The question, How shall I begin the new way of eating?", is asked by thousands who first become acquainted with the principles of right eating. Just how shall they begin? How shall they prepare their new dietary? Shall they change to the new diet gradually or abruptly? How much shall they eat? What reactions may they expect? These are important questions, which, unfortunately, most of the literature of the subject does not help them to answer. We have many vegetarian cook books and books filled with vegetarian recipes and menus; but too often these imitate the old diet rather than lead the neophyte into correct eating practices. These books represent a compromise with perverted tastes, false appetencies, and wrong practices. This is, perhaps, the chief reason so many vegetarians fail to realize the full benefits of the vegetarian way of life. I get mental vertigo when I go through these books and read all the recipes for making meat substitutes, mock turkey, etc. What do we need with a "meat substitute?" Either vegetarianism is a correct way of life, or it is not. Either meat is the substitute, or it is a normal part of man's diet. There can be no need to imitate the old diet if it is wrong. We need to discard the substitute and return to the original, the genuine; we need to make a complete break with the old dietary practices.

Dr. Philip Norman refers to "The American Home Diet," an "excellent work" prepared by McCollum and Simonds, and says of the balanced menus" which "have been introduced with instructions for their use," that: "These meals are ordinary meals fortified with green vegetables, fruit and milk. Custom has so shackled the thought of investigators that they have not been able to break away from the bread, meat and potato type of diet. The balanced meal, therefore, is simply an improvement as regards the balance of dietary essentials. It does not take into account the physiologic process of digestion." It does not, in other words, pay the slightest regard to combinations. These "investigators" are so conservative and so shackled by custom and convention that they are afraid of radical revision of the dietary.

Hygienists are not so timid. They have not hibernated in antiquity. They are not bound by traditions and outworn customs. They long ago got rid of the meat, potato and bread type of diet. "Bread is the staff of death," declared Emmit Densmore, many years ago. Meat we have rejected for over a hundred years. Combinations we have developed.

Household hints, dietetic advice, etc., as dished up to the public, in the columns of the daily press, and, as sent out over the radio, are all designed to sell the goods of the advertisers. These pernicious pieces of propaganda encourage people to go on blindly, as they have always done, and prepare their foods to tickle their palates. The advice thus given the public is actually criminal.

I do not mean to say that the conventionally healthy cannot eat such things and maintain the conventional health standard; but I do insist that they cannot be as well with them as they can be without them. I say also that every meal of such food renders them more liable to various forms of chronic "disease."

The usual doctor-prescribed diet is not a diet at all. The average diet prescribed by the average doctor, contains the same foods, denatured and adulterated, and the same reckless combinations, which the patients have been eating all their lives, and which have built the nutritional states which form the biological ground work for the affections with which they suffer. Doctors, often oppose real eating reform for selfish reasons, and the people are so bound in voluntary or self-forged chains of slavery to the palate that they are easily taken in by the ludicrous diatribes of their natural enemies, the heresy-hunting medical high priests, and are easily induced to leave in the lurch their true helpers and benefactors, the dissenters.

What can they know of food-reform who know it only from hearsay--what can they know of food reform who have seen it only in a few isolated cases of superficial and eleventh-hour changes of eating habits?