Questions Regarding Nutrition in the Light of Spiritual Science

Let us now assume that human beings enter into a relationship with the animal world through food. Then the situation is different. In the creature from which they obtain their food, the process has already been completed in a certain sense. What they otherwise obtain in a virgin and fresh state from plants has already been partially transformed and prepared in animals. For the animal, too, is already incorporating an astral body and a nervous system. So humans then take in something that does not come to them in a virgin state, but has already undergone the process, has already absorbed astral forces. What lives in the animal already has developed astral forces within itself. Now one might believe that this would save humans work. But this idea is not entirely correct. Consider the following: I build a house from various materials. I take the original materials. Then I can build the house entirely according to my original intentions. But suppose three or four other people have already worked on it piece by piece, and now I am supposed to make a whole out of it. Will that make my work easier? No, certainly not. You will read in widely available literature that it makes work easier for people to take on something that has already been worked on. But it is precisely by taking on the original that people become more flexible and independent beings.