of hygiene were being widely promoted, 
white rice could be put over as a superior, cleaner product; with the 
losses due to spoilage overcome, the refined rice could be sold more 
cheaply while still leaving large profits to the merchants. There was at first much resist ance against these changes, which 
the Indian felt was a dismantling of a ritualized act of immense 
importance, but cheapness, and the withdrawal of whole rice by the 
merchants, forced the habit upon the Indian masses, aided perhaps 
by the fact that the European, because of his'mixed diet', found the fibreless white rice more congenial to his taste. But the consequences were soon calamitous. Deficiencies of the B vitamins 
had been virtually unknown in India before. Now they became 
rampant, affecting whole communities, resulting in an apathy which in return affected the labour ava ilable to the colonial powers. An 
attempt was made, as soon as it w as realized that the essential 
vitamins were contained in the e ndosperm and germ, to remedy this 
state of affairs by parboiling the rice before it was refined. Thereby 
some of the B vitamins penetrated the white grain. This not only added to the cost of the eventual product, but left behind an unpleasant soggy taste and smell. When the British Government attempted to make the eating of parboiled rice compulsory, there were riots. The effect of rice refining in India, as elsewhere, has been 
utterly disastrous, leading to a chronic malnutrition that has debased the enterprise and the viability of the people. It is unfortunately true that a vegetarian is all the more damaged by eating refined cereals than a mixed eater, for the latter obtains considerable amounts of the 
B vitamins from the animal ingredient in his diet, whereas the 
vegetarian depends very largely on the B vitamins in cereals. Sugar is another example of an impoverishment in the name of 
technical progress. By itself, sugar should not be considered a food. Although the natural fuel of all anim al life, it is offered in nature with other essentials—particularly Vitamin C in the case of fruits—
and is intended to be part of a whole dietary which supplies the essentials needed by the body for the proper metabolism of sugar, 
chiefly the B vitamins and certain minerals. Taken by itself, sugar is 
an anti-food. In combination with other refined foods, deprived of 
the B vitamins and minerals, it becomes a pernicious and evil 
ingredient in the diet, especially in one already inadequate and impoverished, the case in many parts of the world today. It is depressing to contemplate how a delightful inducement, 
the primate love of sweetness, which is the natural demand for 
fruits, should have become so deceived, with deleterious consequences only now becoming better understood. Besides the well established responsibility for dental caries, sugar has recently been incriminated in a particular  form of listlessness in children, 
often with fit-like attacks and destructive behaviour, seriously 
affecting the ability of such children to learn and to behave in a socially constructive manner. Sugar has been also invoked in heart 
attacks, in diseases of the skin and eye, in diabetes and other metabolic disturbances, as well as being the main contributor to the 
diseases of overweight. Although other questionable crops, such as the vine, are grown 
on lands often inappropriate to the production of primary foods, 
beet sugar has become an established rotational crop on some of the best lands in Europe. Easy to gr ow and profitable, the acreage under 
beet has had to be limited, but it is a perversion of land use to grow 
sugar beet at all. Its place could be better taken by other rotational 
crops which could be used as a primar y food. As for cane sugar, it is 
true that it is the most efficient means of fixing solar energy—were it not for the present clamour for sugar, converted into alcohol it could rival petrol at present prices—but human food is much more 
than calories. With the increasing world pressure on the primary 
foods, there is no doubt that the cane producing lands would do better to grow primary foods ra ther than sugar—less cars and 
gadgets, and less foreign exchange, but better health, and a happier 
people. But it is the use of lands, capable of growing primary human 
foods like cereals, for meat production, that constitutes the greatest 
economic folly. It requires some tw elve to fifteen times more land 
to produce a pound of meat than a pound of cereal, which means that some two to three thousand million more people could be fed if the world became vegetarian. It is not suggested that the world 
population should so increase. Rather, the aim is to emphasize how 
wasteful it has become to use land for the production of animal food, a wastefulness which the planet can no longer tolerate. Since the power of demand is still largely in the hands of the 
industrial communities, and their clamour for meat, far from being satiated, is for ever increasing,  and since much of the animal 
feeding stuffs is produced in the po orer parts of the world, it means 
that the nutrition of the poorer two thirds of the planet is being increasingly sacrificed so that the gluttony of the more prosperous communities can be met. One can doubt that such a situation will be tolerated for much longer, for more  than oil, the West has been 
meeting its protein surfeits at the expense of a planetary majority. The situation is already threatening. The shortage of animal 
food is boosting prices, a main factor in the inflationary costs of feeding. Those countries formerly exporting animal foods are now 
consuming it themselves. And there is no unexploited land left on the planet. If the industrial communities do succeed in even 
maintaining their present levels of consumption of animal foods, it 
can only be at the cost of a deteriorating world situation, leading inexorably to worldwide starvation. And starving people are desperate people. With the means of making atomic weapons now well within the capacity of the poorer, increasingly more poorly fed peoples of the world, it is not impossible that the planetary 
holocaust will be the result of greed. Wisdom would conclude that a worldwide adoption of a 
vegetarian dietary is the proper means of planetary justice and 
survival. Wisdom would also prepar e for this inevitable change in 
good time, so that it came about in good order, without the 
widespread disaster which such momentous change will exact if it 
comes about in violence and chaos. Unfortunately, it is not only the greed of the presently prosperous countries that is involved. Many of the poorer peoples have come to imitate the dietary habits of the West, as they have attempted to catch up with its industrial 
advantages. Former peasantries, only eating animal foods on rare 
festive occasions, now insist on a daily intake, as the mark of emancipation. And many of the poorer peoples are, by culture and tradition, the opposite of vegetarian. The prospects are undoubtedly grim. Success is only likely to 
be achieved if the overall bad habits of civilization, as well as the 
mounting pressure of population, can become corrected. In all 
probability, all these problems are interconnected. Wrong eating must in some way at present unrealized, play its part in the population stampedes of recent times, just as this stampede has its reverse influence on world food resources. The challenge of a world 
food reform calls for a better understanding of the forces at work 
behind the extraordinary rise in the human population of this planet. II. The Unloving Crowd 
 
 
Although the earth could support a considerably larger number 
of people than exist at present on a vegetarian dietary, congestion is fast becoming a dehumanizing influence. Human society differs from the often vast aggregations of individuals one finds among 
other animals, wherein the individual is subordinate to the group 
structure, in that society is the radiation of the humanizing predispositions engendered within each  individual. It  is only when 
such conditions* are fulfilled in the individual that society is itself a humanizing force. Constraint, limitation of individual freedom, subordination of the individual to the needs of vast societies are thus 
inherently antihuman. Human love is so powerful a force, that it can no doubt be 
exercised in large social groupings, possibly extending to a planetary scale. But this requires first of all the reality of love and its achievement between individuals, as well as a social structure 
which preserves individual liberty, in the sense of allowing and 
encouraging every individual to develop along humanizing lines. Unfortunately, the larger the social groupings in human history, the greater the interferences in such  liberty. The rise of the first 
civilizations were attended by such dehumanizing devices as slavery, and although slavery has been condemned for over a 
hundred years, human beings have become increasingly subordinate 
to the vast social groups, with the crises of coercion expressed in the totalitarian regimes. Under such conditions, humanization is thwarted. If human 
beings are not thugs and bullies, they become passive and uncaring, 
which is a form of dehumanization. But the effects of overcrowding, 
inevitable with the rise of the gigantic modern metropolis, are more insidious. Even in rats, spared the precarious balance of the human mind, overcrowding results in an tihuman parallels—in killing and 
maiming without reason, in a neglect of the young, in queer sexual 
practices, and in inexplicable bursts of communal madness. In its 
over-plentifulness, human life is becoming dangerously cheap. The 
calculations of over-kill, in the event of a nuclear war, are symptomatic of such cheapening. Quite apart from the increasing pressure on the resources 
offered by nature, the impact of overcrowding on the environment 
has the antihuman consequence of  leading to a disorderly, ugly 
environment. This is evident enough even where order prevails—in architecture, where the pressure of economics and maximal utilization of space has filled the cities with concrete and glass boxes devoid of human meaning. Where the population pressure 
results in a breakdown of order, the results are appalling, in the 
clutter and dirt of modern cities, in the noise and enervating bustle, in the congestions of crowd and traffic, in the pollution of the air, in the loss of sunlight, not. to mention those hideous consequences of urban disorder, the slums and semi-slums that fester around all 
cities, and increasingly within them. As the crowded cities have spread, forever consuming more of 
the countryside, so nature has become increasingly devastated, and 
rendered meaningless. It is one of the most depressing observations to find the degree to which city inhabitants, including the young, come to lose all contact with nature, to the point where they feel lost 
and awkward, if not actually listless and violent, when brought into 
contact with what is precariously le ft of nature. The fact is that 
unless nature is free and uncorrupted, it does lose much of its 
meaning to the human being. For one thing, the sense of an invigorating purity one can experience in unspoilt and beautiful scenes, is ruled out—by as little as a carelessly discarded wrapper. Since the appreciation of purity, as much as beauty and harmony, 
are essential Humanizing attributes, this loss of environmental 
purity results in an impure human being, necessarily more callous, more able to accept the hideousness of the environment in which he finds himself. Anthropologists are agreed about few things, but most of them 
concur that large-scale conflict—what has come to be known as 
war—is a relatively recent occurren ce. It has increased in severity 
and extent, and in its dehumani zation, as population pressure has 
increased. What then is the reason fo r this extraordinary soaring in 
the human population, itself a recent phenomenon. If the human species has existed for hundreds of thousands of years, and a 
human-like primate for millions, this crisis of over-population is all 
the more extraordinary. The hominids of the Palaeolithic roamed over most of the 
world. If it was only a matter of food, then surely they would have stumbled upon conditions in some part of the world where the kind 
of rapid increase we are witnessing would have occurred. All the 
evidence indicates that the hominids,  like the higher primates, have 
never known a population explosion. They have been as a group, restricted breeders. Gorillas a nd chimpanzees maintain stable 
populations; overcrowding only comes from human encroachment into their habitats. It cannot be disease, in the form of the sweeping 
and devastating epidemics known in the crowded and unsanitary 
conditions of the urban past, that kept their numbers down, for the 
surviving bands of gorillas, already seriously menaced by human intrusion, are superbly healthy. One way in which population stability is maintained in such 
primates, is by varying the length of nurture. Nursing mothers are 
not sexually harassed by the males, so that if nurture is prolonged, the occasions for breeding are reduced. The males are not inconvenienced, for although ever-ready to mount a receptive female, they only become sexually aroused on signals of one kind or another from the females, and can spend a life of bachelor 
uninvolvement if no such signals come. More usually, nursing persists long enough after birth to cut 
down the breeding cycles for a particular female so that not more than a few offspring result. With  the hazards of babyhood in the 
wild, this maintains a stable population. If the population increases, 
mothers nurture their young for longer, to such an extent that the 
number of offspring can be considerably reduced. In all primates, including the human, there is in fact a clash between the hormones involved in suckling and nursing, and those of breeding, so that the 
female has no interest in sex during nurture, a device of obvious biological advantage, for if female mammals were more interested 
in sex than in breeding, the line would have become extinct early, 
an interest which little girls with their little dolls still demonstrate, no matter how they behave later. Is the human an exception to this primate breeding control. Could it not be that the stampede of over population is the outcome of a deranged breeding pattern, as abnormal as the patterns of eating 
and sex already mentioned. It is commonly assumed, with the 
support of scientific authority, that the human female has lost the cyclical nature of the oestral cycl e, and thereby the female decision 
regarding the time of coitus. The human female is described as 'open'. This is a cultural falsification, a device to provide the human 
male with the ready access to sexual relief he has come to require, 
for there is definite evidence that  women have a peak desire for 
coitus during the oestral cycle, which implies that it is in such peaks 
that the woman would best accept th e man. In thus complying with 
the other primates, it would follow that the woman would also 
follow the primate device of extending nurture as a means of 
population control. The way in which the natural woman would do this is probably 
through the pituitary gland. As population pressure increases, so the 
social environment becomes less assured, anxiety increases, and child care intensified. It requires no conscious observation, no 
reasoning. Intuitively, the woman senses the threat of population 
pressure to the species. There is some indication that primitive groups, such as those in the Amazon basin, had achieved stability by such means, before the interrupti ons of civilized men. But it is to 
be noted that this control depends on a sufficient degree of human 
sensitivity, both on the part of  the woman, in order to sense 
intuitively the social situation, and on the part of the man to respect her increased preoccupation with child  nurture. A loss of sensitivity, 
and the device breaks down. The situation is complicated by the fact that the woman, unlike 
the other primate females, is largely conditioned by her cortex. If 
she exists in a society wherein th e woman is considered 'open', so 
she acts, and believes herself to be  open to male whim and fancy. This is true also regarding the orgasm, which is an essentially male preoccupation forced upon the gene ral sexual pattern, to the point 
where orgasmically harassed women become bad mothers, failing in 
what is after all the pre-eminent fe male biological duty. The fact of 
the situation is that while na ture has placed the essential 
responsibility of breeding on the female, it is the male in the human situation who has come to decide the sexual pattern, and this pattern 
is essentially geared to male sexual pleasure, freed from the entanglements of love, and even of breeding care, which is as good 
a definition of lust as one can find. Rejecting the existential evid ence, one can suppose that 
humanization occurred in humanly congenial conditions, and that 
sexual restraint on the part of the male was a natural human ability, not the psychological liability it has been claimed to be, in which 
case the size of the human population in terms of the environment 
would be controlled as it is in other primates—by a greater preoccupation with breeding and l ess with sex. Under existential conditions, the reverse seems to apply; the more anxious and 
harassing the times, the more peopl e breed. Evidently, something 
has happened which has inflamed sexual desire, to the point where 
it overrides the biological perimeters of the species, and this 
something may well be traceable to the amines already mentioned as originating in a faulty and inhuman diet, combined with a general humanizing impoverishment characteristic of civilization. Premature sexual interests in children can often be simply traced to wrong feeding, especially in animal foods. Since the Ice Ages, the abnormal amines have been affecting 
the mind, but on the whole, human beings have not become beset by a demented sexual urge. A hard life, and a hard faith, no doubt helped. In fact, in early times, human breeding may have been so restrained, that religion intervened to boost breeding in order to 
meet a changed society, one increasingly determined by a more 
congested existence. The stampede only got under way with the rise of civilization, and its adverse effe ct of sexual love, combined with 
an increase in the pathological st imulation of the lower aspects of 
the mind. The incidence of child neglect and of promiscuity, 
indicate the severity of the dementia. With some 18 per cent of 
births the result of transient unions in the big cities of civilization, and a much higher proportion of unl oved children, the condition is 
an advanced one, threatening human survival. Food has been in league with this situation, for unless the food 
supplies were increased to meet the ever-increasing harvest of 
babies, population control would ha ve been long ago affected by 
starvation and pestilence. So it is that intensive agriculture, the abuse of artificial fertilizers, the mechanization of meat, milk and egg production, the adulteration, refining and preservation of food, 
the intensifying exploitation of the oceans, and the complex 
chemical and poisonous parapherna lia of civilized food technology 
are as guilty as lust, the reverse side of the same counterfeit coin. 12. The Deceits of Lucullus 
 
 
When one considers that all other animals consume food as nature 
presents it to them, and that virtually no food is now eaten in a 
natural condition, one is entitled to  ask how such an extraordinary 
recourse to artificiality could have arisen. It is not always hunger 
that drives people to eat the extraordinary foods like maggots, birds' 
nests, barnacles and tripe, but some curious perversion of taste, and 
the endless, often unnecessary adulterations and interferences with 
foods point to a related assault against the simple and natural, 
symptoms of man's revulsion against the natural world. The artificialities of food, the endless search for the titillation of 
a jaded palate, are also the results of frustration and boredom. Lucullus was a Roman general who never lost a battle, but was eventually betrayed by the politicians at home. In disgust, he retired to gourmandize, inventing sumptuous dishes and gastronomic orgies never before imagined, with an army of cooks instead of centurions. Faced with the frustrations of living some people take to the way of 
Lucullus. The business magnate gorges himself to death, not because he is successful, but because he is humanly frustrated, secretly cheated of meaning and value to life, in the ruthless 
acquisitiveness of a materialistic jungle. As a result, since the Romans, and in fact long before them, there has been a succession 
of able food inventors and artificers. Such enticements to gluttony become self-perpetuating. The 
glutton's preoccupation with food has much the same features as that of the compulsive addict, with ever more varied and outrageous titillations needed, until the ludicrous is reached as in the food 
fantasies of Lucullus. Fire was probably first used for cooking in 
order to overcome the nauseating smell and taste of raw meat and it was used by the early food collector s to soften the hard fibres of 
vegetable foods that could not be eaten raw. For a long, long time, cooking was thus primarily utilitarian. It was only with the use of 
more sophisticated culture that the cook became an acrobat. The softening of vegetable fibres enables vegetables to be 
better digested in a mixed diet. Over-coarse vegetable foods interfere with protein absorption and result in putrefaction, nausea and general gastric disquiet which can  end in an actual dislike of all 
vegetables, commonly observed in big flesh eaters. This explains 
why many people insist that vegetables which can perfectly well be 
eaten raw, be thoroughly cooked. But a price is paid for this emasculation of vegetable food. Not only the common constipation, 
but more serious diseases like diverticulitis result from a prolonged insufficiency of vegetable fibres in the diet. The softening of the food also  enables the normal mechanism 
of satiety to be cheated. A slice or two of wholemeal bread will induce a feeling of satisfaction, while a whole loaf of white bread still leaves a sense of dissatisfaction. The extraordinary ability of the stomach to expand is no doubt a natural provision enabling the primate to gorge when food is abundant; but this is rarely the case in 
nature, so that the stomach is not continuously distended to its fullest, as it is among the civilized. Big eaters have the highest 
incidence of stomach cancer. There are also stimulants in  abnormal foods, such as meat, 
which cause the stomach to over-secrete. Many hours after a meal of meat, peristaltic contractions persist, even when the stomach contents have emptied into the duo denum. It is these contractions 
which account for the common 'hunger pangs', a pathological 
demand for more food due to wrong  feeding, often exacerbated by 
spices added to foods. Unlike a ppetite, this is not pleasant; relief 
only comes, transiently, as more food is taken in, a vicious circle at times leading to a visibly pathological gorging. The real reason why many people prefer cooked to raw food is 
that it is much easier to overeat the cooked. Romans insisted on 
over-cooked foods, for they were easi er to regurgitate. Hot food is 
also easier to abuse of than co ld. When the overworked stomach 
cries for mercy, and seizes up when given cold food, it will be induced to open out with hot food, one more device for fooling 
nature. The insistence on 'piping hot'dishes is a sure sign that the 
natural gastric functions have been thoroughly sabotaged, the stomach, an over-irritated, beaten, humiliated organ, capable of accepting any abuse. The association of ulceration and cancer with hot, particularly fried food, seems clear. Boiling not only softens vegetable fibres and overcomes the 
reek of raw animal food, but subtly alters proteins, dissolves out 
minerals, and makes the starches and sugars more quickly absorbable, by no means an advantage, for the continuous flooding of the blood with too easily absorb ed sugars is probably the cause of 
an ultimate breakdown of sugar meta bolism, resulting in diabetes, in 
abnormal fat deposition in tissues, in blood vessel degeneration, 
especially when combined with satur ated animal fats. But frying is 
undoubtedly much worse, for heat forms extremely irritating substances, many of which are carcinogenetic. The oil used again and again in restaurant kitchens, in many fish-and-chip shops, is as 
potent a cancer producing brew as one can find in any laboratory. The art of cooking means replacing the natural flavours lost by 
the action of heat, of solution, of dissipation and storage, and today, of intensive agriculture and the industrialization of food production. A battery of flavours, spices, condi ments is always ready to hand in 
every kitchen. But it is salt which is the pivot of gastronomy, so 
much so, that everyone accepts that salt is a natural and necessary 
addition to food. Since the basal needs of salt arc no more than two or three grains, and most people add twenty to thirty times this amount to their daily foods, one is evidently dealing with a dietary perversion. Salt craving in man and in animals is probably the craving for minerals, due to a deficiency in the food, or disease, 
when the body can waste phenomenal amounts of minerals. In 
nature, animals drawn to the rare  saltlicks are invariably diseased. Normal animals will not touch salt,  although salt hunger is common 
in animals associated with man, no doubt due to mineral-defective food. In the human diet, mineral deficiency is most probably due to 
losses in cooking. Raw foods often have a discernible mineral tang, 
which is rapidly lost in cooking. Th ere is a further reason in the fact 
that if salt is added to the food, the body is so disturbed as to become very wasteful of it, often overspilling large amounts of salt 
in the urine and sweat. Animal foods are rich in salt, so that on a mixed diet, even without added salt, there is a mineral disturbance, 
leading to salt craving. It is at last becoming realized that the 
common, virtually universal abuse of salt is incriminated in a long list of diseases, more particularly involving the heart, the kidneys, changes in the lens of the eye, blood pressure and oedema. Cooking has not only facilitated the eating of animal foods, but 
has enabled the eating of many food articles which could not be 
eaten in a raw condition, a fact which should make any such food 
suspect in the first place, however palatable it may become after cooking and preparation. Take the case of the potato. Available in 
Europe from the sixteenth century, it played a leading part in the 
population increases. Not only is it unpleasant in the raw, but it 
contains a poisonous alkaloid, wh ich is enormously increased 
during the formation of the 'eyes' in storage. This alkaloid, solanin, reduces the oxygenerating capacity of the blood, blocks enzyme systems, and poisons the nerves. Recently it was discovered with considerable alarm, that foetuses could be permanently damaged if 
pregnant mothers ate spoiled or germinating potatoes. Possibly all 
members of the solatium group should  be considered suspect, for all 
have alkaloids, some immediately fatal, such as deadly nightshade. That the Aztecs ate large quantities of solanum vegetables is hardly 
a recommendation. In the case of spinach or rhubarb, cooking shows how 
dangerous foods can be made so pa latable as to be eaten to excess. Man is not ideally adapted to most  mature green leaves, but rather 
to tender shoots, and in moderation, for shoots are not over-abundant in nature. Some shoots, ho wever, and many mature leaves, 
have large amounts of oxalic acid, which the liver cannot efficiently 
metabolise. When eaten, the aci d base balance of the body is 
threatened, calcium mobilized and wasted. In the raw state, such 
foods are unpleasantly acid, and no mo re than a bite would be taken. Cooked, dressed with butter and bechamel, spinach becomes delectable and rhubarb delicious, good examples of the dangers of 
gastronomy. Children, however, are often wiser, for in spite of such 
subterfuge, they appear to have an innate aversion to such foods. Many people would be prepared to defend the art of cooking 
for the pleasure that it brings to  a usually boring and frustrated 
existence. Unfortunately, these pl easures are transitory. After many 
a good meal, the bodily disquiet is all too apparent, in the flushed 
face and the beating heart. Only a few lucky people get away with it 
for any time. Usually, the price is paid depressingly early, when one should still be in the prime of life, at fifty, sixty, young still for a creature evidently designed for a very long existence. The trouble is that most people cannot conceive that simple, natural foods can afford pleasure. Only an overall reform of life attitudes, a revival of 
the meaning of purity, of beauty, can enable the sensing of the 
arcadean joys to be had in natural eating. Natural eating does not mean crude, unattractive, unimaginative 
eating. On the contrary, the natural appeals of natural food can be enormously extended, if not by cooking, by presentation and 
preparation. The raw components need not be limited and dull, and 
with a minimum amount of cooking, a thoroughly satisfactory and humanly enhancing diet presents itself. The art of it remains, and has the beauty and purity which all art should bestow upon the 
human. By comparison, the art devices of gastronomy are no different from the false beauty of lipstick and pancake makeup. 13. The Costs of Confusion 
 
 
Living in an age when the human being is looked upon as an 
accidental production of a Universe without meaning, subject to a 
nature prone to catastrophe, man is  seen as no more than a cunning, 
randy naked ape. It would seem re asonable that people should grab 
for the immediate pleasures and sa tisfactions that existence can 
provide, without asking too many questions, particularly those 
involving right or wrong, good or bad. Philosophers themselves, 
who in the past have preoccupied themselves with the ideal, have 
come to the conclusion that only existence counts, that ideals are 
one more manifestation of illusion. For those who believe that ma n is naturally an idealizing 
creature, however opportunistic and existentialistic he may appear, 
the modern situation can only be interpreted as the crisis of blindness and atrophy brought about by long ages of confusion, originally initiated by nature's own hostilities in the trials of the Ice 
Ages, but perpetuated ever since by an inability to feel and think 
clearly again. After many thousands of years of endeavouring to find the lost wisdom of which every one feels his due, the modern age has come to accept the impossib ility of wisdom. It is a tragic 
situation, all the more tragic in that science has come to confirm the 
apparent futility of man. Although most people do not like the effort involved in feeling 
and thinking deeply about such problems, and prefer to take life as it comes, clearly the way out of the present confusions, with their 
roots in the most distant past, can only be found by some very deep and passionate thinking indeed. In facing the problem examined in 
this book—the question of right eating—a practical resolution it not 
enough. To have any effect, it must be backed by belief that man has meaning, that essence is what primarily matters, for existence 
can only have meaning when it complies with essence, with the rules set by nature for human existence, the opposite of the usual 
opportunism. The problem is a circuitous one; living existentially, one comes 
to believe that only existence matters. In the case of food and feeding, it is simply not felt po ssible that there can be any ideal 
pattern; like all things, food is an occasion for the natural 
opportunist scramble. It is generally believed that the gory, 
gluttonous, promiscuous Primal Horde is only held down by social 
censure, by the primitive law of an eye for an eye, and today, law and censure in themselves are being dismantled in a rising, officially backed opportunism. We have all become petty criminals, 
and no longer much troubled by the fact. This turn of events is not only disastrous in its inhuman 
consequences, but is irrational, for the most elementary lesson that biology should have to teach is th at nature not only favours the fit 
and eliminates the unfit, but rewards only the fit, mercilessly punishing the unfit. This does not depend on any ulterior meaning or morality in the working of nature. It is a purely practical, 
indispensable provision in the functioning of things. If reward and punishment are not a built-in provision, as fundamental as the 
particular ways in which atoms combine with one another to form 
the myriad substances of nature and of living things, the whirling 
clouds of hydrogen gas, which appeared at the beginning of the universe some fifteen billion years ago, would still be whirling around, having accomplished nothing. Modern existentialism has been the work of thinkers with no 
scientific training. Scientists, biol ogists in particular, could easily 
dismantle their systems; their guilt should be that so few of them have had the courage to speak out against the falsities of so many of the widely advertised and accepted conclusions of the age. Accepting that nature works on the principles of rewards and 
punishments, it should be evident that the modern opportunist, 
existentialistic attitudes cannot possi bly bring genuine gratification. If there are apparent pleasures in the purely random ways in which people live, then they can but amount to illusions, certain to carry a backwash of retribution. The impartial examination of any aspect of 
modern living shows this to be true, whether it be politics or sex, 
medicine or feeding. The apparent rewards of power invariably bring with them the attendants of insensitivity, and the joys of so 
called freedom in sex disappointments and painfulness. The trouble is that so hollow has life become, that people will not face the emptiness of the only rewards to livi ng which they believe exist, the 
pleasures of the palate, of the bed, of money, of material gadgetry 
and power, of the bogus communalism of urban living, of the mechanically expressed restlessness of the disturbed modern soul. So it is that most people would probably contend that the 
satisfactions of the ordinary life, admitting that they involve many 
departures from normality, are worth the while, the price worth 
paying, if indeed there is a price at all. Almost everyone believes that it is not all that important what one eats, as long as one has variety and amount enough. There has to be something very wrong with a meal for one to be punished with a stomach ache. Uncomplainingly, the body accepts the legions of daily 
transgressions of a lesser kind without protest. When catastrophe 
eventually occurs—and many a ppear to escape altogether—in a 
burst blood vessel, in a seizing arthritic joint, the long abuse of natural law seems quite inappare nt. Bad luck, accident, nature's 
inherent imperfections seem the more likely causes. But if the majority are the victims of such confusion, it seems 
hardly believable that science, and medicine in particular, do not more frequently protest against the common waywardness. Over the past two or three decades, the ev idence has been mounting, enough 
to leave no doubt that man's misfortunes are largely self-inflicted, by carelessness, by greed, by stupidity, and that the price paid in 
suffering is astronomical. Science clearly serves the particular 
culture in which it exists; it is no independent impartial overseer. The common assumption that disease is 'natural' and naturally 
inevitable, the consequences of a wayward and imperfect nature, to 
be remedied only by human interference, is at the heart of much of 
the confusion. One must admit that nature is not perfect, but nature 
does quite often achieve perfection, even if to appreciate the refinements of this perfection, one has to go beyond the realm of appearances, as science has discovered. As insisted upon in the 
course of this book, humanization must have occurred initially under ideal conditions, even if things went wrong subsequently. Health and happiness should therefore be natural possibilities, 
provided the original humanizing conditions can be restored. For transgressions which have recurrently occurred in the 
history of life, the cataclysms of climate and food change, of earth movements, of floodings and dessi cations, living things have an 
inexhaustible reservoir of experience to call upon. Given time, 
readaptation to change follows, a nd the animal survives. But if the 
transgression is unnatural, as in the case of laboratory or industrial products, there is not only a complete absence of past experience to be drawn upon, but no symptom of distress following the ingestion of such substances, for symptoms  to some offending agent take 
millions of years to evolve. So it is that the causes of the most 
terrible, life-destroying diseases remain ignored, and syptomless, calling for no readjustments, until the body is literally overwhelmed, as is the case in many cancers. Today, every contact with the environment is contaminated 
with such unnatural substances. A re cent attempt to draw up a list of 
such substances ran into tens of thousands. Every year, hundreds are 
being added. The official attitude  to such a dangerous situation—
that a substance cannot be conde mned until it is proved harmful—
shows a complete disdain of biological principles. Those relying on this test are mostly guilty men, often aware of the harm ultimately 
likely, but more concerned with  expediency than with human 
wholeness. It is often contended that the situation cannot be as bad as the 
pessimists claim, for has not the human life span been extensively 
increased, and are not many, once crippling diseases conquered. Medical and scientific journalists, often not scientists themselves, 
are in the habit of hinting that such achievements are thanks to science's conquest over nature's natural infirmities, implying that the 'natural' life-span has been extended,  that a naturally sick nature has 
been corrected. This is biological nonsense. Every species of animal 
has a genetically set life-span, a setti ng closely related to its rate of 
growth. If this correlation is applied to man, the most slowly 
developing of all creatures, then the human life-span should be well over a hundred years. All that science has in fact achieved is the removal of unsanitary conditions and the control of diseases inherent in such conditions. The unhealthiness of Ice Age 
Palaeolithic humans can be seen in the pathological torturings of 
their bones, but the worst ravag es of unhealthiness probably only 
came with the urbanization of livi ng, in the earliest civilizations. There are hints that when the Ice Ages ended, and before the rise of 
the first civilizations, human beings lived long, whole lives, a length which has not been fully recovered. There are still isolated 
peasantries in which many indivi duals live well over the century. Quite recently, as the functional collapse intensifies in soaringly degenerative diseases, the cancers and heart diseases in particular, there has been a dip in the life- span. Far from confidence in the 
apparent successes of science and medicine, there should be alarm, 
for while the diseases that have b een corrected, due to pathogenic 
organisms, only affect individuals, the degenerative diseases entail a 
definite genetic impoverishment. Here again, one is faced with a barrage of propaganda, 
optimistic and pontifical, that some  success has been achieved, that 
cancers can be cured. But for one case surviving a number of years 
after operation and treatment, dozens die, for all the vast agitations 
of worldwide research. Some cancers undoubtedly begin quite locally, as in the case of radiation damage, and if removed in time, survival is assured. But in most cases, the localized appearance of a 
cancer is only a stage in what is a general underlying pathology, involving the entire body, so evident in the leukaemias. Medicine 
has yet to admit that most diseases of such a nature are not 
localized, but entail a failure of the entire organism, an admission which would entail a revolution in medical philosophy, away from its present mechanical concepts, to more holistic ones. There are at the moment indications that something in this direction is 
happening, in the admission that exercise and diet are the best ways 
of preventing heart attacks, that years of over-eating are likely to 
end in diabetes, and that possibly the best if not the only way of combating many kinds of cancer is through the body's own abilities to react. But evidently, before ther e can be a real change of heart, 
there has to be a fundamental change  in ideology, in the world-view 
of science, in its attitudes to man and nature, and judging the slowness of progress in this dir ection, one can be excused for 
doubting that there is sufficient survival time. 14. Food Fit for Humans 
 
 
Basing oneself on the humanizing aesthetic criteria, and making use 
of the scientific evidence that co mplies with them, one can define 
the ideal human diet as one beautiful and refreshing, consisting of 
fruits in abundance, of seeds a nd nuts, of cereals and tender shoots 
and leaves, of flowers, eaten in the raw. Unfortunately, given the 
present-day interferences in natural fo ods, it is unlikely that such an 
ideal dietary is possible, for almost all foods available today, are 
produced from unnatural, variously disturbed soils. Sadly therefore, 
no longer is a purely simple wisdom adequate. This is where a 
science, serving the human condition rather than undermining it, 
can help. Treating the soil as nothing but a physical medium is the result 
of a materialistic, mechanical attitude to life and nature generally. While at first this seemed justified by the enormously increased yields which resulted from chemical fertilizers, it has become ever 
more apparent that the soil is a living medium, seriously 
undermined by such crude stimuli, and that foods grown on such disturbed soils lack substan ces indispensable to animals. Since the work of McCarrison in India over half a century ago, 
it has been known that organically defective soils produce crops with a lowered vitamin B content. One of these vitamins in 
particular, Vitamin B
12, is more or less completely absent in such 
crops. Vitamin B 12 is an exceptional and extraordinary substance, 
still something of a mystery although its chemical nature is fully known. Section summary: 

This passage discusses several topics concerning humanity’s struggle towards achieving moral goodness (replacing primal urges). Key ideas include:
1) **Sexuality**: Sex isn't meant solely for reproduction purposes. 2)**Economic** pressures drive societal unrest & imbalance (**Vitamin deficiencies**, etc. )
3]**Food Quality:** Consumptions lead directly to *imbalances*
4)
5]Cultural influences shape our actions

Please summarize your answer using concise language focusing mainly on key highlights. Please refrain from repetition throughout the essay response. Summary:


In contrast to instinct-driven lov-making, compassionate relationships promote harmonious development within families/societies. •   Evolutionarily speaking,
    - Guilty feelings emerge when desires aren’t satisfied;
      • Failure leads to depression/frust ration/anger/hat red = unhealthy


Society fails to acknowledge



         https://www. liv. [More](https://www. liveabout. com/biological-prior. )



Source URL: <http:\/\/\/ www\. live\u0026#x0F8D>





To create a succinct overview based exclusively on provided data:



[Insert Summary here]
```
Here is my rewritten version summarising sections 11–15):

Key findings highlight significant issues surrounding Western Civilization failures influencing global degradation alongside promoting dysfunctional behaviors. Main themes included:

(Section 114)
Evolutionally, unresolved cravings trigger negative sentiments. Failure ensues – stress-frustration-hat-red

(Sectio
Social structures disregard. Note:`I've omitted repetitive elements`<-->`You requested. `.
Compassion and a heightened sense of social and spiritual involvement.
What is the natural tendency for love to evolve into, according to the author?
Guilt is a biologically implanted reprimand for sexual patterns that fail to comply with the needs of humanization.
What is the author's opinion on the role of guilt in human society?
The author believes that the consumption of sugar can lead to a range of negative health consequences, including the development of diseases such as cancer and heart disease.
What is the author's stance on the consumption of sugar and its effects on the body?
The author suggests that the faulty amino acid stimulation, which has led to an unnatural and excessive stimulation of the lower aspects of the mind, is the primary reason for the rapid population growth.
According to the author, what is the primary reason for the extraordinary increase in the human population?
The author believes that science should serve the human condition, rather than undermining it, and that a holistic approach is necessary to achieve true well-being and health.
What is the author's view on the role of science and its relationship to human well-being?