THE FOOD OF MAN.
"This leads me to remark," answered the eyeless seer, "that you speak
without due consideration of previous experience. You are, or should be,
aware of other and as marked differences in food products of upper
earth, induced by climate, soil and cultivation. The potato which, next
to wheat, rice, or corn, you know supplies nations of men with starchy
food, originated as a wild weed in South America and Mexico, where it
yet exists as a small, watery, marble-like tuber, and its nearest
kindred, botanically, is still poisonous. The luscious apple reached its
present excellence by slow stages from knotty, wild, astringent fruit,
to which it again returns when escaped from cultivation. The cucumber is
a near cousin of the griping, medicinal cathartic bitter-apple, or
colocynth, and occasionally partakes yet of the properties that result
from that unfortunate alliance, as too often exemplified to persons who
do not peel it deep enough to remove the bitter, cathartic principle
that exists near the surface. Oranges, in their wild condition, are
bitter, and are used principally as medicinal agents. Asparagus was once
a weed, native to the salty edges of the sea, and as this weed has
become a food, so it is possible for other wild weeds yet to do.
Buckwheat is a weed proper, and not a cereal, and birds have learned
that the seeds of many other weeds are even preferable to wheat. The
wild parsnip is a poison, and the parsnip of cultivation relapses
quickly into its natural condition if allowed to escape and roam again.
The root of the tapioca plant contains a volatile poison, and is deadly;
but when that same root is properly prepared, it becomes the wholesome
food, tapioca. The nut of the African anacardium (cachew nut) contains a
nourishing kernel that is eaten as food by the natives, and yet a drop
of the juice of the oily shell placed on the skin will blister and
produce terrible inflammations; only those expert in the removal of the
kernel dare partake of the food. The berry of the berberis vulgaris is
a pleasant acid fruit; the bough that bears it is intensely bitter. Such
examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but I have cited enough to
illustrate the fact that neither the difference in size and structure of
the species in the mushroom forest through which we are passing, nor the
conditions of these bodies, as compared with those you formerly knew,
need excite your astonishment. Cultivate a potato in your former home so
that the growing tuber is exposed to sunshine, and it becomes green and
acrid, and strongly virulent. Cultivate the spores of the intra-earth
fungi about us, on the face of the earth, and although now all parts of
the plants are edible, the species will degenerate, and may even become
poisonous. They lose their flavor under such unfavorable conditions, and
although some species still retain vitality enough to resist poisonous
degeneration, they dwindle in size, and adapt themselves to new and
unnatural conditions. They have all degenerated. Here they live on
water, pure nitrogen and its modifications, grasping with their roots
the carbon of the disintegrated limestone, affiliating these substances,
and evolving from these bodies rich and delicate flavors, far superior
to the flavor of earth surface foods. On the surface of the earth, after
they become abnormal, they live only on dead and devitalized organic
matter, having lost the power of assimilating elementary matter. They
then partake of the nature of animals, breathe oxygen and exhale
carbonic acid, as animals do, being the reverse of other plant
existences. Here they breathe oxygen, nitrogen, and the vapor of water;
but exhale some of the carbon in combination with hydrogen, thus
evolving these delicate ethereal essences instead of the poisonous gas,
carbonic acid. Their substance is here made up of all the elements
necessary for the support of animal life; nitrogen to make muscle,
carbon and hydrogen for fat, lime for bone. This fungoid forest could
feed a multitude. It is probable that in the time to come when man
deserts the bleak earth surface, as he will some day be forced to do, as
has been the case in frozen planets that are not now inhabited on the
outer crust; nations will march through these spaces on their way from
the dreary outside earth to the delights of the salubrious inner sphere.
Here then, when that day of necessity appears, as it surely will come
under inflexible climatic changes that will control the destiny of
outer earth life, these constantly increasing stores adapted to nourish
humanity, will be found accumulated and ready for food. You have already
eaten of them, for the variety of food with which I supplied you has
been selected from different portions of these nourishing products
which, flavored and salted, ready for use as food, stand intermediate
between animal and vegetable, supplying the place of both."
My instructor placed both hands on my shoulders, and in silence I stood
gazing intently into his face. Then, in a smooth, captivating,
entrancing manner, he continued:
"Can you not see that food is not matter? The material part of bread is
carbon, water, gas, and earth; the material part of fat is charcoal and
gas; the material part of flesh is water and gas; the material part of
fruits is mostly water with a little charcoal and gas.[4] The material
constituents of all foods are plentiful, they abound everywhere, and yet
amid the unlimited, unorganized materials that go to form foods man
would starve.
[4] By the term gas, it is evident that hydrogen and nitrogen were
designated, and yet, since the instructor insists that other gases
form part of the atmosphere, so he may consistently imply that
unknown gases are parts of food.--J. U. L.
"Give a healthy man a diet of charcoal, water, lime salts, and air; say
to him, 'Bread contains no other substance, here is bread, the material
food of man, live on this food,' and yet the man, if he eat of these,
will die with his stomach distended. So with all other foods; give man
the unorganized materialistic constituents of food in unlimited amounts,
and starvation results. No! matter is not food, but a carrier of food."
"What is food?"
"Sunshine. The grain of wheat is a food by virtue of the sunshine fixed
within it. The flesh of animals, the food of living creatures, are
simply carriers of sunshine energy. Break out the sunshine and you
destroy the food, although the material remains. The growing plant locks
the sunshine in its cells, and the living animal takes it out again.
Hence it is that after the sunshine of any food is liberated during the
metamorphosis of the tissues of an animal although the material part of
the food remains, it is no longer a food, but becomes a poison, and
then, if it is not promptly eliminated from the animal, it will destroy
the life of the animal. This material becomes then injurious, but it
is still material.
"The farmer plants a seed in the soil, the sunshine sprouts it,
nourishes the growing plant, and during the season locks itself to and
within its tissues, binding the otherwise dead materials of that tissue
together into an organized structure. Animals eat these structures,
break them from higher to lower compounds, and in doing so live on the
stored up sunshine and then excrete the worthless material side of the
food. The farmer spreads these excluded substances over the earth again
to once more take up the sunshine in the coming plant organization, but
not until it does once more lock in its cells the energy of sunshine can
it be a food for that animal."
"Is manure a food?" he abruptly asked.
"No."
"Is not manure matter?"
"Yes."
"May it not become a food again, as the part of another plant, when
another season passes?"
"Yes."
"In what else than energy (sunshine) does it differ from food?"
"Water is a necessity," I said.
"And locked in each molecule of water there is a mine of sunshine.
Liberate suddenly the sun energy from the gases of the ocean held in
subjection thereby, and the earth would disappear in an explosion that
would reverberate throughout the universe. The water that you truly
claim to be necessary to the life of man, is itself water by the grace
of this same sun, for without its heat water would be ice, dry as dust.
'Tis the sun that gives life and motion to creatures animate and
substances inanimate; he who doubts distrusts his Creator. Food and
drink are only carriers of bits of assimilable sunshine. When the fire
worshipers kneeled to their god, the sun, they worshiped the great food
reservoir of man. When they drew the quivering entrails from the body of
a sacrificed victim they gave back to their God a spark of sunshine--it
was due sooner or later. They builded well in thus recognizing the
source of all life, and yet they acted badly, for their God asked no
premature sacrifice, the inevitable must soon occur, and as all
organic life comes from that Sun-God, so back to that Creator the
sun-spark must fly."
"But they are heathen; there is a God beyond their narrow conception of
God."
"As there is also a God in the Beyond, past your idea of God. Perhaps to
beings of higher mentalities, we may be heathen; but even if this is so,
duty demands that we revere the God within our intellectual sphere. Let
us not digress further; the subject now is food, not the Supreme
Creator, and I say to you the food of man and the organic life of man is
sunshine."
He ceased, and I reflected upon his words. All he had said seemed so
consistent that I could not deny its plausibility, and yet it still
appeared altogether unlikely as viewed in the light of my previous earth
knowledge. I did not quite comprehend all the semi-scientific
expressions, but was at least certain that I could neither disprove nor
verify his propositions. My thoughts wandered aimlessly, and I found
myself questioning whether man could be prevailed upon to live
contentedly in situations such as I was now passing through. In company
with my learned and philosophical but fantastically created guardian and
monitor, I moved on.