When a man and a bear meet together casually in an American forest,
it makes a great deal of difference, to the two parties concerned at
least, whether the bear eats the man or the man eats the bear. We
haven’t the slightest difficulty in deciding afterwards which of the
two, in each particular case, has been the eater, and which the eaten.
Here, we say, is the grizzly that ate the man; or, here is the man
that smoked and dined off the hams of the grizzly. Basing our opinion
upon such familiar and well-known instances, we are apt to take it for
granted far too readily that between eating and being eaten, between
the active and the passive voice of the verb _edo_, there exists
necessarily a profound and impassable native antithesis. To swallow an
oyster is, in our own personal histories, so very different a thing
from being swallowed by a shark that we can hardly realise at first
the underlying fundamental identity of eating with mere coalescence.
And yet, at the very outset of the art of feeding, when the nascent
animal first began to indulge in this very essential animal practice,
one may fairly say that no practical difference as yet existed between
the creature that ate and the creature that was eaten. After the man
and the bear had finished their little meal, if one may be frankly
metaphorical, it was impossible to decide whether the remaining being
was the man or the bear, or which of the two had swallowed the other.
The dinner having been purely mutual, the resulting animal represented
both the litigants equally; just as, in cannibal New Zealand, the chief
who ate up his brother chief was held naturally to inherit the goods
and chattels of the vanquished and absorbed rival, whom he had thus
literally and physically incorporated.
A jelly-speck, floating about at his ease in a drop of stagnant water
under the field of a microscope, collides accidentally with another
jelly-speck who happens to be travelling in the opposite direction
across the same miniature ocean. What thereupon occurs? One jelly-speck
rolls itself gradually into the other, so that, instead of two,
there is now one: and the united body proceeds to float away quite
unconcernedly, without waiting to trouble itself for a second with
the profound metaphysical question, which half of it is the original
personality, and which half the devoured and digested. In these minute
and very simple animals there is absolutely no division of labor
between part and part; every bit of the jelly-like mass is alike head
and foot and mouth and stomach. The jelly-speck has no permanent limbs,
but it keeps putting forth vague arms and legs every now and then from
one side or the other; and with these temporary and ever-dissolving
members it crawls along merrily through its tiny drop of stagnant
water. If two of the legs or arms happen to knock up casually against
one another, they coalesce at once, just like two drops of water on
a window-pane, or two strings of treacle slowly spreading along the
surface of a plate. When the jelly-speck meets any edible thing—a
bit of dead plant, a wee creature like itself, a microscopic egg—it
proceeds to fold its own substance slimily around it, making, as
it were, a temporary mouth for the purpose of swallowing it, and a
temporary stomach for the purpose of quietly digesting and assimilating
it afterwards. Thus what at one moment is a foot may at the next moment
become a mouth, and at the moment after that again a rudimentary
stomach. The animal has no skin and no body, no outside and no inside,
no distinction of parts or members, no individuality, no identity.
Roll it up into one with another of its kind, and it couldn’t tell you
itself a minute afterwards which of the two it had really been a minute
before. The question of personal identity is here considerably mixed.
But as soon as we get to rather larger creatures of the same type,
the antithesis between the eater and the eaten begins to assume
a more definite character. The big jelly-bag approaches a good
many smaller jelly-bags, microscopic plants, and other appropriate
foodstuffs, and, surrounding them rapidly with its crawling arms,
envelops them in its own substance, which closes behind them and
gradually digests them. Everybody knows, by name at least, that
revolutionary and evolutionary hero, the amœba—the terror of
theologians, the pet of professors, and the insufferable bore of
the general reader. Well, this parlous and subversive little animal
consists of a comparatively large mass of soft jelly, pushing forth
slender lobes, like threads or fingers, from its own substance, and
gliding about, by means of these tiny legs, over water-plants and
other submerged surfaces. But though it can literally turn itself
inside out, like a glove, it still has some faint beginnings of a
mouth and stomach, for it generally takes in food and absorbs water
through a particular part of its surface, where the slimy mass of its
body is thinnest. Thus the amœba may be said really to eat and drink,
though quite devoid of any special organs for eating or drinking.
The particular point to which I wish to draw attention here, however,
is this: that even the very simplest and most primitive animals do
discriminate somehow between what is eatable and what isn’t. The
amœba has no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no tongue, no nerves of taste,
no special means of discrimination of any kind; and yet, so long as it
meets only grains of sand or bits of shell, it makes no effort in any
way to swallow them; but the moment it comes across a bit of material
fit for its food, it begins at once to spread its clammy fingers around
the nutritious morsel. The fact is, every part of the amœba’s body
apparently possesses, in a very vague form, the first beginnings of
those senses which in us are specialised and confined to a single spot.
And it is because of the light which the amœba thus incidentally
casts upon the nature of the specialised senses in higher animals that
I have ventured once more to drag out of the private life of his native
pond that already too notorious and obtrusive rhizopod.
With us lordly human beings, at the extreme opposite end in the scale
of being from the microscopic jelly-specks, the art of feeding and the
mechanism which provides for it have both reached a very high state of
advanced perfection. We have slowly evolved a tongue and palate on the
one hand, and French cooks and _pâté de foie gras_ on the other. But
while everybody knows practically how things taste to us, and which
things respectively we like and dislike, comparatively few people ever
recognize that the sense of taste is not merely intended as a source of
gratification, but serves a useful purpose in our bodily economy, in
informing us what we ought to eat and what to refuse. Paradoxical as it
may sound at first to most people, nice things are, in the main, things
that are good for us, and nasty things are poisonous or otherwise
injurious. That we often practically find the exact contrary the case
(alas!) is due, not to the provisions of nature, but to the artificial
surroundings in which we live, and to the cunning way in which we
flavor up unwholesome food, so as to deceive and cajole the natural
palate. Yet, after all, it is a pleasant gospel that what we like is
really good for us, and, when we have made some small allowances for
artificial conditions, it is in the main a true one also.
The sense of taste, which in the lowest animals is diffused equally
over the whole frame, is in ourselves and other higher creatures
concentrated in a special part of the body, namely the mouth, where the
food about to be swallowed is chewed and otherwise prepared beforehand
for the work of digestion. Now it is, of course, quite clear that
some sort of supervision must be exercised by the body over the kind
of food that is going to be put into it. Common experience teaches
us that prussic acid and pure opium are undesirable food stuffs in
large quantities; that raw spirits, petroleum, and red lead should be
sparingly partaken of by the judicious feeder; and that even green
fruit, the bitter end of cucumber, and the berries of deadly nightshade
are unsatisfactory articles of diet when continuously persisted in.
If, at the very outset of our digestive apparatus, we hadn’t a sort of
automatic premonitory adviser upon the kinds of food we ought or ought
not to indulge in, we should naturally commit considerable imprudences
in the way of eating and drinking—even more than we do at present.
Natural selection has therefore provided us with a fairly efficient
guide in this respect in the sense of taste, which is placed at the
very threshold, as it were, of our digestive mechanism. It is the duty
of taste to warn us against uneatable things, and to recommend to our
favorable attention eatable and wholesome ones; and, on the whole,
in spite of small occasional remissness, it performs its duty with
creditable success.
Taste, however, is not equally distributed over the whole surface of
the tongue alike. There are three distinct regions or tracts, each
of which has to perform its own special office and function. The tip
of the tongue is concerned mainly with pungent and acrid tastes; the
middle portion is sensitive chiefly to sweets and bitters; while the
back or lower portion confines itself almost entirely to the flavors of
roast meats, butter, oils, and other rich or fatty substances. There
are very good reasons for this subdivision of faculties in the tongue,
the object being, as it were, to make each piece of food undergo three
separate examinations (like “smalls,” “mods,” and “greats” at Oxford),
which must be successively passed before it is admitted into full
participation in the human economy. The first examination, as we shall
shortly see, gets rid at once of substances which would be actively
and immediately destructive to the very tissues of the mouth and body;
the second discriminates between poisonous and chemically harmless
foodstuffs; and the third merely decides the minor question whether
the particular food is likely to prove then and there wholesome or
indigestible to the particular person. The sense of taste proceeds,
in fact, upon the principle of gradual selection and elimination;
it refuses first what is positively destructive, next what is more
remotely deleterious, and finally what is only undesirable or
over-luscious.
When we want to assure ourselves, by means of taste, about an unknown
object—say a lump of some white stuff, which may be crystal, or glass,
or alum, or borax, or quartz, or rocksalt—we put the tip of the tongue
against it gingerly. If it begins to burn us, we draw it away more or
less rapidly, with an accompaniment in language strictly dependent
upon our personal habits and manners. The test we thus occasionally
apply, even in the civilised adult state, to unknown bodies is one that
is being applied every day and all day long by children and savages.
Unsophisticated humanity is constantly putting everything it sees up to
its mouth in a frank spirit of experimental inquiry as to its gustatory
properties. In civilised life, we find everything ready labelled and
assorted for us; we comparatively seldom require to roll the contents
of a suspicious bottle (in very small quantities) doubtfully upon the
tongue in order to discover whether it is pale sherry or Chili vinegar,
Dublin stout or mushroom ketchup. But in the savage state, from which,
geologically and biologically speaking, we have only just emerged,
bottles and labels do not exist. Primitive man, therefore, in his sweet
simplicity, has only two modes open before him for deciding whether the
things he finds are or are not strictly edible. The first thing he does
is to sniff at them, and smell being, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has well
put it, an anticipatory taste, generally gives him some idea of what
the thing is likely to prove. The second thing he does is to pop
it into his mouth, and proceed practically to examine its further
characteristics.
Strictly speaking with the tip of the tongue one can’t really taste at
all. If you put a small drop of honey or of oil of bitter almonds on
that part of the mouth, you will find (no doubt to your great surprise)
that it produces no effect of any sort; you only taste it when it
begins slowly to diffuse itself, and reaches the true tasting region
in the middle distance. But if you put a little cayenne or mustard
on the same part, you will find that it bites you immediately—the
experiment should be tried sparingly—while, if you put it lower down
in the mouth you will swallow it almost without noticing the pungency
of the stimulant. The reason is, that the tip of the tongue is supplied
only with nerves which are really nerves of touch, not nerves of taste
proper; they belong to a totally different main branch, and they go
to a different centre in the brain, together with the very similar
threads which supply the nerves of smell for mustard and pepper. That
is why the smell and taste of these pungent substances are so much
alike, as everybody must have noticed; a good sniff at a mustard-pot
producing almost the same irritating effects as an incautious mouthful.
As a rule, we don’t accurately distinguish, it is true, between these
different regions of taste in the mouth in ordinary life; but that is
because we usually roll our food about instinctively, without paying
much attention to the particular part affected by it. Indeed, when one
is trying deliberate experiments in the subject, in order to test the
varying sensitiveness of the different parts to different substances,
it is necessary to keep the tongue quite dry, in order to isolate the
thing you are experimenting with, and prevent its spreading to all
parts of the mouth together. In actual practice this result is obtained
in a rather ludicrous manner—by blowing upon the tongue, between each
experiment, with a pair of bellows. To such undignified expedients does
the pursuit of science lead the ardent modern psychologist. These
domestic rivals of Dr. Forbes Winslow, the servants, who behold the
enthusiastic investigator alternately drying his tongue in this
ridiculous fashion, as if he were a blacksmith’s fire, and then
squeezing out a single drop of essence of pepper, vinegar, or beef-tea
from a glass syringe upon the dry surface, not unnaturally arrive at
the conclusion that master has gone stark mad, and that, in their
private opinion, it’s the microscope and the skeleton as has done it.
Above all things, we don’t want to be flayed alive. So the kinds of
tastes discriminated by the tip of the tongue are the pungent, like
pepper, cayenne, and mustard; the astringent, like borax and alum;
the alkaline, like soda and potash; the acid, like vinegar and green
fruit; and the saline, like salt and ammonia. Almost all the bodies
likely to give rise to such tastes (or, more correctly, sensations
of touch in the tongue) are obviously unwholesome and destructive
in their character, at least when taken in large quantities. Nobody
wishes to drink nitric acid by the quart. The first business of this
part of the tongue is, therefore, to warn us emphatically against
caustic substances and corrosive acids—against vitriol and kerosene,
spirits of wine and ether, capsicums and burning leaves or roots,
such as those of the common English lords-and-ladies. Things of this
sort are immediately destructive to the very tissues of the tongue
and palate; if taken incautiously in too large doses, they burn the
skin off the roof of the mouth; and when swallowed they play havoc,
of course, with our internal arrangements. It is highly advisable,
therefore, to have an immediate warning of these extremely dangerous
substances, at the very outset of our feeding apparatus.
This kind of taste hardly differs from touch or burning. The
sensibility of the tip of the tongue is only a very slight modification
of the sensibility possessed by the skin generally, and especially by
the inner folds over all delicate parts of the body. We all know that
common caustic burns us wherever it touches; and it burns the tongue,
only in a somewhat more marked manner. Nitric or sulphuric acid attacks
the fingers each after its own kind. A mustard plaster makes us tingle
almost immediately; and the action of mustard on the tongue hardly
differs, except in being more instantaneous and more discriminative.
Cantharides work in just the same way. If you cut a red pepper in
two and rub it on your neck it will sting you just as it does when
put into soup (this experiment, however, is best tried upon one’s
younger brother; if made personally, it hardly repays the trouble and
annoyance). Even vinegar and other acids, rubbed into the skin, are
followed by a slight tingling; while the effect of brandy, applied,
say, to the arms, is gently stimulating and pleasurable, somewhat
in the same way as when normally swallowed in conjunction with the
habitual seltzer. In short, most things which give rise to distinct
tastes when applied to the tip of the tongue, give rise to fainter
sensations when applied to the skin generally. And one hardly needs
to be reminded that pepper or vinegar placed (accidentally as a rule)
on the inner surface of the eyelids produces a very distinct and
unpleasant smart.
The fact is, the liability to be chemically affected by pungent or
acid bodies is common to every part of the skin; but it is least felt
where the tough outer skin is thickest, and most felt where that skin
is thinnest, and the nerves are most plentifully distributed near the
surface. A mustard plaster would probably fail to draw at all on one’s
heel or the palm of one’s hand; while it is decidedly painful on one’s
neck or chest; and a mere speck of mustard inside the eyelid gives one
positive torture for hours together. Now the tip of the tongue is just
a part of one’s body specially set aside for this very object, provided
with an extremely thin skin, and supplied with an immense number of
nerves, on purpose so as to be easily affected by all such pungent,
alkaline, or spirituous substances. Sir Wilfrid Lawson would probably
conclude that it was deliberately designed by Providence to warn us
against a wicked indulgence in the brandy and seltzer aforesaid.
At first sight it might seem as though there were hardly enough of such
pungent and fiery things in existence to make it worth while for us to
be provided with a special mechanism for guarding against them. That is
true enough, no doubt, as regards our modern civilized life; though,
even now, it is perhaps just as well that our children should have an
internal monitor (other than conscience) to dissuade them immediately
from indiscriminate indulgence in photographic chemicals, the contents
of stray medicine bottles, and the best dried West India chilies. But
in an earlier period of progress, and especially in tropical countries
(where the Darwinians have now decided the human race made its first
_début_ upon this or any other stage), things were very different
indeed. Pungent and poisonous plants and fruits abounded on every
side. We have all of us in our youth been taken in by some too cruelly
waggish companion, who insisted upon making us eat the bright, glossy
leaves of the common English arum, which without look pretty and juicy
enough, but within are full of the concentrated essence of pungency
and profanity. Well, there are hundreds of such plants, even in cold
climates, to tempt the eyes and poison the veins of unsuspecting cattle
or childish humanity. There is buttercup, so horribly acrid that cows
carefully avoid it in their closest cropped pastures; and yet your cow
is not usually a too dainty animal. There is aconite, the deadly poison
with which Dr. Lamson removed his troublesome relatives. There is
baneberry, whose very name sufficiently describes its dangerous nature.
There are horseradish, and stinging rocket, and biting wall-pepper,
and still smarter water-pepper, and wormwood, and nightshade, and
spurge, and hemlock, and half a dozen equally unpleasant weeds. All of
these have acquired their pungent and poisonous properties, just as
nettles have acquired their sting, and thistles their thorns, in order
to prevent animals from browsing upon them and destroying them. And
the animals in turn have acquired a very delicate sense of pungency
on purpose to warn them beforehand of the existence of such dangerous
and undesirable qualities in the plants which they might otherwise be
tempted incautiously to swallow.
In tropical woods, where our “hairy quadrumanous ancestor” (Darwinian
for the primæval monkey, from whom we are presumably descended) used
playfully to disport himself, as yet unconscious of his glorious
destiny as the remote progenitor of Shakespeare, Milton, and the late
Mr. Peace—in tropical woods, such acid or pungent fruits and plants
are particularly common, and correspondingly annoying. The fact is, our
primitive forefather and all the other monkeys are, or were, confirmed
fruit-eaters. But to guard against their depredations a vast number
of tropical fruits and nuts have acquired disagreeable or fiery rinds
and shells, which suffice to deter the bold aggressor. It may not be
nice to get your tongue burnt with a root or fruit, but it is at least
a great deal better than getting poisoned; and, roughly speaking,
pungency in external nature exactly answers to the rough gaudy labels
which some chemists paste on bottles containing poisons. It means to
say, “This fruit or leaf, if you eat it in any quantities, will kill
you.” That is the true explanation of capsicums, pimento, colocynth,
croton oil, the upas tree, and the vast majority of bitter, acrid,
or fiery fruits and leaves. If we had to pick up our own livelihood,
as our naked ancestors had to do, from roots, seeds, and berries,
we should far more readily appreciate this simple truth. We should
know that a great many more plants than we now suspect are bitter or
pungent, and therefore poisonous. Even in England we are familiar
enough with such defences as those possessed by the outer rind of the
walnut; but the tropical cashewnut has a rind so intensely acrid that
it blisters the lips and fingers instantaneously, in the same way
as cantharides would do. I believe that on the whole, taking nature
throughout, more fruits and nuts are poisonous, or intensely bitter, or
very fiery, than are sweet, luscious, and edible.
“But,” says that fidgety person, the hypothetical objector (whom one
always sets up for the express purpose of promptly knocking him down
again), “if it be the business of the forepart of the tongue to warn us
against pungent and acrid substances, how comes it that we purposely
use such things as mustard, pepper, curry-powder, and vinegar?” Well,
in themselves all these things are, strictly speaking, bad for us;
but in small quantities they act as agreeable stimulants; and we take
care in preparing most of them to get rid of the most objectionable
properties. Moreover, we use them, not as foods, but merely as
condiments. One drop of oil of capsicum is enough to kill a man, if
taken undiluted; but in actual practice we buy it in such a very
diluted form that comparatively little harm arises from using it.
Still, very young children dislike all these violent stimulants, even
in small quantities; they won’t touch mustard, pepper, or vinegar, and
they recoil at once from wine or spirits. It is only by slow degrees
that we learn these unnatural tastes, as our nerves get blunted and
our palates jaded; and we all know that the old Indian who can eat
nothing but dry curries, devilled biscuits, anchovy paste, pepper-pot,
mulligatawny soup, Worcestershire sauce, preserved ginger, hot pickles,
fiery sherry, and neat cognac, is also a person with no digestion, a
fragmentary liver, and very little chance of getting himself accepted
by any safe and solvent insurance office. Throughout, the warning
in itself is a useful one; it is we who foolishly and persistently
disregard it. Alcohol, for example, tells us at once that it is bad
for us; yet we manage so to dress it up with flavoring matters and
dilute it with water that we overlook the fiery character of the spirit
itself. But that alcohol is in itself a bad thing (when freely indulged
in) has been so abundantly demonstrated in the history of mankind that
it hardly needs any further proof.
The middle region of the tongue is the part with which we experience
sensations of taste proper—that is to say, of sweetness and
bitterness. In a healthy, natural state all sweet things are pleasant
to us, and all bitters (even if combined with sherry) unpleasant. The
reason for this is easy enough to understand. It carries us back at
once into those primæval tropical forests where our “hairy ancestor”
used to diet himself upon the fruits of the earth in due season.
Now, almost all edible fruits, roots, and tubers contain sugar; and
therefore the presence of sugar is, in the wild condition, as good a
rough test of whether anything is good to eat as one could easily find.
In fact, the argument cuts both ways: edible fruits are sweet because
they are intended for man and other animals to eat; and man and other
animals have a tongue pleasurably affected by sugar because sugary
things in nature are for them in the highest degree edible. Our early
progenitors formed their taste upon oranges, mangoes, bananas, and
grapes; upon sweet potatoes, sugar-cane, dates, and wild-honey. There
is scarcely anything fitted for human food in the vegetable world (and
our earliest ancestors were most undoubted vegetarians), which does
not contain sugar in considerable quantities. In temperate climates
(where man is but a recent intruder), we have taken, it is true, to
regarding wheaten bread as the staff of life; but in our native tropics
enormous populations still live almost exclusively upon plantains,
bananas, breadfruit, yams, sweet potatoes, dates, cocoanuts, melons,
cassava, pineapples, and figs. Our nerves have been adapted to the
circumstances of our early life as a race in tropical forests; and we
still retain a marked liking for sweets of every sort. Not content with
our strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, currants, apples, pears,
cherries, plums, and other northern fruits, we ransack the world for
dates, figs, raisins, and oranges. Indeed, in spite of our acquired
meat-eating propensities, it may be fairly said that fruits and seeds
(including wheat, rice, peas, beans, and other grains and pulse) still
form by far the most important element in the foodstuffs of human
populations generally.
But besides the natural sweets, we have also taken to producing
artificial ones. Has any housewife ever realised the alarming condition
of cookery in the benighted generations before the invention of sugar?
It is really almost too appalling to think about. So many things that
we now look upon as all but necessaries—cakes, puddings, made dishes,
confectionery, preserves, sweet biscuits, jellies, cooked fruits,
tarts, and so forth—were then practically quite impossible. Fancy
attempting nowadays to live a single day without sugar; no tea, no
coffee, no jam, no pudding, no cake, no sweets, no hot toddy before one
goes to bed; the bare idea of it is too terrible. And yet that was
really the abject condition of all the civilised world up to the middle
ages. Horace’s punch was sugarless and lemonless; the gentle Virgil
never tasted the congenial cup of afternoon tea; and Socrates went from
his cradle to his grave without ever knowing the flavor of peppermint
bull’s eyes. How the children managed to spend their Saturday _as_, or
their weekly _obolus_, is a profound mystery. To be sure, people had
honey; but honey is rare, dear, and scanty; it can never have filled
one quarter the place that sugar fills in our modern affections. Try
for a moment to realise drinking honey with one’s whiskey-and-water,
or doing the year’s preserving with a pot of best Narbonne, and you
get at once a common measure of the difference between the two as
practical sweeteners. Nowadays, we get sugar from cane and beetroot in
abundance, while sugar-maples and palm-trees of various sorts afford
a considerable supply to remoter countries. But the childhood of the
little Greeks and Romans must have been absolutely unlighted by a
single ray of joy from chocolate creams or Everton toffee.
The consequence of this excessive production of sweets in modern times
is, of course, that we have begun to distrust the indications afforded
us by the sense of taste in this particular as to the wholesomeness
of various objects. We can mix sugar with anything we like, whether
it had sugar in it to begin with or otherwise; and by sweetening and
flavoring we can give a false palatableness to even the worst and most
indigestible rubbish, such as plaster-of-Paris, largely sold under the
name of sugared almonds to the ingenuous youth of two hemispheres.
But in untouched nature the test rarely or never fails. As long as
fruits are unripe and unfit for human food, they are green and sour;
as soon as they ripen they become soft and sweet, and usually acquire
some bright color as a sort of advertisement of their edibility. In
the main, bar the accidents of civilisation, whatever is sweet is good
to eat—nay more, is meant to be eaten; it is only our own perverse
folly that makes us sometimes think all nice things bad for us, and all
wholesome things nasty. In a state of nature, the exact opposite is
really the case. One may observe, too, that children, who are literally
young savages in more senses than one, stand nearer to the primitive
feeling in this respect than grown-up people. They unaffectedly like
sweets; adults, who have grown more accustomed to the artificial meat
diet, don’t as a rule, care much for puddings, cakes, and made dishes.
(May I venture parenthetically to add, any appearance to the contrary
notwithstanding, that I am not a vegetarian, and that I am far from
desiring to bring down upon my devoted head the imprecation pronounced
against the rash person who would rob a poor man of his beer. It is
quite possible to believe that vegetarianism was the starting-point of
the race, without wishing to consider it also as the goal; just as it
is quite possible to regard clothes as purely artificial products of
civilization, without desiring personally to return to the charming
simplicity of the Garden of Eden.)
Bitter things in nature at large, on the contrary, are almost
invariably poisonous. Strychnia, for example, is intensely bitter,
and it is well known that life cannot be supported on strychnia alone
for more than a few hours. Again, colocynth and aloes are far from
being wholesome food stuffs, for a continuance; and the bitter end of
cucumber does not conduce to the highest standard of good living. The
bitter matter in decaying apples is highly injurious when swallowed,
which it isn’t likely to be by anybody who ever tastes it. Wormwood and
walnut-shells contain other bitter and poisonous principles; absinthe,
which is made from one of them, is a favorite slow poison with the
fashionable young men of Paris, who wish to escape prematurely from “Le
monde où l’on s’ennuie.” But prussic acid is the commonest component in
all natural bitters, being found in bitter almonds, apple pippins, the
kernels of mango-stones, and many other seeds and fruits. Indeed, one
may say roughly that the object of nature generally is to prevent the
actual seeds of edible fruits from being eaten and digested; and for
this purpose, while she stores the pulp with sweet juices, she encloses
the seed itself in hard stony coverings, and makes it nasty with bitter
essences. Eat an orange pip, and you will promptly observe how
effectual is this arrangement. As a rule, the outer rind of nuts is
bitter, and the inner kernel of edible fruits. The tongue thus warns us
immediately against bitter things, as being poisonous, and prevents us,
automatically, from swallowing them.
“But how is it,” asks our objector again, “that so many poisons are
tasteless, or even, like sugar of lead, pleasant to the palate?”
The answer is (you see, we knock him down again, as usual) because
these poisons are themselves for the most part artificial products;
they do not occur in a state of nature, at least in man’s ordinary
surroundings. Almost every poisonous thing that we are really liable to
meet with in the wild state we are warned against at once by the sense
of taste; but of course it would be absurd to suppose that natural
selection could have produced a mode of warning us against poisons
which have never before occurred in human experience. One might just
as well expect that it should have rendered us dynamite-proof, or have
given us a skin like the hide of a rhinoceros to protect us against the
future contingency of the invention of rifles.
Sweets and bitters are really almost the only tastes proper, almost
the only ones discriminated by this central and truly gustatory
region of the tongue and palate. Most so-called flavorings will be
found on strict examination to be nothing more than mixtures with
these of certain smells or else of pungent, salty, or alkaline
matters, distinguished as such by the tip of the tongue. For instance,
paradoxical as it sounds to say so, cinnamon has really no taste at
all, but only a smell. Nobody will ever believe this on first hearing,
but nothing on earth is easier than to put it to the test. Take a small
piece of cinnamon, hold your nose tightly, rather high up, between
the thumb and finger, and begin chewing it. You will find that it is
absolutely tasteless; you are merely chewing a perfectly insipid bit
of bark. Then let go your nose, and you will find immediately that it
“tastes” strongly, though in reality it is only the perfume from it
that you now permit to rise into the smelling-chamber in the nose. So,
again, cloves have only a pungent taste and a peculiar smell, and the
same is the case more or less with almost all distinctive flavorings.
When you come to find of what they are made up, they consist generally
of sweets or bitters, intermixed with certain ethereal perfumes, or
with pungent or acid tastes, or with both or several such together.
In this way, a comparatively small number of original elements,
variously combined, suffice to make up the whole enormous mass of
recognisably different tastes and flavors.
The third and lowest part of the tongue and throat is the seat of
those peculiar tastes to which Professor Bain, the great authority
upon this important philosophical subject, has given the names of
relishes and disgusts. It is here, chiefly, that we taste animal food,
fats, butters, oils, and the richer class of vegetables and made
dishes. If we like them, we experience a sensation which may be called
a relish, and which induces one to keep rolling the morsel farther
down the throat, till it passes at last beyond the region of our
voluntary control. If we don’t like them, we get the sensation which
may be called a disgust, and which is very different from the mere
unpleasantness of excessively pungent or bitter things. It is far less
of an intellectual and far more of a physical and emotional feeling. We
say, and say rightly, of such things that we find it hard to swallow
them; a something within us (of a very tangible nature) seems to rise
up bodily and protest against them. As a very good example of this
experience, take one’s first attempt to swallow cod-liver oil. Other
things may be unpleasant or unpalatable, but things of this class are
in the strictest sense nasty and disgusting.
The fact is, the lower part of the tongue is supplied with nerves in
close sympathy with the digestion. If the food which has been passed by
the two previous examiners is found here to be simple and digestible,
it is permitted to go on unchallenged; if it is found to be too rich,
too bilious, or too indigestible, a protest is promptly entered against
it, and if we are wise we will immediately desist from eating any more
of it. It is here that the impartial tribunal of nature pronounces
definitely against roast goose, mince pies, _pâté de foie gras_, sally
lunn, muffins and crumpets, and creamy puddings. It is here, too, that
the slightest taint in meat, milk, or butter is immediately detected;
that rancid pastry from the pastrycook’s is ruthlessly exposed, and
that the wiles of the fishmonger are set at naught by the judicious
palate. It is the special duty, in fact, of this last examiner to
discover, not whether food is positively destructive, not whether it is
poisonous or deleterious in nature, but merely whether it is then and
there digestible or undesirable.
As our state of health varies greatly from time to time, however, so
do the warnings of this last sympathetic adviser change and flicker.
Sweet things are always sweet, and bitter things always bitter; vinegar
is always sour, and ginger always hot in the mouth, too, whatever our
state of health or feeling; but our taste for roast loin of mutton,
high game, salmon cutlets, and Gorgonzola cheese varies immensely
from time to time, with the passing condition of our health and
digestion. In illness, and especially in sea-sickness, one gets the
taste carried to the extreme: you may eat grapes or suck an orange in
the chops of the Channel, but you do not feel warmly attached to the
steward who offers you a basin of greasy ox-tail, or consoles you with
promises of ham sandwiches in half a minute. Under those too painful
conditions it is the very light, fresh, and stimulating things that
one can most easily swallow—champagne, soda-water, strawberries,
peaches, not lobster salad, sardines on toast, green Chartreuse, or hot
brandy-and-water. On the other hand, in robust health, and when hungry
with exercise, you can eat fat pork with relish on a Scotch hillside,
or dine off fresh salmon three days running without inconvenience. Even
a Spanish stew, with plenty of garlic in it, and floating in olive
oil, tastes positively delicious after a day’s mountaineering in the
Pyrenees.
The healthy popular belief, still surviving in spite of cookery, that
our likes and dislikes are the best guide to what is good for us, finds
its justification in this fact, that whatever is relished will prove on
the average wholesome, and whatever rouses disgust will prove on the
whole indigestible. Nothing can be more wrong, for example, than to
make children eat fat when they don’t want it. A healthy child likes
fat, and eats as much of it as he can get. If a child shows signs of
disgust at fat, that proves that it is of a bilious temperament, and it
ought never to be forced into eating it against its will. Most of us
are bilious in after life just because we were compelled to eat rich
food in childhood, which we felt instinctively was unsuitable for us.
We might still be indulging with impunity in thick turtle, canvas-back
ducks, devilled white-bait, meringues, and Nesselrode puddings, if we
hadn’t been so persistently overdosed in our earlier years with things
that we didn’t want and knew were indigestible.
Of course, in our existing modern cookery, very few simple and
uncompounded tastes are still left to us; everything is so mixed up
together that only by an effort of deliberate experiment can one
discover what are the special effects of special tastes upon the tongue
and palate. Salt is mixed with almost everything we eat—_sal sapit
omnia_—and pepper or cayenne is nearly equally common. Butter is put
into the peas, which have been previously adulterated by being boiled
with mint; and cucumber is unknown except in conjunction with oil
and vinegar. This makes it comparatively difficult for us to realise
the distinctness of the elements which go to make up most tastes as
we actually experience them. Moreover, a great many eatable objects
have hardly any taste of their own, properly speaking, but only a
feeling of softness or hardness, or glutinousness in the mouth, mainly
observed in the act of chewing them. For example, plain boiled rice is
almost wholly insipid; but even in its plainest form salt has usually
been boiled with it, and in practice we generally eat it with sugar,
preserves, curry, or some other strongly flavored condiment. Again,
plain boiled tapioca and sago (in water) are as nearly tasteless as
anything can be; they merely yield a feeling of gumminess; but milk, in
which they are oftenest cooked, gives them a relish (in the sense here
restricted), and sugar, eggs, cinnamon, or nutmeg are usually added
by way of flavoring. Even turbot has hardly any taste proper, except
in the glutinous skin, which has a faint relish; the epicure values
it rather because of its softness, its delicacy, and its light flesh.
Gelatine by itself is merely very swallowable, we must mix sugar, wine,
lemon-juice, and other flavorings in order to make it into good jelly.
Salt, spices, essences, vanilla, vinegar, pickles, capers, ketchups,
sauces, chutneys, lime-juice, curry, and all the rest are just our
civilised expedients for adding the pleasure of pungency and acidity
to naturally insipid foods, by stimulating the nerves of touch in the
tongue, just as sugar is our tribute to the pure gustatory sense, and
oil, butter, bacon, lard, and the various fats used in frying to the
sense of relish which forms the last element in our compound taste.
A boiled sole is all very well when one is just convalescent, but in
robust health we demand the delights of egg and bread-crumb, which are,
after all only the vehicle for the appetising grease. Plain boiled
macaroni may pass muster in the unsophisticated nursery, but in the
pampered dining-room it requires the aid of toasted parmesan. Good
modern cookery is the practical result of centuries of experience in
this direction; the final flower of ages of evolution, devoted to the
equalisation of flavors in all human food. Think of the generations of
fruitless experiment that must have passed before mankind discovered
that mint sauce (itself a cunning compound of vinegar and sugar) ought
to be eaten with leg of lamb, that roast goose required a corrective in
the shape of apple, and that while a pre-established harmony existed
between salmon and lobster, oysters were ordained beforehand by nature
as the proper, accompaniment of boiled cod. Whenever I reflect upon
such things, I become at once a good Positivist, and offer up praise
in my own private chapel to the Spirit of Humanity which has slowly
perfected these profound rules of good living.—_Cornhill Magazine._