FOODS AND POISONS
(Concludes the subject of diet, and discusses the effect upon the
system of stimulants and narcotics.)
A few years ago there died an old gentleman who had devoted some twenty
years of his life to teaching people to chew their food. Horace Fletcher
was his name, and his ideas became a fad, and some people carried them
to comical extremes. But Fletcher made a real discovery; what he called
"the food filter." This is the automatic action of the swallowing
apparatus, whereby nature selects the food which has been sufficiently
prepared for digestion. If you chew a mouthful of food without ever
performing the act of swallowing, you will find that the food gradually
disappears. What happens is that all of it which has been reduced to a
thin paste will slip unnoticed down your throat, and you may go on
putting more food into your mouth, and chewing, and can eat a whole meal
without ever performing the act of swallowing. Fletcher claimed that
this is the proper way to eat, and that you can train yourself to follow
this method. I have tried his idea and adopted it. One of my diet rules,
to which there is no exception, is that if I haven't the time to chew my
food properly, I haven't the time to eat; I skip that meal.
The habit of bolting food is a source of disease. To be sure, the
carnivorous animals bolt their food, but they are tougher than we are,
and do not carry the burden of a large brain and a complex nervous
system. If you swallow your meals half chewed, and wash them down with
liquids, you may get away with it for a while, but some day you will pay
for it with dyspepsia and nervous troubles. And the same thing applies
to your habit of jumping up from meals and rushing away to work, whether
it be work of the muscles, or of brain and nerves. Proper digestion
requires the presence of a quantity of blood in the walls of the stomach
and digestive tract. It requires the attention of your subconscious
mind, and this means rest of muscles and brain centers. If you cannot
rest for an hour after meals, omit that meal, or make it a light one, of
fruit juices, which are almost immediately absorbed by the stomach, and
of salads, which do not ferment. You may rest assured that it will not
hurt you to skip a meal, and make up for it when you have time to be
quiet. I have been many times in my life under very intense and long
continued nervous strain; for example, during the Colorado coal strike,
I led a public demonstration which kept me in a state of excitement all
the day and a good part of the night several weeks. During this period I
ate almost nothing; a baked apple and a cup of custard would be as near
as I would go to a meal, and as a result I came through the experience
without any injury whatever to my health. I lost perhaps ten pounds in
weight, but that was quickly made up when I settled back to a normal way
of life.
I have been on camping trips when I had a great deal of hard work to do,
carrying a canoe long distances on my back, or paddling it forty miles a
day. On the mornings of such a trip I have seen a guide cook himself an
elaborate breakfast of freshly baked bread, bacon, and even beans, and
make a hearty meal and then go straight to work. My meal, on the
contrary, would consist of a small dish of stewed prunes, or perhaps
some huckleberries or raspberries, if they could be found. I will not
say that I could do as much as the guide, because he was used to it, and
I was not. But I can say this--if I had eaten his breakfast at the start
of the day, I would have been dead before night; and I mean the word
"dead" quite literally. I know a man who started to climb Whiteface
mountain in the Adirondacks. He climbed half way, and then ate lunch,
which consisted of nine hard boiled eggs. Then he started to climb the
rest of the mountain, and dropped dead of acute indigestion.
There are few poisons which can affect the system more quickly, or more
dangerously, than a mass of food which is not digested. The stomach is
an ideal forcing-house for the breeding of bacteria. It provides warmth
and moisture, and you, in your meal, provide the bacteria and the
material upon which they thrive. Under normal conditions, the stomach
pours out a gastric juice which kills the bacteria; but let this gastric
juice for any reason be lacking--because your nervous energy has gone
somewhere else, or because your blood-stream, from which the gastric
juice must be made, has been drawn away to the muscles by hard labor;
then you have a yeast-pot, with great quantities of gases and poisons.
In acute cases the results are evident enough: violent pains and
convulsions, followed by coma and the turning black of the body. But
what you should understand is that you may produce a milder case of such
poisoning, and may do it day after day habitually, and little by little
your vital organs will be weakened by the strain.
It does not make any difference at what hour of the twenty-four you take
the great bulk of your food. It is one of the commonest delusions that
you get some strengthening effect from your food immediately, and must
have this strength in order to do hard work. To be sure, there are
substances, such as grape-sugar, which require practically no digesting;
you can hold them in the mouth, and they will be digested by the saliva,
and absorbed at once into the blood-stream. But unless you have been
starved for a long period you do not need to get your strength in this
rush fashion. If you ate your normal meals on the previous day, your
blood-stream is fully supplied with nutriment which has been put through
a long process of preparation, and you can get up in the morning and
work all day, if necessary, upon what is already in your system. To be
sure, you may feel hungry, and even faint, but that is merely a matter
of habit; your system is accustomed to taking food and expects it. But
if you are a laborer doing hard work, you can easily train yourself to
eat a light meal in the morning, and another light meal at noon, and to
eat a hearty meal when your work is done and you can rest. Two light
meals and a hearty meal are all that any system needs, and you can prove
it to yourself by trying it, and watching your weight once a week.
I have tried many experiments, and the conclusion to which I have come
is that there is no virtue in any particular meal-hours or any
particular number of meals. For several years I tried the experiment of
two meals a day. I was living a retired life, and had little contact
with the world, and I would make a hearty meal at ten o'clock in the
morning, and another at five in the afternoon. But later on I found that
inconvenient, and now I take a light breakfast, and two moderate-sized
meals at the conventional hours of lunch and dinner. I can arrange my
own time, so after meal times is when I get my reading done. Sometimes,
when I am tired, I feel sleepy after meals, but I have learned not to
yield to this impulse. I do not know how to explain this; I have
observed that animals sleep after eating, and it appears to be a natural
thing to do; but I know that if I go to sleep after a meal, nature makes
clear to me that I have made a mistake, and I do not repeat it. I never
eat at night, and always go to bed on an empty stomach, so I am always
hungry when I open my eyes in the morning. I never know what it is not
to be hungry at meal times, and my habits are so regular that I could
set my watch by my stomach.
Another common habit which is harmful is eating between meals. I have
known people who are accustomed to nibble at food nearly all the time.
Shelley records that he tried it as an experiment, thinking it might be
a convenient way to get digestion done--but he found that it did not
work. The stomach is apparently meant to work in pulses; to do a job of
digesting, and then to rest and accumulate the juices for another job.
It will accustom itself to a certain regime, and will work accordingly,
but if, when it has half digested a load of food, you pile more food in
on top, you make as much trouble as you would make in your kitchen if
you required your cook to prepare another meal before she has cleaned up
after the last one. Three times a day is enough for any adult to eat.
Children require to eat oftener, because their bodies are more active,
and they not merely have to keep up weight, but to add to it. The
simplest way to arrange matters with children is to give them three good
meals at the hours when adults eat, and then to give them a couple of
pieces of fruit between breakfast and lunch, and again between lunch and
supper. I have never seen a child who would not be satisfied with this,
when once the habit was established.
I have already spoken of the cooking and serving of food. I consider
that the "gastronomic art," as it is pompously called, is ninety-nine
per cent plain rubbish. To be sure, if foods are appetizingly prepared,
and look good and smell good and taste good, they will cause the gastric
juices to flow abundantly, as the Russian scientist Pavlov has
demonstrated by practical experiment with the stomach-pump. But I know
without any stomach-pump that the best thing to make my gastric juices
flow is hard work and a spare diet. When I come home from five sets of
tennis, and have a cold shower and a rub-down, my gastric juices will
flow for a piece of cold beefsteak and a cold sweet potato, quite as
well as for anything that is served by a leisure class "chef." Needless
to say, I want food to be fresh, and I want it to be clean, but I have
other things to do with my time and money than to pamper my appetites
and encourage food whims.
If you have a grandmother, or ever had one, you know what grandmothers
tell you about "hot nourishing food"; but I have tried the experiment,
and satisfied myself that there is absolutely no difference in
nourishing qualities between hot food and cold food. If you chew your
food sufficiently, it will all be ninety-eight and six-tenths degree
food when it gets to your stomach, and that is the way your stomach
wants it. Of course, if you have been out in a blizzard, and are
chilled, and want to restore the body temperature, a hot drink will be
one of the quickest ways, and if the emergency is extreme, you may even
add a stimulant. On the other hand, if you are suffering from heat, it
is sensible to cool your body by a cold drink. But you should use as
much judgment with yourself as you would with a horse, which you do not
permit to drink a lot of cold water when he is heated up, and is going
into his stall to stand still.
I have mentioned the word "stimulants," and this opens a large subject.
There are drugs which affect the body in two different ways: some excite
the nerves, and through the nerves the heart and blood-stream, to more
intense activity; others have the effect of deadening the nerves, and
dulling the sense of exhaustion and pain. One of these groups is called
stimulants, and the other is called narcotics; but as a matter of fact
the stimulants are really narcotics, because they operate by dulling the
nerves whose function it is to prevent the over-accumulation of fatigue
poisons; in other words, they keep the nerves and muscles from knowing
that they are tired, and so they go on working.
It is possible, of course, to conceive of an emergency in which that is
necessary. Once upon a time, on a hunting trip, I had been traveling all
day, and was caught in a rain storm, and exhausted and chilled to the
bone; I had to make camp without a fire, so when I got the tent up I
wrapped myself in blankets and drank a couple of tablespoons full of
whiskey. That is the only time I have ever taken whiskey in my life,
and it warmed me almost instantly, and did me no harm. In the same way
there were two or three occasions when I was on the verge of a nervous
breakdown, and could not sleep, and let the doctor give me a sleeping
powder. But in each case I knew that I was fooling with a dangerous
habit, and I did no more fooling than necessary. No one should make use
of either stimulants or narcotics except in extreme emergency, and never
but a few times in a lifetime. What you should do is to change your
habits so that you will not need to over-strain.
All these drugs are habit forming; that is to say, they leave the body
no better, and with a craving for a repetition of the relief. When you
are tired, it is because your muscles and nerves are storing up fatigue
poisons more rapidly than your blood-stream can get rid of them. You
need to know about this condition, and exhaustion and pain are nature's
protective warning. If you put a stop to the warning, you are as
unintelligent as the Eastern despots who used to cut off the head of the
messenger who brought bad tidings. If, when you have a headache, you go
into a drug store and let the druggist mix you one of those white fizzy
drinks, what you are doing is not to get rid of the poisons in your
blood-stream, but merely to reduce the action of your heart, so as to
keep the blood from pressing so fast into the aching blood vessels and
nerves. You may try that trick with your heart a number of times, but
sooner or later you will try it once too often--your heart will stop a
little bit quicker than you meant it to!
Drugs are poisons, and their action depends upon their poisoning some
particular portion of the body, and temporarily paralyzing it. And bear
this in mind, they are none the less poisonous because they are
"natural" products. You can kill yourself by cyanide of potassium, which
comes out of a chemist's retort; but you can kill yourself just as dead
with laudanum, which comes out of a plant, or with the contents of the
venom sac of a snake. You are poisoning yourself none the less certainly
if you use alcohol, which is made from the juices of beautiful fruits,
and has had hosts of famous poets writing songs about it; or you can
poison yourself with the caffein which you get in a lovely brown bean
which comes from Brazil, fragrant to the nostrils and delicious to the
taste. You may drink wine and tea and coffee for a hundred years, and
have your picture published in the newspapers as a proof that these
habits conduce to health; but nothing will be said about the large
number of people who practiced these habits, and didn't live so long,
and about how long they might have lived if they hadn't practiced these
habits.
I was brought up in the South, and my "elders" belonged to a generation
which had grown up in war time. For this reason many of the men both
drank and smoked to excess, and in my boyhood I lived among them and
watched them, and with the help of advice from a wise mother, I
conceived a horror of every kind of stimulant. The alcoholic poets could
not fool me; I had been in the alcoholic wards of the hospitals. I had
seen one man after another, beautiful and kindly and gracious men,
dragged down into a pit of torment and shame.
Alcohol is, I think, the greatest trap that nature ever set for the feet
of the human race. It is responsible for more degradation and misery
than any other evil in the world; and I say this, knowing well that my
Socialist friends will cry, "What about Capitalism?" My answer is that I
doubt if there ever would have been any Capitalism in the world, if it
had not been for alcohol. If the workers had not been systematically
poisoned, and all their savings taken from them by the gin-mill, they
would never have submitted to the capitalist system, they would have
built the co-operative commonwealth at the time they were building the
first factories. I listen to the arguments of my radical friends about
"personal liberty," but I note that in Russia, when it was a question of
making a practical revolution and keeping it alive, the first thing the
leaders did was to drag out the contents of the wine-cellars of the
palaces, and smash them in the gutters.
Tea and coffee are, of course, much milder in their effects than
alcohol; you can play with them longer, and the punishment will be less
severe. But if you make habitual use of them, you will pay the penalty
which all drugs exact from the system. Your brain and your nerve centers
will be less sensitive, less capable of working except under the
influence of drugs; their reacting power will be dulled, and they will
wear out more quickly. I have watched the slaves of the "morning cup of
coffee," and know how they suffer when they do not get it. Likewise, I
have watched the tea drinkers. It is comical to live in England, and see
all the able-bodied men obliged to leave their work at four o'clock in
the afternoon, and seek the regular stimulus for their tired nerves. If
you are to meet anybody, it is always for "tea" that the ceremony is
set, and if you refuse to drink tea, your hostess will be uncomfortable,
unable to talk about anything but the strange, incredible notion that
one can live without tea. I discovered after a while the solution of
this problem; I would say that I preferred a little hot water, if you
please, and so my hostess would pour me a cup of hot water, and I would
sit and gravely sip it, and everybody would be perfectly content: I was
conforming to the outward appearance of normality, which is what the
British conventions require.
I have never drunk a cup of coffee, so I do not know what its effect on
me would be. But some fifteen years ago I drank a glass of very weak
iced tea at eight o'clock in the evening, and did not get to sleep until
four or five the next morning. So I know that there is really a drug in
tea. I know also that I might accustom my system to it, just as I might
learn to poison my lungs with nicotine without being made immediately
and suddenly ill; but why should I wish to do this? Life is so
interesting to me that I do not need to stimulate my brain centers in
order to appreciate the thrill of it. And when I am tired, I can rest
myself by listening to music, or by reading a worth-while novel--things
which I have found do not leave the after effects of nicotine.
I remember the first time I met Jack London. Our meeting consisted in
good part of his "kidding" me, because I was lacking in the congenial
vices of the cafe. He told me how much I had missed, because I had never
been drunk; One ought to try the great adventure, at least once! Poor
Jack is gone, because his kidneys gave out at forty; and nothing could
seem more ungracious than to point out that I am still alive, and
finding life enjoyable. Yet, in this book we are trying to find out how
to live, and if there are habits which wreck and destroy a magnificent
physique, and bring a great genius to death at the age of forty--surely
the rest of us want to know about it, and to be warned in time. I
mention Jack London in this connection, because he has said the last
word on the subject of alcohol. Read "John Barleycorn," and especially
read between the lines of it, and you will not need my argument to
persuade you to be glad that the Eighteenth Amendment has been written
into the Constitution, and that it is your duty as a Socialist, not
merely to obey it, but to vote for its enforcement.
I am proceeding on the assumption that your life is of importance to
you; that you have a job to do which you know to be worth while, and to
which you desire to apply your powers. You agree with me that the
workers of the world are suffering, and that it is necessary for them to
find their freedom, and that this takes hard work and hard thinking. You
may say that I exaggerate the amount of harm that is done to the system
by tea and coffee, alcohol and tobacco. Well, let us assume that in
moderate quantities they do no harm at all: even so, I have the right to
ask you to show that they do some good; otherwise, surely, it is a
mistake for the workers to spend their savings upon them.
Consider, for example, the amount of money which the wage slaves of the
world spend upon tobacco. Suppose they could be persuaded for two or
three years to spend this amount upon good reading matter--do you not
think there would be an improvement in their condition? Surely you
cannot maintain that the use of tobacco is necessary to the activities
of the brain! Surely you do not think that a man has to have a cigarette
in order to stimulate his thoughts, or to smoke a pipe to rest himself
after his work is done! I offer myself as evidence in such a
controversy; I have written as many books as any man in the radical
movement, and the sum total of my lifetime smoking amounts to one-half
of one cigarette. I tried that when I was eight years old, and somebody
told me a policeman would arrest me if he caught me, and I threw away
the cigarette, and ran and hid in an alley, and have not yet got over my
scare.
In the "Journal for Industrial Hygiene" for October, 1920, is an article
entitled "Fatigue and Efficiency of Smokers in a Strenuous Mental
Occupation." Experiments were conducted among telegraph operators, and
the result showed that "the heavy smokers of the group show a higher
output rate at the beginning of the day than the light smokers, but
their rate falls off more markedly in the late hours, and their
production for the whole day is definitely less than that of the light
smokers. The heavy smokers also show less ability than the light smokers
to respond to increasing pressure of work in the late hours of the day
by handling their full share of the work presented."
One point upon which every medical authority agrees is--that the use of
nicotine is of deadly effect upon the immature organism. Half-grown
youths who smoke cigarettes will never be full-sized men; they will
never have normal lungs or a normal heart. And likewise, all authorities
agree about the effect of smoking upon the organism of women. I gave
what little help I could to the task of helping to set women free, and
to make them the equals of men; but I was always pained when I
discovered that some of my feminist friends understood by woman's
emancipation no more than her right to adopt men's vices. I would say to
these ardent young female radicals, who cultivate the art of dangling a
cigarette from their lower lip, and sip cocktails out of coffee-cups in
Greenwich Village cafes, that they will never be able to bear sound
children; but I know that this would not interest them--they don't want
to bear any children at all. So I say that they will never be able to
think straight thoughts, and will be nervous invalids when they are
thirty.
We went to war to make the world safe for democracy, and we put several
millions of our young men into armies, and if there were any of them who
did not already know how to smoke cigarettes, they learned it under
official sanction. So now we have a national tobacco bill that runs up
to two billions, and will insure us a new generation of "Class C"
rating. Speaking to the young radicals who are reading my books, I say:
We want to make the world over, to make it a place of freedom and
kindness, instead of the hell of greed and hate that it is today. For
that purpose we need a new moral code, and we can never win our victory
without it. I have attended radical conventions, sitting in unventilated
halls amid clouds of tobacco smoke, and listening to men wrangle all
through the day and a great part of the night; I have watched the fatal
dissensions in the movement, the quarrelings of the right wingers and
the left wingers and all stages and degrees in between, and I have
wondered--not jestingly, but in pitying earnest--how much of all those
personalities and factional misunderstanding had their origin in carbon
dioxide and nicotine. There is no use suggesting such ideas to the older
men, whose habits are fixed; but a new generation is coming on, with a
new vision of the enormous task before it; and is it too much to expect
of these young men and women, that they shall realize in advance the
grim tasks they have to do, and shall learn to run the machine of their
body so as to get out of it the maximum amount of service? Is it too
much to hope for, that some day we shall have a race of young fighters
for truth and justice, who are willing to live abstemious lives, and
consecrate themselves to the task of delivering mankind from wage
slavery and war?