A: Well, since God is intelligence and God is love, the attitude would have to be whatever is intelligent and loving. It would mean that a student, insofar as possible—well, let’s put it this way first: In the ordinary sense, take no thought what you shall eat, or what you shall drink. Whatever is set before you, eat it and drink it. But there is a secondary consideration, and that is that in our modern way of living, everything that is put in front of you isn’t food, even though it is dressed up as food on the table.
For instance, about two years ago, an attempt was made by the largest maker of breads, pies, and cakes in England—there’s one big firm that’s nationwide over there that does most of the bread, pie and cake baking for the whole nation—and they tried to expand into Scotland, and the government forbade them to come in there with their products. Why? All their products are made from American recipes, and they [the Scots] want none of it. They say, “Our people have to live on that stuff and be fed. You’ve taken the food out of it.” That’s wisdom. That’s wisdom. If you eat a lot of bread, you just can’t afford to depend on the bread that’s served you here, because our bread isn’t food. It’s bulk, but it’s not food.
So it is, when you go out to restaurants, you eat what’s set in front of you, because it can’t harm you. It isn’t a power. But neither would you want to spend your whole life eating that which isn’t even food. So in your home, you would have the intelligence to use bread or pies or cakes that were baked of flour or substances that had food value.
You already know that when you go into restaurants, most of the vegetables you eat are cooked out. You know there can’t be much food value; the food value is left in the water in the cooking pans. You know that when you cook in your own home, you cook your vegetables very quickly, and you serve them as promptly as you can, and the food value is still in them.
Well, insofar as possible then, it’s wise to give thought to seeing that the food is served that way. What I’m saying is that to the extent that intelligence is given you, eat intelligently. Eat what you know is good for you. That doesn’t mean to make a fetish of it and refuse to eat a piece of pie or a piece of cake or a donut, if you like it, but to keep the major part of your eating on as an intelligent level as you can.
On the subject of vitamins, if you find that you are not getting certain vitamins in your food, what difference does it make whether you take it in the form of food or in the form of a capsule or pill? It’s the same food; it comes from the same place. As long as we tabernacle in the flesh, we will have to eat, and what we eat will determine our comfort. It was proven generations ago that sailors who didn’t have certain foods got scurvy. The minute they were supplied with that food when they got on shore again, the scurvy disappeared.
We know that if you don’t eat certain foods, certain diseases of the body come from malnutrition. A report recently was issued on the mainland that said that more than twenty percent of all of the hospital beds in the United States were filled with people suffering from malnutrition. Now that did not mean poverty-stricken people, because poverty-stricken people can’t get into our hospitals. They’re not that cheap. Do you understand that? Malnutrition means the body is being deprived of certain foods that it needs, and you can bet that these twenty percent of the population are all people who are well fed, but they are not well fed from the standpoint of having quality food, regardless of quantity.
So if you do know of some particular deficiency in your system that you can’t supply with food, personally I can’t see the harm of making that up with vitamins or minerals, because the only alternative you have is if you find you haven’t enough, let us say, of whatever it is that Vitamin A is supposed to do, you’ll have to eat more of the food that has Vitamin A. Well, there you are.
I know that I get a great deal of joy, and I’m sure other benefits, from drinking carrot juice. I could get the same benefit from carrots, but I’d probably have to eat twenty of them, and that isn’t possible. Do you see what I mean? But I can drink the juice of twenty carrots, easily, quickly. I can’t see that it makes much difference whether I take the whole carrot or whether I take the carrot juice, as long as what I’m after is the food value of that carrot, or the food value of a steak. The question comes in there too, should you eat a steak? I don’t see that it makes any difference whether you eat the steak, or whether you eat the cheese, or you eat whatever it is that gives you the food value. Whichever you like, that’s the one to eat.
Naturally, your spiritual evolution will cut down on the amount of meat that you eat, and there will even be times when you can’t eat any meat. Well, when the time comes, you don’t violate that. You don’t eat any, or you cut down, and when you can eat it, you eat it again if you wish. If you don’t, there are substitutes, but you can’t fool yourself. Regardless of what you’re doing, you’re after that particular substance of that particular food. And so it is everybody that eats, eats because their body needs the particular substance of that food.
1This excerpt is from Recording 253A: 1959 Halekou Special Work, “Questions and Answers.” It is posted with kind permission from the Estate of Joel Goldsmith, which holds the copy protection on the recorded classes and the copyright on the transcripts. The full transcript of this recording is available at www.joelgoldsmith.com or by calling 1-800-922-3195.