Prophetess of Health

Chapter 7: Whatsoever Ye Eat or Drink

By Ronald L. Numbers

"We bear positive testimony against tobacco, spiritous liquors, snuff, tea, coffee, flesh-meats, butter, spices, rich cakes, mince pies, a large amount of salt, and all exciting substances used as articles of food."

Ellen G. White¹

To the typical Seventh-day Adventist in the 1860s, health reform meant essentially a twice-a-day diet of fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts. Since Ellen White's vision on June 5, 1863, meat, eggs, butter, and cheese had joined alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee on her index of proscribed items. The discontinuance of these articles was as much a religious as a physiological duty, for, as Mrs. White repeatedly said, health reform was as "closely connected with present truth as the arm is connected with the body." Many responded to the call for radical reform, and by the summer of 1870 James White was able to boast that Adventists from Maine to Kansas, "with hardly an exception," had discarded flesh-meats and suppers.²

During the early days of Adventist health reform the two-meal-a-day system shared equal billing with the vegetarian diet. Two meals had long been the rule at places like Dr. Jackson's water cure in Dansville, but the Whites seem to have adopted the practice several months before their first visit to Our Home. What inspired them to do so is not entirely clear. Ellen indirectly tied the change to her June 5 vision, while James, never wanting to appear overly dependent on his wife, appealed to the Bible, arguing tenuously that "the New Testament recognizes but two meals a day." At any rate, by mid-1864 the Whites were taking breakfast at 7:00 A.M., dinner at 1:00 P.M., and no supper. Fruits, grains, and vegetables filled their pantry:

Vegetables. — Potatoes, turnips, parsnips, onions, cabbage, squashes, peas, beans, &c., &c.

Grains. — Wheat, corn, rye, barley, and oatmeal bread and puddings, rice, farina, corn starch, and the like.

Fruits. — Apples, raw and cooked, pears, and peaches, canned and dried, canned strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, huckleberries, grapes, cranberries, and tomatoes.

In addition to these items, the Whites kept a supply of raisins for cooking purposes, and their family cow provided them with about ten quarts of fresh milk per day.³

Once or twice, for the children's sake, James and Ellen experimented with a light evening meal, but found that it resulted only in bad breath and unpleasant dispositions. To provide ample time for digestion Ellen White recommended spacing meals at least five hours apart and eating not "a particle of food" in between. According to countless testimonials in the Health Reformer and the Review and Herald her sparse regimen brought renewed vigor and strength to those who adopted it. "Praise God for the Health Reform" was the universal sentiment.⁴

Meat

The rationale behind Mrs. White's ban on flesh-foods was not kindness to animals, which she never mentioned at this time, but her belief, expressed in Appeal to Mothers and subsequent writings, that meat caused disease and stirred up the "animal passions." The supposed relationship between diet and sexuality had been noted earlier by Sylvester Graham and others, but Ellen White seems to have learned of it primarily from Dr. L. B. Coles's Philosophy of Health, with which she was well acquainted.⁵ In a testimony sent to a "Bro. and Sister H.," whose children she had seen in vision as having strong "animal propensities," she made free (and unacknowledged) use of Coles's phrenologically loaded language on the animalizing tendency of meat.

Continuing to follow Coles, she went on in the same testimony to discuss the connection between meat-eating and disease:

In view of Ellen White's indignant assertions that her testimonies were not subject to human influences — "I am as dependent upon the Spirit of the Lord in writing my views as I am in receiving them" — her manifest reliance on Coles is, to say the least, puzzling.¹⁰

The prohibition against meat-eating proved to be a trifle embarrassing for a church that put so much stock in biblical prophecies. Enemies pointed accusingly to the passage in Saint Paul's first epistle to Timothy (1 Tim. 4:1-3), where the apostle predicted that "in the latter times some shall depart from the faith,... commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth." Were Seventh-day Adventists fulfilling that prophecy? Not at all, replied James White, for they did not command their members to refrain from eating meat, but simply recommended the change from "a physiological point of view." Besides, he added, the word meats really meant food, not flesh-meats. "The articles of food which God has permitted us to use are good; and they should be received with thanksgiving."¹¹

Dairy and Eggs

For at least a decade after her June 5 vision Ellen White made little or no distinction between the use of meat and such animal products as butter, eggs, and cheese. They all aroused man's animal nature and were thus to be condemned indiscriminately. Her unyielding attitude toward these items is revealed in representative statements made between 1868 and 1873:

Cheese should never be introduced into the stomach.¹²

You place upon your tables butter, eggs, and meat, and your children partake of them. They are fed with the very things that will excite their passions, and then you come to meeting and ask God to bless and save your children. How high do your prayers go?¹³

No butter or flesh-meats of any kind come on my table.¹⁴

Children are allowed to eat flesh-meats, spices, butter, cheese, pork, rich pastry, and condiments generally.... These things do their work of deranging the stomach, exciting the nerves to unnatural action, and enfeebling the intellect. Parents do not realize that they are sowing the seed which will bring forth disease and death.¹⁵

Eggs should not be placed upon your table. They are an injury to your children.¹⁶

These were hardly the words of a moderate; yet Mrs. White did not regard herself as an extremist. That epithet she reserved for the fanatics who wished to add milk, sugar, and salt to the list of forbidden foods. Throughout the early 1870s Adventist reformers argued incessantly over these three products. The disciples of Dr. Trall demanded their immediate discontinuance, while others professed to see no harm in them. In the middle stood Ellen White. She admitted that their free use was "positively injurious to health," and that it would probably be better never to eat them, but she refused to press additional restrictions on an unwilling church. Her husband, though obviously sympathetic to the Trall faction, concurred in this pragmatic decision and supported her policy of simply recommending a sparing use of all three articles, especially combinations of milk and sugar, which she considered to be worse than meat.¹⁷

Despite reservations about milk and her belief that the time would soon come when it would have to be discarded, she continued in her own home to use moderate amounts of both milk and sweet cream. At the same time she forbade butter, cheese, and eggs from appearing on her table. This apparent inconsistency toward dairy products actually placed her in good health-reform company. Years earlier, in his Lectures on the Science of Human Life, Sylvester Graham had made a similar distinction, arguing that cream was preferable to butter because its solubility made it more easily digestible, and that eggs were more objectionable than milk because they were "more highly animalized."¹⁸

Salt

The one item on which Ellen White broke with established health-reform opinion was salt. Her reason for this minor departure, she once wrote, was that God had given her special "light" showing its importance for the blood. Consequently she had disregarded Dr. Jackson's advice against its use. A private letter written in 1891, however, tells a somewhat different story:

Many years ago, while at Dr. Jackson's, I undertook to leave it [salt] off entirely, because he advocated this in his lectures. But he came to me and said, "I request you not to come into the dining hall to eat. A moderate use of salt is necessary to you; without it you will become a dyspeptic. I will send your meals to your room." After a while, however, I again tried the saltless food, but was again reduced in strength and fainted from weakness. Although every effort was made to counteract the effect of the six-weeks' trial, I was all summer in so feeble a condition that my life was despaired of. I was healed in answer to prayer, else I should not have been alive today.

In this account the oft-maligned Dansville physician emerges as the source of inspiration for Mrs. White's tolerance of salt.¹⁹

Tea and Coffee

Far worse than meat, eggs, butter, and cheese were what Ellen White called the "poisonous narcotics": tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol. With these items, she wrote, the "only safe course is to touch not, taste not, handle not."²⁰ Apparently she got the idea of classifying tea and coffee with alcoholic beverages from reading Coles's Philosophy of Health, in which all three are said to produce similar effects. Throughout her writings on the subject Coles's influence is unmistakable.

Still following Coles, she described the woeful effects of coffee on mind and body:

Certainly the most intriguing insight she borrowed from Coles was that tea and coffee were responsible for the rampant gossip at women's social gatherings:

Tobacco

Of all the "poisonous narcotics," tobacco struck Ellen White as being the most sinister. Even after most Adventists had given up smoking and chewing, she continued to remind them of the weed's pernicious effects. Writing in 1864 about her vision the previous year, she described tobacco as a "malignant" poison of the worst kind, responsible for the death of multitudes. She did not say specifically that it caused cancer, but she may well have had that thought in mind since Coles and others had already noted the relationship between prolonged tobacco use and carcinomas. Of equal, if not greater, concern to her was the fact (as she saw it) that tobacco created a thirst for strong drink and often laid "the foundation for the liquor habit."²⁷

Alcohol

No health topic aroused Mrs. White to more fervent activity than abstinence from alcoholic drinks, or "temperance" as it was euphemistically called. Basically her position was that of a teetotaler, opposed even to a moderate consumption of fermented and distilled beverages. But on occasion both she and her husband grudgingly allowed a limited use of "domestic wine." In an 1869 testimony reproving a brother in Wisconsin for his extremist approach to health reform that had deprived his family of the necessities of life, she suggested that "a little domestic wine," or even a little meat, would have done his pregnant wife no injury. Presumably James went along with this advice, for only a few years earlier he had protested strenuously against the "disgusting" practice of substituting molasses and water for wine at communion. "This objecting to a few drops of domestic wine with which to only wet the lips at the Lord's supper, is carrying total-abstinence principles to great length," he commented in the Review and Herald. While not recommending that wine be purchased from local liquor-vendors, he saw nothing wrong with having the church deacons make it themselves. That way the purity and alcoholic content could be controlled.²⁸

There were no signs of compromise, however, when Ellen White mounted the lecture platform, as she frequently did. In a clear, strong voice she vividly portrayed the horrors of alcoholism and carefully explained the cause-and-effect relationship between diet and drink. Temperance was her favorite theme, and she happily accepted the many speaking invitations that came her way. In the summer of 1874, for example, she joined the temperance forces in Oakland, California, and in several public appearances helped to defeat the liquor interests by the narrow margin of two hundred sixty votes. Three years later "fully five thousand persons" turned out in her hometown to hear her speak at a mass temperance rally co-sponsored by the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Battle Creek Reform Club. But her greatest triumph as a temperance lecturer came in September, 1876, when she drew an estimated twenty thousand to a camp meeting in Groveland, Massachusetts. So impressed were the officers of the nearby Haverhill Reform Club, they invited her to talk again the next day in their city hall. Before a packed house of eleven hundred, including "the very elite of Haverhill's society," she "struck intemperance at the very root, showing that on the home table largely exists the fountain from which flow the first tiny rivulets of perverted appetite, which soon deepen into an uncontrollable current of indulgence, and sweep the victim to a drunkard's grave." Enthusiastic applause punctuated her talk.²⁹

In addition to her lecturing, Ellen White was continually turning out temperance articles for various Adventist publications. Even the children were not forgotten. In her four-volume collection of Sabbath Readings for the Home Circle she included a selection of sentimental temperance stories with such titles as "Father, Don't Go," "Affecting Scene in a Saloon," and "The Major's Cigar." Typical was one tale entitled "Made a Drunkard by His Cigar," which told of a promising young clergyman whose intemperate habits killed his wife, made a beggar of his child, and eventually sent him to a mad-house.³⁰

Adventist efforts on behalf of temperance culminated in 1879 in the formation of the American Health and Temperance Association, a denominational organization presided over by Dr. John H. Kellogg. The principal goal of the sponsors of the association was to acquire as many signatures as possible on their two pledges: a "teetotal pledge" for those swearing to abstain from "alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, opium, and all other narcotics and stimulants forever," and a less comprehensive "anti-liquor and tobacco pledge" for the faint-hearted. Ellen White was among the first to affix her name to the teetotal pledge and one of the most active in signing up others as she traveled from place to place.³¹

Kellogg's presidency of the American Health and Temperance Association symbolized his ascendancy to the leadership of the Adventist health-reform movement. From the time of his appointment in 1876 as superintendent of the Western Health Reform Institute, he had begun slowly to eclipse the prophetess as the church's health authority. By 1886 he could without embarrassment describe himself in a letter to Mrs. White as "a sort of umpire as to what was true or correct and what was error in matters relating to hygienic reform, a responsibility which has often made me tremble, and which I have felt very keenly." For her part, she seems to have willingly abdicated her previous role, having had her fill of trying to change the habits of a recalcitrant church. The noncontroversial temperance lectures continued, but there were few words about the short skirt, sex, or radical changes in diet. The less she said, the more her followers reverted to their former ways, and before long there were unmistakable signs of "a universal backsliding on health reform." As early as 1875 she noticed the drift and commented ruefully that "Our people are constantly retrograding upon health reform." Young Kellogg tried valiantly to stem the onrushing tide, but without Mrs. White's support, his efforts were doomed to failure.³²

Evidence of dietary backsliding was particularly noticeable at the summer camp meetings, where provision stands prominently displayed "whole codfish, large slabs of halibut, smoked herring, dried beef and Bologna sausage." For years Kellogg waged a one-man crusade to cleanse the camps of these odious items, on occasion even buying up the entire stock and destroying it. But flesh-loving campers and ministers constantly hampered his efforts. At one statewide meeting in Indiana he paid fifteen dollars to have "the whole stock of meat, strong cheese and some detestable bakery stuff" thrown in the river, only to discover later that the conference ministers had surreptitiously salvaged the goods and divided the spoil among themselves.³³

As this incident illustrates, the Adventist clergy were often the greatest enemies of reform. Many refused to preach against the evils of meat-eating and by their own example discouraged others who looked to them for guidance. At one point Kellogg estimated that all but "two or three" Adventist ministers ate meat. It was routinely served at their annual General Conference banquets, where even the leading brethren partook. Uriah Smith, the respected editor of the Review and Herald, was known to love a good steak and an occasional bowl of oyster soup, and others in the hierarchy apparently shared his tastes. By the turn of the century the reform movement had plunged to such depths, vegetarianism was more the exception than the rule in Adventist households.³⁴

Although Ellen White liked to blame this great "backsliding” on extremists in the church who had given health reform a bad name, she herself was not guiltless. For when it came to meat-eating, she was for a time the most prominent backslider of all. (Charges that she also imbibed a little tea were resolutely denied.) We do not know precisely when she first resumed eating meat, but certainly it was not before March, 1869, when she assured the Battle Creek church that she had not changed her course “a particle” since first adopting the twice-a-day vegetarian diet: “I have not taken one step back since the light from Heaven upon this subject first shone upon my pathway." Only four-and-one-half years later, however, she was eating duck while vacationing in the Rockies. And by 1881 she was no longer willing to make an issue of eating meat and dairy products, against which she had once borne such "positive testimony." Meat, eggs, butter, and cheese, she now said, were not to be classed with tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol — the poisonous narcotics which were to be discarded entirely.³⁵

According to Dr. John Kellogg, Mrs. White celebrated her return from Europe in 1887 with a “large baked fish.” When she visited the doctor at the Battle Creek Sanitarium during the next several years, she "always called for meat and usually fried chicken,” much to the consternation of Kellogg and the cook, both thoroughgoing vegetarians. At the various camp meetings she attended, her lax dietary habits became common knowledge, thanks in no small part to her own children, who were prone to indulge their "animal passions." Kellogg recalled once hearing Edson (J. E.) White,

standing in front of his mother's tent, call out to a meat wagon that visited the grounds regularly and was just leaving, "Say, hello there! Have you any fresh fish?"

"No," was his reply.

"Have you got any fresh chicken?"

Again the answer was "no," and J. E. bawled out in a very loud voice, “Mother wants some chicken. You had better get some quick."

It was obvious to Kellogg that Edson, never much of a health reformer, wanted the chicken every bit as much as his mother did.³⁶

When the inevitable rumors began circulating that the prophetess had not always lived up to her own standards, Ellen White protested that she had indeed been "a faithful health reformer," as the members of her family could testify. But even her favorite son Willie related a different story. Years after his mother's death he told of the many setbacks in her struggle to overcome meat, of the difficulties in finding competent vegetarian cooks, and of lunch baskets filled with turkey, chicken, and tinned tongue. Yet despite these lapses, both he and his mother seem to have regarded themselves as true vegetarians — in principle if not in practice.³⁷

The rumors of Mrs. White's fondness for flesh were not based on hearsay alone; in 1890 she confessed in print to occasionally using meat. "When I could not obtain the food I needed, I have sometimes eaten a little meat," she admitted in the book Christian Temperance. She went on to add that she was "becoming more and more afraid of it" and was looking forward hopefully to the time when meat-eating would eventually disappear among those expecting the Second Coming of Christ. The very next year she advised a Brother H. C. Miller that "a little meat two or three times a week" would be preferable to "eating so largely of [Graham] gems and potatoes, and gravies, and strong sauce."³⁸

It was not until January, 1894, that Ellen White finally gained the victory over her appetite for meat. She had just completed a temperance lecture in Brighton, Australia, when a Catholic admirer in the audience came forward and inquired if the speaker ate any meat. Upon hearing that she did, the woman fell on her knees at Mrs. White's feet and tearfully pleaded with her to have compassion on the unfortunate animals. The incident proved to be a turning point in the life of the prophetess, who described it in a letter to friends in the United States: "when the selfishness of taking the lives of animals to gratify a perverted taste was presented to me by a Catholic woman, kneeling at my feet, I felt ashamed and distressed. I saw it in a new light, and I said, I will no longer patronize the butchers. I will not have the flesh of corpses on my table." From that time until her death in 1915 she apparently never touched another piece of meat.³⁹

Now that she was once again in the vegetarian fold, Ellen White joined Dr. Kellogg in fighting the apathy and hostility that many members felt toward dietary reform. It seemed to her that the very success of the church depended upon an immediate "revival in health reform." In a 1900 testimony on the need for such a reawakening, she attributed the low state of the church to the fact that her earlier testimonies had "not been heartily received" and that many of the brethren were "in heart and practice opposed to health reform." "The Lord does not now work to bring many souls into the truth," she wrote, "because of the church-members who have never been converted [to health reform], and those who were once converted but who have backslidden." Ministers and conference presidents in particular were admonished to place themselves "on the right side of the question."⁴⁰

By far the most controversial of her plans for reviving health reform was the so-called antimeat pledge, modeled after those used in the temperance work. In a March 29, 1908, letter to Elder A. G. Daniells, then president of the General Conference, she urged that a pledge be circulated requiring total abstinence from "flesh meats, tea, and coffee, and all injurious foods." Daniells, no vegetarian himself, balked at this unwelcome assignment, fearing that its implementation would unnecessarily divide the church and even split families. But not being anxious to offend the prophetess by an outright refusal, he countered with a less drastic proposal of his own calling for "an extensive well-balanced educational work... carried on by physicians and ministers instead of entering precipitately upon an Anti-Meat Pledge Campaign."⁴¹

Deferring to the president, Ellen White quietly withdrew her suggestion and took steps to prevent its publication. At the quadrennial session of the General Conference in 1909 she came out in support of Daniells's educational plan and pointedly discouraged any attempt to make the use of flesh food a "test of fellowship." Although her address closely paralleled her original communication to Daniells, there was no mention of a pledge this time. But the pledge episode did not end there. In 1911 some medical workers in California somehow obtained a copy of the March 29 letter and disclosed its contents at an Adventist camp meeting in Tulare. In harmony with its advice they circulated the following pledge: "In compliance with the revealed will of the Lord, and trusting in His help, we pledge ourselves to abstain from the use of tea, coffee, and flesh foods, including fish and fowl." Needless to say, this unauthorized version did not please either Mrs. White or her son Willie, who quickly saw to it that the pledge-signing movement died an early death.⁴²

Ellen White's twentieth-century health-reform revival differed in many respects from the crusade she had originally launched in the 1860s. In the case of meat, the focus shifted from its animalizing tendencies to the diseased condition of animals and the "moral evils of a flesh diet," an argument made by her Catholic admirer in Australia. Nowhere is this change in emphasis more apparent than in The Ministry of Healing (1905), her last major work on health. Among the "reasons for discarding flesh foods" one searches in vain for any of the old references to animal passions or sexuality. In their place are two other arguments: that meat transmits cancer, tuberculosis, and "other fatal diseases" to man and is thus unfit for human consumption; and that meat-eating is cruel to the animals and destroys man's tenderness. In Australia Mrs. White had adopted a mongrel dog named Tiglath Pileser, and in her old age she grew increasingly fond of the intelligent and affectionate members of the animal kingdom. The thought of eating any of them now repulsed her. "What man with a human heart, who has ever cared for domestic animals, could look into their eyes, so full of confidence and affection, and willingly give them over to the butcher's knife?" she asked with obvious emotion. "How could he devour their flesh as a sweet morsel?"⁴³

A similar evolution can be seen in her attitude toward eggs, butter, and other dairy products. In the early days she roundly condemned these items and indiscriminately lumped them together with meat and the poisonous narcotics. In 1872 she wrote:

We bear positive testimony against tobacco, spirituous liquors, snuff, tea, coffee, flesh-meats, butter, spices, rich cakes, mince pies, a large amount of salt, and all exciting substances used as articles of food.

But just nine years later she refused to classify meat, eggs, butter, and cheese with the poisonous narcotics:

Tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol we must present as sinful indulgences. We cannot place on the same ground, meat, eggs, butter, cheese and such articles placed upon the table.

By the turn of the century (1902) she was drawing a line between meat, on one hand, and milk, eggs, and butter on the other, even allowing that the latter three might have a salutary effect:

Milk, eggs, and butter should not be classed with flesh-meat. In some cases the use of eggs is beneficial.

Again, in 1909, she cautiously recommended using eggs, butter, and milk to prevent malnutrition. By this time her greatest fear was the likelihood that these foods were diseased, not that they acted as aphrodisiacs.⁴⁴

Mrs. White's intellectual development created "a good deal of controversy" among those who found the notion of progressive revelation difficult to understand. The gradual acceptance of butter was particularly troublesome in view of her once uncompromising stand against its use. At a meeting in 1904 Willie White helpfully explained to his aging mother why she had formerly condemned but now condoned the consumption of this product:

Now, when that view was given you about butter [in 1863], there was presented to you the condition of things — people using butter full of germs. They were frying and cooking in it, and its use was deleterious. But later on, when our people studied into the principle of things, they found that while butter is not best, it may not be so bad as some other evils; and so in some cases they are using it.

Actually Mrs. White had not seen "germs" in 1863, only disease-producing humors. But in anachronistically substituting the more modern term, Willie was merely reflecting his mother's changing vocabulary. In her early writings she had described how flesh-meats filled the blood "with cancerous and scrofulous humors." Within a few decades, however, scientists like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch had convinced the world of the existence of germs, and Mrs. White's language changed accordingly. The familiar humors disappeared from her works, and she began writing instead of meat filling the body with "tuberculous and cancerous germs."⁴⁵

Many factors had a moderating effect on Mrs. White's dietary views. Her own struggle with meat had demonstrated that thoroughgoing reform was not easy, and her family's experience had taught her the impossibility of making "one rule for all to follow." Fanatics in the church, who carried reform to extremes, had shown her the potential for harm. Travels in Europe and the South Pacific had impressed on her the importance of international differences in a church rapidly expanding beyond the bounds of North America. But most significant of all were her frequent contacts with the growing number of Adventist physicians, especially her friend John Kellogg. Until his expulsion from the church in 1907 (discussed in the following chapter), Dr. Kellogg made a point of supplying the prophetess with the latest data from his laboratories and apprising her of developments in medicine and nutrition. Whenever visiting Battle Creek, she stopped by the doctor's office to learn of any new scientific discoveries relating to health. At other times, she relied on his multitudinous publications or corresponded with him by mail. Whatever his influence on her, it certainly was not negligible.⁴⁶

Ellen White lived out her last years as a true health reformer, happily subsisting on a simple twice-a-day diet of vermicelli-tomato soup or thistle greens "seasoned with sterilized cream and lemon juice" — "horse feed" a companion good-naturedly called it. Meat, butter, and cheese never appeared on her table. She no longer objected to a moderate use of butter, but feared that if she ate a little, others would use it as an excuse to eat a lot. With the eating habits of a hundred thousand persons virtually hanging on her every bite, her fears were not unfounded. Once during an illness in Minneapolis she tried a small piece of cheese, only to have it "reported in large assemblies that Sister White eats cheese." It was taken for granted that whatever she ate, others were free to eat also. And at her age she had no desire to be a "stumbling block" to anyone.⁴⁷