CHILDREN'S FOOD.
Der Mensch ist, was er isst.--_Feuerbach_.
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.--_Coleridge_.
Man did eat angels' food.--_Psalm_ ixxviii. 25.
_Honey_.
_Der Mensch ist, was er isst_,--"man is what he eats,"--says
Feuerbach, and there were food-philosophies long before his time. Among
primitive peoples, the food of the child often smacks of the Golden Age.
Tennyson, in _Eleanore_, sings:--
"Or, the yellow-banded bees,
Through half-open lattices
Coming in the scented breeze,
Fed thee, a child lying alone,
With white honey, in fairy gardens cull'd--
A glorious child dreaming alone,
In silk-soft folds, upon yielding down,
With the hum of swarming bees
Into dreamful slumber lull'd."
This recalls the story of Cretan Zeus, fed, when an infant, by the
nymphs in a cave on Mount Ida with the milk of the goat Amalthæa and
honey brought by the bees of the mountain.
In the sacred books of the ancient Hindus we read: "The father puts his
mouth to the right ear of the new-born babe, and murmurs three times,
'Speech! Speech!' Then he gives it a name. Then he mixes clotted milk,
honey, and butter, and feeds the babe with it out of pure gold"
(460.129). Among the ancient Frisians and some other Germanic tribes,
the father had the right to put to death or expose his child so long as
it had not taken food; but "so soon as the infant had drunk milk and
eaten honey he could not be put to death by his parents" (286. 69). The
custom of giving the new-born child honey to taste is referred to in
German counting-out rhymes, and the ancient Germans used to rub honey in
the mouth of the new-born child. The heathen Czechs used to drop honey
upon the child's lips, and in the Eastern Church it was formerly the
custom to give the baptized child milk and honey to taste (392. II. 35).
When the Jewish child, in the Middle Ages, first went to school, one of
the ceremonial observances was to have him lick a slate which had been
smeared with honey, and upon which the alphabet, two Bible verses, and
the words "The Tora shall be my calling" were written; this custom is
interestingly explanative of the passage in Ezekiel (iii. 3) where we
read "Then I did eat it [the roll of a book given the prophet by God];
and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness." There were also given to
the child sweet cakes upon which Bible verses were written. Among the
Jews of Galicia, before a babe is placed in the cradle for the first
time, it is customary to strew into the latter little pieces of
honey-comb. Among the Wotjaks we find the curious belief that those who,
in eating honey, do not smear their mouth and hands with it, will die.
With children of an older growth,--the second Golden Age,--honey and
cakes again appear. Magyar maidens at the new moon steal honey and
cakes, cook them, and mix a part in the food of the youth of their
desires; among the White Russians, the bridal couple are fed honey with
a spoon. Even with us "the first sweet month of matrimony," after the
"bless you, my children" has been spoken by parents, church, and state,
is called the "honey-moon," for our Teutonic ancestors were in the habit
of drinking honey-wine or mead for the space of thirty days after
marriage (392. IV. 118,211). In wedding-feasts the honey appears again,
and, as Westermarck observes, the meal partaken of by the bride and
bridegroom practically constitutes the marriage-ceremony among the
Navajos, Santal, Malays, Hovas, and other primitive peoples (166. 419).
In Iceland, in ancient times, "the food of sucklings was sweetened by
honey," and "in the mouths of weakly children a slice of meat was placed
at which they sucked." Among other interesting items from Scandinavia,
Ploss (326. II. 182) gives the following: "In Iceland, if the child has
been suckled eight (at most, fourteen) days, it is henceforth placed
upon the ground; near it is put a vessel with luke-warm whey, in which a
reed or a quill is stuck, and a little bread placed before it. If the
child should wake and show signs of hunger, he is turned towards the
vessel, and the reed is placed in his mouth. When the child is nine
months old, it must eat of the same food as its parents do."
In Shropshire, England, the first food given a child is a spoonful of
sugar and butter, and, in the Highlands of Scotland, "at the birth of an
infant the nurse takes a green stick of ash, one end of which she puts
into the fire, and, while it is burning, receives in a spoon the sap
that oozes from the other, which she administers to the child as its
first food." This recalls the sap of the sacred ash of Scandinavian
mythology. Solinus states that the ancient Irish mother "put the first
food of her newborn son on the sword of her husband, and, lightly
introducing it into his mouth, expressed a wish that he might never meet
death otherwise than in war and amid arms," and a like custom is said
"to have been kept up, prior to the union, in Annandale and other places
along the Scottish border" (460. 129, 131).
_Salt._
Among the Negritos of the Philippine Islands, when a child is born, one
of the other children immediately gives it to eat some salt on the point
of a knife (326. I. 258). The virtues of salt are recognized among many
peoples. In the Middle Ages, when mothers abandoned their infants, they
used to place beside them a little salt in token that they were
unbaptized (326. I. 284); in Scotland, where the new-born babe is
"bathed in salted water, and made to taste it three times, because the
water was strengthening and also obnoxious to a person with the evil
eye," the lady of the house first visited by the mother and child must,
with the recital of a charm, put some salt in the little one's mouth. In
Brabant, during the baptismal ceremony, the priest consecrates salt,
given him by the father, and then puts a grain into the child's mouth,
the rest being carefully kept by the father. The great importance of
salt in the ceremonies of the Zuñi and related Indians of the Pueblos
has been pointed out by Mr. Gushing.
Salt appears also at modern European wedding-feasts and prenuptial
rites, as do also rice and meal, which are also among the first foods of
some primitive races. Among the Badagas of the Nilgiri Hills, when the
child is named (from twenty to thirty days after birth), the maternal
uncle places three small bits of rice in its mouth (326. I. 284).
_Folk-Medicine_.
Among the Tlingit Indians, of Alaska, the new-born infant "is not given
the breast until all the contents of its stomach (which are considered
the cause of disease) are removed by vomiting, which is promoted by
pressing the stomach" (403. 40), and among the Hare Indians, "the infant
is not allowed food until four days after birth, in order to accustom it
to fasting in the next world" (396. I. 121). The Songish Indians do not
give the child anything to eat on the first day (404. 20); the Kolosh
Indians, of Alaska, after ten to thirty months "accustom their children
to the taste of a sea-animal," and, among the Arctic Eskimo, Kane found
"children, who could not yet speak, devouring with horrible greediness,
great lumps of walrus fat and flesh." Klutschak tells us how, during a
famine, the Eskimo of Hudson's Bay melted and boiled for the children
the blood-soaked snow from the spot where a walrus had been killed and
cut up (326. II. 181).
In Culdaff, in the county of Donegal, Ireland, "an infant at its birth
is forced to swallow spirits, and is immediately afterwards [strange
anticipation of Dr. Robinson] suspended by the upper jaw on the nurse's
forefinger. Whiskey is here the representative of the Hindu sôma, the
sacred juice of the ash, etc., and the administration of alcoholic
liquors to children of a tender age in sickness and disease so common
everywhere but a few years ago, founded itself perhaps more upon this
ancient belief than upon anything else" (401. 180).
The study of the food of sick children is an interesting one, and much
of value may be read of it in Zanetti (173), Black (401), and other
writers who have treated of folk-medicine. The decoctions of plants and
herbs, the preparations of insects, reptiles, the flesh, blood, and
ordure of all sorts of beasts (and of man), which the doctrines of
signatures and sympathies, the craze of _similia similibus_, forced
down the throat of the child, in the way of food and medicine, are
legion in number, and must be read in Folkard and the herbalists, in
Bourke (407), Strack, etc.
In some parts of the United States even snail-water and snail-soup are
not unknown; in New England, as Mrs. Earle informs us (221. 6), much was
once thought of "the admirable and most famous snail-water."
_Milk and Honey_.
As we have abundantly seen, the first food of the child is the "food of
the gods," for so were honey and milk esteemed among the ancient
Germans, Greeks, Slavs, Hindus, etc., and of the Paradise where dwelt
the Gods, and into which it was fabled children were born, we have some
recollection, as Ploss suggests, in the familiar "land flowing with milk
and honey," into the possession of which the children of Israel entered
after their long wandering in the wilderness (462. II. 696). Of the
ancient Hindu god Agni, Letourneau (100. 315) observes: "After being for
a long time fed upon melted butter and the alcoholic liquor from the
acid asclepias, the sacred Sôma, he first became a glorious child, then
a metaphysical divinity, a mediator living in the fathers and living
again in the sons." It was the divine _Sôma_ that, like the nectar
of the Greeks, the elixirs of the Scandinavians, conferred youth and
immortality upon those who drank it.
According to Moslem legend, after his birth, Abraham "remained concealed
in a cave during fifteen months, and his mother visited him sometimes to
nurse him. But he had no need of her food, for Allah commanded water to
flow from one of Abraham's fingers, milk from another, honey from the
third, the juice of dates from the fourth, and butter from the fifth"
(547. 69).
_Poison_.
In the _Gesta Romanorum_ (Cap. XI.) we read of the "Queen of the
North," who "nourished her daughter from the cradle upon a certain kind
of deadly poison; and when she grew up, she was considered so beautiful,
that the sight of her alone affected one with madness." Moreover, her
whole nature had become so imbued with poisons that "she herself had
become the deadliest poison in existence. Poison was her element of
life. With that rich perfume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her
love would have been poison, her embrace death." Hawthorne's story of
"Rappaccini's Daughter,"--"who ever since infancy had grown and
blossomed with the plants whose fatal properties she had imbibed with
the air she breathed,"--comes from the same original source (390. II.
172). Here we are taken back again to the Golden Age, when even poisons
could be eaten without harm.
_Priest and Food_.
With the giving of the child's food the priest is often associated. In
the Fiji Islands, at Vitilevu, on the day when the navel-string falls
off, a festival is held, and the food of the child is blest by the
priest with prayers for his life and prosperity. In Upper Egypt, a feast
is held at the house of the father and the child consecrated by the cadi
or a priest, to whom is brought a plate with sugar-candy. The priest
chews the candy and lets the sweet juice fall out of his mouth into that
of the child, and thus "gives him his name out of his mouth" (326. I.
284).
The over-indulgence of children in food finds parallels at a later
period of life, when, as with the people of southern Nubia and the
Sahara between Talifet and Timbuktu, men fatten girls before marriage,
making them consume huge quantities of milk, butter, etc.
For children, among many primitive peoples, there are numerous
_taboos_ of certain classes and kinds of food, from religious or
superstitious motives. This _taboo_-system has not lost all its
force even to-day, as no other excuse can reasonably be offered for the
refusal of certain harmless food to the young.
_Tobacco_.
Concerning certain Australian tribes, Lumholtz remarks: "Before the
children are big enough to hold a pipe in their mouth they are permitted
to smoke, and the mother will share her pipe with the nursing babe"
(495. 193). In like manner, among the natives of the Solomon Islands,
Mr. Guppy witnessed displays of precocity in this regard:
"Bright-looking lads, eight or nine years of age, stood smoking their
pipes as gravely as Haununo [a chief] himself; and even the smallest
babe in its father's arms caught hold of his pipe and began to suck
instinctively" (466.42). With the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador, according
to Simson, the child, when three or four years old, is initiated into
the mysteries of tobacco-smoking, amid great festivities and ceremonies
(533. 388).
_Drink of Immortality_.
Feeding the dead has been in practice among many primitive peoples. The
mother, with some of the Indian tribes of New Mexico, used to drop milk
from her breast on the lips of her dead babe; and in many parts of the
world we meet with the custom of placing food near the grave, so that
the spirits may not hunger, or of placing it in the grave or coffin, so
that on its way to the spirit-land the soul of the deceased may partake
of some refreshment. Among the ancient natives of Venezuela, "infants
who died a few days after their birth, were seated around the Tree of
Milk, or Celestial Tree, that distilled milk from the extremity of its
branches"; and kindred beliefs are found elsewhere (448. 297).
We have also the tree associated beautifully with the newborn child, as
Reclus records concerning the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills, in India:
"Immediately the deliverance has taken place--it always happens in the
open air--three leaves of the aforementioned tree [under which the
mother and father have passed the night] are presented to the father,
who, making cups of them, pours a few drops of water into the first,
wherewith he moistens his lips; the remainder he decants into the two
other leaves; the mother drinks her share, and causes the baby to
swallow his. Thus, father, mother, and child, earliest of Trinities,
celebrate their first communion, and drink the living water, more sacred
than wine, from the leaves of the Tree of Life" (523. 201).
The sacred books of the Hebrews tell us that the race of man in its
infancy became like the gods by eating of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge, and in the legends of other peoples immortality came to the
great heroes by drinking of the divine sap of the sacred tree, or
partaking of some of its fruit. The ancient Egyptians believed that milk
from the breast of the divine mother Isis conferred divinity and
immortality upon him who drank of it or imbibed it from the sacred
source. Wiedemann aptly compares with this the Greek story of the
infancy of Hercules. The great child-hero was the son of the god Jupiter
and Alcmena, daughter of Electryon, King of Argos. He was exposed by his
mother, but the goddess Athene persuaded Hera to give him her breast
(another version says Hermes placed Hercules on the breast of Hera,
while she slept) and the infant Hercules drew so lustily of the milk
that he caused pain to the goddess, who snatched him away. But Hercules
had drunk of the milk of a goddess and had become immortal, and as one
of the gods (167. 266).