As we now know, the ideal food for the present terrestrial civilised human being is absolutely not animal foodstuffs but is to be found among the vegetarian foods. Of these the edible fruit-flesh is the purest and noblest, but as it lies too high for the above-mentioned being, so that it cannot yet constitute one hundred per cent of his nutrition, he must also look to other vegetarian products to replace the missing percentage. These products can be divided into three categories, namely "grain products", "root products" and "leaf products". To the first category belong such products as are made from the kernels of plants, grains and nuts, such as bread, flour, meal, nutmeat, together with the various meat-free bean dishes, pea soups and so on. To the second category belong such products as are made from the roots of plants, which means dishes that are made from potatoes, carrots, parsnips, beetroots, celery or other edible roots. The third category includes all dishes that are made from leaves and stalks, for example salads, vegetable dishes, the various forms of meat-free cabbage dishes and the like.
      Individuals who want to leave animal nourishment will thus be referred to seek their nourishment among the above-mentioned products or dishes, which constitute the great connecting link between meat- and fruit-nourishment. To lay down what he should eat or preferably choose from these foods is not possible, for this can in the main be decided only by the individual himself. As the great majority of the people on the Earth are unhealthy and are therefore to be regarded only as "patients", it will be very individual what the various beings will be able to tolerate. What can be tolerated by one is very often very bad for another. Furthermore the mental attitude has a fundamental significance. The organism of the profoundly spiritually enlightened and loving being will in many cases be able to digest the strong, coarse root-products only with great difficulty, just as the same can also sometimes be true of the coarse nut- or kernel-products. Such an organism will therefore be able to tolerate only the more mild and refined sorts. It can therefore be recommended only that the beginner vegetarian carefully tries out and monitors the effects of this or that food made from vegetarian products in order to ascertain what for him or her is particularly appropriate or suitable. Every individual must carefully keep to the foods that cause him no inconvenience and whose digestion he, so to speak, does not notice. Here some will perhaps say that they can digest animal foods very well; but to this I must answer that it is really only a question of time how long they will have this ability, since it is due exclusively to the power of habit through inherited traditions. The loss of the energy that the individuals in question must supply when assimilating the animal nourishment in their organisms will sooner or later result in a reaction in the form of one organic illness or another.
      Kernel, root and leaf products contain to a certain degree, like the animal products, a series of A life-units, the nature of which is not, as previously mentioned, to be assimilated as nourishment in an organism. During the assimilation in the organism of the products mentioned there will therefore also be a certain resistance to overcome, since the organisms of the said life-units must first be killed and decomposed before the B life-units within them can be liberated and transferred alive to the organism as nourishment. As the A life-units in the plant substances are not nearly as numerous and not nearly as far advanced as the A life-units in the animal products, the smell of their process of decomposition or putrefaction is not nearly as pungent and penetrating as in the decomposition of animal products. This in turn means that the excrement is not nearly so stinking or poisonous after the eating of vegetarian products as it is after animal products. The killing principle is therefore far less extensive in vegetarian nourishment than in animal; it is not such a great violation of the fifth commandment as that, and is therefore to be considered to belong to a higher layer of consciousness.