_The Friendly Sons of the Boiled Spinach_
My friend gave me the names of several men of acknowledged standing and
told me I should be making no mistake did I put myself in the hands of any
one on the list. I thanked him and departed from his presence. To the
casual eye I may have seemed, going away, to be in high spirits; but,
confidentially, I wasn't feeling so very brash. My spirits were low. I had
heard the truth--I made no effort to deceive myself there--but the truth
was painful.
Still, knowing what I should do, I hesitated, temporizing with myself. I
gave a couple of days of intensive meditation to the subject, and then I
reached this conclusion: I would read a few standard and orthodox works
on dietetics, and, so doing, try to arrive at least at a superficial
knowledge of the matter. Also, I would balance what one recognized
authority said as against what another recognized authority said, and
then, before going to a specialist, I would do a little personal
experimenting with my diet and mark the effects.
I arrived at this decision privately, taking no one into my confidence.
And without an intent to deprive any hard-worked specialist of a
prospective fee, I shall ever continue to believe that the second part of
the course I chose to follow was a wise one. It might not serve my
brother-in-obesity, but it served me well. I'm sure of that.
But the first part of the system naturally came first. This had to do with
research work among the best authorities. Here I struck one of the snags
that rise in the pathway of the hardy soul who goes adventuring into any
given department of the science of medicine and its allied sciences. I was
pained to observe how rare it was for two experts, of whatsoever period,
to agree upon a single essential element. An amateur investigator was left
at a loss to fathom why such entirely opposite conclusions should have
been arrived at by the members of the same school when presumably both had
had the same raw materials to work on. By their raw materials I mean their
patients. But so it was.
The ancient apostles of dietetics, the original pathfinders into a
hitherto untracked field, had disciples who set out to follow in their
footsteps, but before they had traveled very far along the alimentary
trail the disciples were quarreling bitterly with the masters' deductions
and conclusions. To-day's school was snooty touching on the major opinions
of yesterday's crowd, and to-morrow's crowd already made faces at
to-day's.
On just two points I found a unanimity of opinion among what might be
termed the middle group of dietetic explorers as counter-distinguished
from the pioneering cult and the modern or comparatively modern. Each one
was so absolutely certain that he was so absolutely right and so
absolutely certain that all his contemporaries were so absolutely wrong.
At the beginning, it seemed, a reduction of the sufferer's flesh had been
attempted by the simple device of bleeding him copiously--not with a
monthly statement, as latterly, but with a lancet. Abundant drinking of
vinegar also had been recommended as a means to accomplish the desired
end. They were noble drinkers in the olden times, but until I began
delving into literature of the subject I did not suspect that there had
been any out-and-out vinegar topers.
There was citation in an early work of the interesting case of the Marquis
of Cortona, a subchieftain under the Duke of Alva, and a fine fat old
butcher he must have been, too, by all tellings. Finding himself grown so
rotund that no longer could he enter with zest into the massacre bees and
torture outings which the Spaniards were carrying on in the harried
Netherlands, the marquis had recourse to vinegar; and so efficacious was
the treatment that, as the tradition runs, he soon could wrap his loosened
skin about him in great slack folds like a cloak, and thus, close-reefed,
go merrily murdering his way across the Low Countries.
One pictures the advantages accruing. In cold weather, now, he might
overlap his wrinkles in a clapboarded effect and save the expense of
laying in heavy underwear. True, this might give to the wearer a
clinker-built appearance; still it would keep him nice and warm, and no
doubt he had his armor on outside the rest of his things. But likewise
there must have been drawbacks. Suppose, now, the marquis were caught out
in blowy weather and the wind worked in under his tucks and the ratlines
pulled loose and, all full-rigged and helpless, bellying and billowing and
flapping and jibing, he went scudding against his will before the gale.
Could he hope to tack and go about before he blew clear over into the next
county? I doubt it.
And suppose he inflated himself for a party or a reception or something,
and a practical joker put a tack in a chair and he sat down on it and had
a blow-out. The thought is not a pretty one, yet the thing were possible.
From these crude beginnings I worked my way down toward the present day.
Doctor Banting, of England, the father of latter-day dietetics from whose
name in commemoration of his services to mankind we derive the verb
intransitive "to bant," had theories wherein his chief contemporaneous
German rival, Epstein the Bavarian, radically disagreed with him. Voit,
coming along subsequently, disagreed in important details with both. Among
the moderns I discerned where Dr. Woods Hutchinson had his pet ideas and
Doctor Wiley had his, diametrically opposed. So it went. There was almost
as much of disputation here as there is when a federation of women's
clubs is holding an annual election. It was all so very confusing to one
aiming to do the right thing.
One learned savant flatly laid down the ultimatum that the individual
seeking to reduce should cut out all pork products from chitterings clear
through the list to headcheese and give his undivided support to the red
meats and the white. One of his brethren was equally positive that I might
partake of bacon and even ham in moderation, but urged that I walk around
red meat as though it were a pesthouse. Yet a third--a foe, plainly, to
the butcher, but a well-wisher to the hay-and-produce dealer if ever one
lived--recommended that I should eliminate all meat of whatsoever
character or color and stick closely to fodder, roughage and processed
ensilage. I judge he sent his more desperate cases to a livery stable.
According to one dictum, bread was all right up to a certain point, and,
according to another, all wrong. This man here held a brief for beans,
especially the succulent baked bean; that man yonder served solemn warning
upon me that if perversely I persisted to continue to eat baked beans the
fat globules would form so fast I would have the sensation that a little
boy was inside of me somewhere blowing bubbles. The writer didn't exactly
say this, but it was the inference I drew from his remarks.
Eat dried fruits until your seams give, said Doctor A. Avoid dried fruits
as you would the plague, counseled the equally eminent Doctor B. Professor
C considered the drinking of water with meals highly inadvisable; whereas
Professor D said that without adding an extra ounce of weight I might
consume water until my fluid contents sloshed up and down in me when I
walked, and merely by getting a young lady in Oriental costume to stand
alongside me I might qualify at a Sunday-school entertainment for the
entire supporting cast of the familiar tableau entitled Rebecca at the
Well. He intimated that just so I stopped short of committing suicide as
an inside job all would be fine and dandy. I do not claim that these were
his words; this is the free interpretation of his meaning. Sink the knife
in the butter to the very hilt--there will be no ill effects but only a
beneficial outcome--declares such-and-such a food faddist. Eschew butter
by all means or accept the consequences, clarions an earnest voice. Well,
I never was much of a hand for eschewed butter anyway. We keep our own cow
and make our own butter and it seems to slip down, just so.
In the vegetable kingdom the controversy raged with unabated fury. The
boiled prune, blandest and most inoffensive of breakfast dishes, formed
the basis of a spirited debate. There were pro-prunists and there were
con-prunists. The parsnip had its champions and its antagonists; the
carrot its defenders and its assailants. In this quarter was the cabbage
heartily indorsed, there was it belittled and made naught of. The
sprightly spring onion, already socially scorned in some of the best lay
circles, suffered attack at the hands of at least one scientific and
scholarly professional.
After reading his strictures I remarked to myself that really there
remained but one field of useful popularity for the onion to adorn; in
time it might hope to supplant the sunflower as the floral emblem of
Kansas, as typifying a great political principle which originated in that
state: The Initiative, when one took a chance and ate a young onion; the
Referendum, while one's digestive apparatus wrestled with it; the Recall,
if it disagreed with one. Alone, of all the vegetables, stood spinach,
with not a single detractor. On this issue the vote in the affirmative
practically was by acclamation. I am tin position to state that boiled
spinach has not an enemy among the experts. This seems but fair--it has so
few friends among the eating public.
I observed much and confusing talk of the value of nitrogens, proteids
and--when I had reached the ultra-modernists--vitamines. Vitamines, I
gathered, had only recently been discovered, yet by the progressives they
were held to be of the supremest importance in the equation of properly
balanced human sustenance. To my knowledge I had never consciously eaten
vitamines unless a vitamine was what gave guaranteed strictly fresh string
beans, as served at a table-d'hôte restaurant, that peculiar flavor. Here
all along I had figured it was the tinny taste of the can, which shows how
ignorant one may be touching on vitally important matters. I visualized a
suitable luncheon for one banting according to the newest and most
generally approved formula:
=RELISH=
MIXED GELATINOIDS
=POTAGE=
STRAINED NITROGEN GUMBO
=ENTREE=
GRILLED PROTEIDS WITH GLOBULIN PATTIES
=DESSERT=
COMPOTE OF ASSORTED VITAMINES
Or the alternative course for one sincerely desirous of reducing, who
believed everything he saw in print, was to cut out all the proscribed
articles of food--which meant everything edible except spinach--and starve
gracefully on a diet composed exclusively of boiled spinach, with the
prospect of dying a dark green death in from three to six weeks and
providing one's own protective coloration if entombed in a cemetery
containing cedars.
Personally I was not favorably inclined toward either plan, so I elected
to let my conscience be my guide, backed by personal observation and
personal experimentation. I was traveling pretty constantly this past
spring, and in the smoking compartments of the Pullmans, where all men,
for some curious reason, grow garrulous and confidential, I put crafty
leading questions to such of my fellow travelers as were over-sized and
made mental notes of their answers for my own subsequent use. Since the
Eighteenth Amendment put the nineteenth hole out of commission,
prohibition and how to evade it are the commonest of all conversational
topics among those moving about from place to place in America; but the
subject of what a man eats, and more particularly what he eats for
breakfast, runs it a close second for popularity.
For example, there is the seasoned trans-atlantic tourist who, on the
occasion of a certain terrifically stormy passage, was for three days the
only person on board excepting the captain who never missed a single meal.
You find him everywhere; there must be a million or more of him; and he
loves to talk about it, and he does.
But even more frequently encountered is the veteran drummer--no, beg
pardon, the veteran district sales manager, for there aren't any drummers
any more, or even any traveling salesmen; but instead we have district
sales managers featuring strong selling points--I say, even more
frequently encountered is the veteran district sales manager, wearing a
gravy-colored waistcoat if a tasty dresser, or a waistcoat of a
nongravy-colored or contrasting shade if careless, who craves to tell
strangers what, customarily, he eats for breakfast.
I made it a point to study the proportions and hearken to the disclosures
of such a one, and if he carried his stomach in a hanging-garden effect,
with terraces rippling down and flying buttresses and all; and if he had a
pasty, unhealthy complexion or an apoplectic tint to his skin I said to
myself that thenceforth I should apply the reverse English to his favorite
matutinal prescription.