ut if milk is diseased, the butter and
cheese made from it must be diseased also.

But milk is sometimes diseased through the vegetables which are eaten by
the cow. Every one knows how readily the sensible properties of certain
acrid plants are perceived in the milk. Hence as I have elsewhere
intimated, we are doubly exposed to danger from eating animal food;
first, from the diseases of the animal itself, and secondly, from the
diseases which are liable to be induced upon us by the vegetables they
use, some of which are not poisonous to them, but are so to us. So that,
in avoiding animal food, we escape at least a part of the danger.

Besides the general fact, that almost all medical and dietetic writers
object to fat, and to butter among the rest, as difficult of digestion
and tending to cutaneous and other diseases,--and besides the general
admission in society at large that it makes the skin "break out,"--it
must be obvious that it is liable to retain, in a greater or less
degree, all the poisonous properties which existed in the milk from
which it was made. Next to fat pork, butter seems to me one of the worst
things that ever entered a human stomach; and if it will not, like pork,
quite cause the leprosy, it will cause almost every other skin disease
which is known.

Cheese is often poisoned now-a-days by design. I do not mean to say that
the act of poisoning is accompanied by malice toward mankind; far from
it. It is added to color it, as in the form of anatto; or to give it
freshness and tenderness, as in the case of arsenic.[21]

Eggs, when not fresh, are more or less liable to disease. I might even
say more. When not fresh, they _are_ diseased. On this point we have the
testimony of Drs. Willich and Dunglison. The truth is, that the yolk of
the egg has a strong tendency to decomposition, and this decomposing or
putrefying process _begins_ long before it is perceived, or even
suspected, by most people. There is much reason for believing that a
large proportion of the eggs eaten in civic life,--except when we keep
the poultry ourselves,--are, when used, more or less in a state of
decomposition. And yet, into how many hundred forms of food do they
enter in fashionable life, or in truth, in almost every condition of
society! The French cooks are said to have six hundred and eighty-five
methods of cooking the egg, including all the various sorts of pastry,
etc., of which it forms a component part.

One of the g