The Durham Daily Globe

VEGETARIAN FARE.
A WOMAN WHO EATS NO MEAT AND LIVES ON $1.30 A WEEK.
Mrs. Le Fevre, of New York, Tells About Her Diet of Nuts, Grains and Fruits.
It Is Really Very Attractive--Something About Those Who Eat Meat.

Why is it there are only about 200 vegetarians in New York city, less than the number in either Boston or Chicago? In the latter city visits to the sanguinary meat packing establishments have driven people to a non-meat diet, and there is a large and increasing class that forages upon the fruits, nuts and leaves of the earth.

These facts were communicated to me the other day by Mrs. Le Favre, the leader of New York's vegetarians, 200. She has not eaten meat for four years. A diet of nuts, fruits and seeds she claims is more wholesome and much cheaper than one composed of flesh. Her thirty day experiment of living on her favorite foods at the lowest possible cost was recently told of. She brought her table board down to $1.30 a week. She claims that with this she committed many gastronomical extravagances and that the price can be still further pared down.

Mrs. Le Favre goes a little further than most vegetarians in discarding roots and leaves altogether. The humble potato, the succulent lettuce and the homely cabbage are not to be found upon her bill of fare, nor will she partake of radishes, turnips, carrots or the many items usually so well relished that come under the head of roots or leaves.

She thinks that they are a very poor class of nourishment and intended only for horses and pigs, though under a vegetarian dispensation what the pigs are intended for it would be difficult to say. Some of the proprietors of vegetarian sanitariums who find potatoes somewhat cheap and excessively filling for their patients take issue with her on these points.

I don't think that Mrs. Le Favre is a very hearty eater, as eaters go, but she is very well nourished and does a vast amount of work for the fuel she consumes. I doubt if any meat eater of my acquaintance can do more labor of brain or muscle than she.

For her breakfast she eats cereal food, granula, wheatena, rice or corn. Of one of these things she takes a tablespoonful and a half, costing perhaps one cent, and cooks it. Then she has a cup of coffee, costing about one cent more, and a slice or two of whole grained bread at less than a penny a slice, and concludes the repast with an orange or banana. The quantities given are not large, but they can be increased to suit the appetite, and the heartiest eater, she thinks, couldn't very well make away with more than ten cents' worth.

The luncheon consists of a plate of lentil soup, a most nourishing dish, involving an outlay of about half a cent. This is followed by a vegetable of some sort well cooked, a few olives or nuts, two slices of bread, some fruit, canned cherries or something like that or pudding. The check for this meal would be seven or eight cents.

Supper is made up of whole grained or oatmeal bread, preserves, bananas or oranges and a little chocolate.

Once this anti-meat advocate saw a porter in the east carrying a large piano down the street on his shoulders. She became interested at once and wanted to find out what food would produce such enormous strength. She inquired and found that he lived chiefly on green cucumbers and garlic, and never devoured flesh at any time. Two-thirds of the people in the world—three-fourths some people assert—never eat meat and wouldn't know how to.

In Boston there are vegetarians of the second generation—that is, their parents had eaten no flesh for some years before they were born and they themselves have not broken their fast upon roasts and boileds. To these people the sight of a butcher's shop or a wagon load of deceased pigs is exceedingly repulsive.

There is no vegetarian restaurant in the United States, and the non-meat eaters want to start one in New York. London has at least forty places where one can dine upon the vegetable fat of the land without tasting flesh. The number and variety of dishes that are served in these places would startle the unsophisticated and shock a butcher.

Vegetarians everywhere realize that the best way to preach their doctrine is to induce people to eat one of their meals. Bachelors and spinsters bent on dietary reform and ignorant of cooking or perhaps not having a kitchen at their disposal, find it hard to board at a restaurant and not live on meat. They can live on apples, perhaps Mrs. Le Favre did once for two weeks and grew stout and healthy—but many of them might not care to.

"All the fighting of the world is done by meat eaters," said Mrs. Le Favre. "Flesh engenders a fierce restlessness which finds vent in war. Vegetarians, while they will work unceasingly, are not fighters, but they win their point by gentleness and persuasion.

"There is a constant craving for stimulant in a meat eater. Children fed on flesh swallow slate pencils and ashes. It is because their system calls out for the carbonates and lime of vegetables. Vegetarian children never eat their slate pencils.

"A square mile of land will sustain six times as many vegetarians as meat eaters. Think of the waste there is here! Meat is the most extravagant food we can use. The overcrowding of the earth will compel the universal adoption of vegetarianism.

"The roots and leaves I consider food for the lower animals. The pig grubs in the ground for his potatoes, but I don't. I pluck the rich, ripe grain, the nuts and the apple. I consider the apple the finest food there is. An electrician can arrange apples in a row and obtain a current of electricity from them. I think we should eat only the very best form of nourishment, and I consider that the nuts and fruits answer this requirement."
—New York Herald