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beans, lentils, wholemeal bread, or oatmeal. Mr. Hoyle has calculated that, if every family in the kingdom were to reduce its consumption of butcher's meat by one pound’s weight only, there would be an annual saving of at least ten millions of money. Statistics are proverbially an unsatisfactory method of argument ; but, even at the lowest computation, it cannot be denied that our food supply would be enormously increased if the use of flesh meat were entirely discontinued.[1] Nor would this direct saving be by any means the only benefit resulting from the change. If the towns renounced flesh eating. it would no longer be worth a landlord’s while to keep arable land in pasture, and the result would be an immense development of
- ↑ It is worth remarking that, though Sir Henry Thompson scarcely mentions the question of economy in his latest article on “Diet,” be dealt rather more fully with it in the June number of the Nineteenth Century for 1879. He there wrote: “These things being so, a consideration at no small concern arises in relation to the economical management of the national resources. For it is a fair computation that every acre of land devoted to the production of meat is capable of becoming the source at three or four times the amount of produce of equivalent value of food, if devoted to the production of grain. In other words, a given area of land cropped with cereals and legumes will support a population more than three times as numerous as that which can be sustained on the same land devoted to the growth of cattle.” Of late Sir Henry Thompson seems to have overlooked this very important consideration.
