REPEATING HISTORIES^345citizens should have the "luxury" of eating meat. Socrates replies, "if
you wish us also to contemplate a city that is suffering from inflam-
mation .... We shall also need great quantities of all kinds of cattle for
those who may wish to eat them, shall we not?"
Glaucon says, "Of course we shall." Socrates then says, "Then shall
we not experience the need of medical men also to a much greater ex-
tent under this than under the former regime?" Glaucon can't deny it.
"Yes, indeed," he says. Socrates goes on to say that this luxurious city
will be short of land because of the extra acreage required to raise ani-
mals for food. This shortage will lead the citizens to take land from oth-
ers, which could precipitate violence and war, thus a need for justice.
Furthermore, Socrates writes, "when dissoluteness and diseases abound
in a city, are not law courts and surgeries opened in abundance, and do
not Law and Physic begin to hold their heads high, when numbers even
of well-born persons devote themselves with eagerness to these profes-
sions?" In other words, in this luxurious city of sickness and disease,
lawyers and doctors will become the norm.^2
Plato, in this passage, made it perfectly clear: we shall eat animals
only at our own peril. Though it is indeed remarkable that one of the
greatest intellectuals in the history of the Western world condemned
meat eating almost 2,500 years ago, I find it even more remarkable that
few know about this history. Hardly anybody knows, for example, that
the father of Western medicine, Hippocrates, advocated diet as the chief
way to prevent and treat disease or that George Macilwain knew that
diet was the way to prevent and treat disease or that the man instru-
mental in founding the American Cancer Society, Frederick L. Hoffman,
knew that diet was the way to prevent and treat disease.
How did Plato predict the future so accurately? He knew that con-
suming animal foods would not lead to true health and prosperity. In-
stead, the false sense of rich luxury granted by being able to eat animals
would only lead to a culture of sickness, disease, land disputes, lawyers
and doctors. This is a pretty good description of some of the challenges
faced by modern America!
How did Seneca, one of the great scholars 2,000 years ago, a tutor
and advisor to Roman Emperor Nero, know with such certainty the
trouble with consuming animals when he wrote^2 :
An Ox is satisfied with the pasture of an acre or two: one wood
suffices for several Elephants. Man alone supports himself by the