On Thu, 17 Jul 1997, Brian Glass wrote:

> I am a Seventh-day Adventist (or at least my wife is and I put on a good
> show of it) and grew up an SDA and vegetarian.  I would like to point out
> that the SDA church does not "excommunicate" people.  Wrather it
> "disfellowships" people.  This is not quite as drastic as excommunication
> since you are not considered to be cut off from heaven and all.

You're right.  Kellogg was disfellowshiped, not excommunicated.
His sin was not his dietary teachings but his expressed
concern about rumors that some of Sister White's revelations were
plagiarized, and that she herself was enjoying meat when she was
a safe distance away from her flock.

> Anyway, my real question is, did your grandmother eat any of the typical
> SDA assortment of "vege-foods?"  Such things as "choplets" (mostly gluten),
> etc.?

Occasionally, but not on a regular basis.  When I was a kid I
went to SDA school and church for a while, and in the summer we
would attend a "campmeeting" in South Lancaster, MA.  There, the
cafeteria served only the various Loma Linda vege-burgers,
vege-links, and the like.  I particularly remember the
vege-links, which indeed tasted something like hot dogs, but had
the consistency of a banana.  The "chick-ettes", ersatz chicken
cutlets, were my favorite.  My grandmother would buy some of this
junk to take home with her, but didn't replenish her supply
during the year, so it was back to beans and rice very quickly.
My grandfather never did become a vegetarian, although his
consumption of meat was undoubtedly less than it would otherwise
have been.

> I used to sluff the stuff down like there was no tomorrow.

A little Adventist humor?

> I keep telling my parents (also SDA's) that vege-meat is much worse for
> them than real meat, but it's a religious thing so it's very hard to
> convice them.  It's next to impossible to get them to believe in
> paleolithic diets because the theory behind them goes completely against
> thier strict creationist belief system, and when reading any materials
> about these diets, the moment anything having to do with evolution shows
> up, the book goes out the window.  It's very frustrating.  How does one
> deal with this?

One wishes them well and leaves them alone.  If you are inclined
to accept an evolutionary picture of humanity, you must have
strayed pretty far from the fold yourself, unless the SDA church
has really loosened up since I was a kid.

> I have come up with an alternate theory that fits into the christian
> creationist belief system.  My theory is that the tree of life had high
> quality protein/fat growing on it.  And being the paradise that the Garden
> of Eden was, you wouldn't expect Adam and Eve to have to work to harvest
> grains.  So their diet must have been mostly fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds
> and this super protein fruit growing on the tree of life.

Try reading the Urantia Book, according to which Adam and Eve
were beings sent here to genetically uplift the species.  This
project went awry (consequence of the Lucifer Rebellion), leaving
us with population pockets of greater and lesser adaptation to
agricultural diet.  The idea is that the transition to
agricultural diet was supposed to be made possible by this
genetic uplift, without which it wouldn't work.  Because of the
Rebellion, we are left in the lurch.

And it must be true, because it was written by celestial beings.

Todd Moody
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