dissolved and lost in the water which is thrown away, and so we try to
restore to them that which we have destroyed. But our efforts are vain.
No condiment has ever been devised which would restore a lost flavor or
the elements that have been destroyed.
In the use of elementary foods all of this is avoided, and the demand
or desire for condiments is entirely overcome.
Many people go through the world and eat three meals a day until they
have marked off their three score years and ten, and never know the
real taste of the commonest article of food. The use of condiments, the
pouring of some mixed-up mess of something over foods just before we
eat them, in the vain hope of making them better, seems to be a sort
of weird superstition. It seems to have become a kind of unaccountable
insanity.
Of all the errors and stupid blunders that people have made in
their foolish effort to fix up foods, the condiment habit has the
least excuse for existence. Think of taking a pure article of food
and pouring over it a muddy colored liquid that was made somewhere
in Europe out of--well, here we are compelled to call a halt. The
imagination fails, and if it did not, language would.
Most individuals in polite society are extremely careful about their
persons. Their dress must fit just so, it must be made of certain
choice material, the linen must be spotless, the colors with which
they bedeck themselves must harmonize. They are extremely careful
about their companionship. Their house must face a certain way and the
furnishings must be just right. They are very cautious about what they
say. They are very jealous of their opinions. They select with much
care their language. They will not venture out in threatening weather.
They restrict themselves in every conceivable useless thing. They put
the chain upon nearly all their liberties, and try hard sometimes to
manacle the liberty of others.
But these same wise people will sit in a fashionable café and dine upon
an undrawn, cold-storage turkey that has been a year dead, and pour
over its ancient flesh a tar-colored fluid that has been upon the shelf
of a grocer several years--until it has reached that limit of delicious
decay suggested by the green, slimy mildew in Roquefort cheese.
All condiments, especially stock sauces and dressings, vinegar,
mustards, and such things, possess absolutely no constructive property,
but all of them possess to a very large degree the elements of decay
and destruction. The great increase in stomach and intestinal diseases
referred to by the best medical authorities in the country is very
largely due to the habit of using condiments.
The use of condiments is followed by two very pronounced evils:
First, they cause fermentation of foods, and irritation of the mucous
membranes of the stomach, which excites a false appetite and causes
overeating--the origin of a great many stomach ills.
Second, they deprive the taste-buds of their rights, thus lessening
the desire for perfect mastication.
One of the first steps in adopting a reform or hygienic dietary is to
eliminate from the bill of fare all condiments, hot sauces, and such
stuff. Remember their origin was not very respectable. They seem to
have been created for the purpose of covering up something which we
instinctively regard as unclean.
HOW TO EAT.
To the average individual who eats everything in sight, who accepts
as correct anything that is jumbled together and dished up by cunning
Chinamen, greasy Africans and uneducated foreigners, knowing as little
of the chemistry of foods and their nutritive value as they do about
the inhabitants of Sirius, this title will be amusing.
They will no doubt regard it as presuming upon their intelligence. They
will expect to see on the next page instructions as to how to draw
their breath, though the fact is that but few people know how to do
either. The majority use about one-third of their lung capacity and eat
with less intelligence than a cornfield goose.
There are several thousand taste-buds called “papillæ” on the top and
root of the tongue. There are six groups of salivary glands that work
in harmony and in pairs. The two largest groups are called the parotid
glands. They are located in front of the ears on each side of the mouth.
When the mouth receives food that is approved by the taste-buds each
motion of the jaw in mastication pumps out of these glands small
particles of saliva which pour it into the mouth.
The most delicious thing to the taste, therefore, is that thing which
will exercise--put into operation or call into activity the greatest
number of these tasters. Therefore, the combining or mixing of foods in
the mouth becomes not only of paramount importance, but the principal
factor in digestion, and in the enjoyment of what we eat.
One article of food may call into use but one set of tasters, while
two or three articles whose properties chemically agree, may put into
use the entire six groups. Hence the logical place to mix and make
combinations of food is in the mouth. It is the crucible in which
everything that goes into the stomach should be tested and prepared,
for the obvious reason that the taste-buds occupy the very important
position of being the police of the stomach. If they have not been
perverted, and abused, they will stand ever on guard to see that
nothing goes into that strange factory without protest except that
which will make good blood, muscle, bone and brain.
They will perform this service for us perfectly if we train and treat
them decently; but if we abuse and pervert these delicate organs by
heaping upon them and forcing them to accept stimulating, irritating
and unnatural things, they cease to perform their functions, and
sullenly accept almost anything we choose to load upon them.
Luigi Cornaro was a Venetian nobleman and philosopher. He became a
physical wreck at 40. He ceased philosophizing about ethics and such
things and decided to ascertain _why_.
He very soon solved the problem. It was over-eating. He began by
restricting himself to 12 ounces of solid food per day. As he advanced
in age he still further reduced his daily ration, until he partook of
only one egg a day, in addition to a very little wine and water.
After adhering to this custom for many years and enjoying perfect
health, he one day partook of two ounces of solid food, an experiment
which nearly cost him his life. Some of his best works were written
between the ages of 86 and 95. He lived to be 103 years old, while the
best medicine men of his day told him at 40 that he could never reach
the age of 50.
In subsisting wholly upon uncooked food, the natural tendency is for
all the organs that are employed in converting food into energy to
become normal, and make no demands except those required by nature.
They require more mastication, which is nature’s greatest guard against
over-eating; but until the system adjusts itself to the new régime, it
is best to partake of only about half the quantity one would eat were
the foods cooked, but masticate them twice or three times as long.
If people would masticate their food until it ceased to taste, removing
from the mouth the residue, if any, and involuntarily swallowing the
liquid (soup) therefrom, it would quadruple the pleasure of eating
and eliminate forever from the catalogue of human ills indigestion,
constipation and overeating.
In commencing the use of uncooked foods, one must not fail to remember
that the taste and appetite so long fed on fired and devitalized foods
must be reckoned with. If they accept the new diet, all is well; but
should they rebel, give them some of the old charcoal and ashes now and
then. But give them plenty of live, vital foods again, and they will
soon accept them. Then will one begin to live in a new world.
Until taste and hunger are sufficiently well trained to demand such
food as the system needs, it is well to employ our learning to aid
them. We should avoid the continuous use of such things as contain
similar nutritive elements, that is to say, we should not eat too much
of any one thing. We should acquaint ourselves with the composition
of the leading articles of diet, which will enable us to select
intelligently our daily menu until abnormal appetite is changed to
natural hunger.
No greater question can possibly command the thoughts of people than
the study of nature’s infallible laws of feeding. When the proper
energy and vitality are given to the body by correct food a certain
amount of motion becomes imperative. We would not need to take lessons
in physical culture. We would be forced to obey the demands of the
body, thus sending to the lungs an extra amount of blood, which would
cause deep breathing, or extra oxidation of waste matter.
Therefore, if the great natural law of feeding was obeyed, we would
instinctively carry out the laws of motion and breathing, which would
give us not only perpetual insurance against disease, but emblazon the
way to perfect health.
MASTICATION.
The stomach has no teeth. Teeth were the product of necessity. They
were placed in the mouth by nature for the specific purpose of
emulsifying food, so that it could be absorbed by the body. This
process we call digestion.
Food that is not thoroughly pulverized by mastication must be reduced
to solution by the stomach and the other digestive organs. If it be
such material as the gastric juice will not dissolve, then it must be
disposed of by disintegration, which starts with fermentation. This is
the genesis of nearly all indigestion and intestinal disorders.
Fermentation changes food from a life-_giving_ to a life-_destroying_
substance. It generates a poisonous gas which is absorbed by the system
and which preys upon the red corpuscles of the blood, lowering the
vitality of every organ of the body.
This is only one of the many evils that result from imperfect
mastication. A whole book could be written and the subject not
exhausted--in fact, a very admirable work has been written by Mr.
Horace Fletcher called “The A B Z of Our Own Nutrition,” devoted almost
entirely to the subject of mastication. Under the heading of “Some
Pertinent Questions” he suggests that the reader interrogate himself as
follows: “Were I an iron and steel automobile instead of a flesh and
blood automobile, which I really am, could I get a license for myself
as a chauffeur to run myself with safety, based upon my knowledge of my
own mechanism and the theory and development of my powers?”
Nature refuses to create and keep healthful any part of the anatomy or
member of the body which is not used. Allow the arm to rest in a sling
for a few months, and nature will cease to feed it, and it will become
feeble, emaciated and almost useless.
Nature is a perfect economist. If the teeth are not used, she will
refuse to keep them in repair; she will allow them to decay. She
presumes that you do not need them because you have refused to put them
to that use for which they were created. So long as people subsist upon
soft, cooked, mushy foods, they cannot expect to have good teeth. This
is one of the greatest arguments against the baneful habit of cooking
and in favor of elementary foods.
Nature produces no food that should be swallowed without mastication,
when eaten in its elementary state. She produces no soup trees, gravy
vines, mush plants or cook stoves. Elementary food must be masticated.
Thorough mastication will develop numerous flavors in foods that are a
revelation in enjoyment to those who live upon them.
The majority of people cheat and dull the keenest sense of taste and
defeat the primary purposes of nature by doing as others do, viz.:
yielding to their hurried environment. The most delicious flavors of
foods are developed by long mastication, which gives the saliva time
enough to act upon their chemical properties and begin the process of
changing and digesting them.
For instance, the changing of starch into dextrine and grape sugar is
the first process of digestion; if done by mastication it develops a
most delicious taste. If this most important function is not performed
in the mouth by the act of mastication, the taste-buds are not only
robbed of their rights, but extra labor is put upon the stomach, and
the process of digestion much retarded and made more difficult.
Perfect mastication is the surest means of avoiding the habit of
over-eating, which is so disastrous to the health and so common among
civilized people. Every pennyweight of food taken into the stomach more
than is necessary becomes at once a leaden load upon the body. It is
converted into a poison. It so over-burdens the excretory organs that
they become torpid and diseased and Bright’s disease, constipation, and
the long train of evils that follow are the result.
Not long since, we dined with some friends whose knowledge of the
culinary art was very highly developed. From memory we made an
inventory of the quantity of food consumed by one of the most advanced
disciples of French cookery; and according to our best calculations if
the same quantity of material had been eaten in its elementary state
and thoroughly masticated it would have taken about thirty-one hours’
continuous chewing to have disposed of the cargo.
The only excuse nature offers to man for creating him is that she gives
him liberty and the means of securing his happiness and contentment.
Yet nearly everything he does with reference to his physical structure
seems to be especially designed to defeat this purpose.
There is a great deal of pleasure to be gained from eating, but
when our highly civilized man comes to perform this very important
function, he shovels in the provender with one hand while he makes
out a mortgage or figures per cent. with the other. The result is that
he gets no happiness from the mortgage or per cent., but a great deal
of unhappiness from the provender; therefore, at the age of forty the
majority of men stand dejected and defeated, while half the amount of
study bestowed upon themselves and the inexorable laws of nature that
they have given to the foibles of fashion or the fight for food would
have brought health and abundant vitality up to and even beyond the
century mark.
Old age is the most valuable period of life. When the strife and chase
is ended we stand before our fellows with accumulated knowledge, with
no ambition to serve except the common good, which should be given to
the world in exchange for what Mother Nature has given to us.
FEEDING CHILDREN.
The first year of the baby’s existence is the most trying and hazardous
period of its life. The frightful fatality among children the first
year after birth furnishes ample evidence that something is wrong. The
average mother or nurse knows but little about the few simple laws that
nature has framed to govern infant life. The greatest of all errors
are made in reference to feeding. The nurse or mother seems to think
that the least outcry or expression of disturbance is a demand or
evidence that baby must be fed, and straightway the place is searched
for something--something _sweet_--anything that will temporarily give
employment or divert the mind of the child from its trouble, while in
the great majority of cases it is caused by too much or the wrong kind
of food being given.
For the first twelve months, or until all the molar teeth have
appeared, a child should take nothing but liquid food. Mother’s milk
if possible. If this cannot be supplied, then whole, unsterilized cow’s
milk is the best substitute. The practice of boiling or sterilizing
milk is positively mischievous. This subject is treated at some length
in our chapter on milk.
Dried or powdered milk and all kinds of “infant foods” should be
religiously avoided. Putting milk through the drying process destroys
the cellular tissues of the fat globules, and the butter fat is set
free and becomes very difficult of digestion. Every mother should read
Dr. Fischer’s “Infant Feeding,” which treats this subject at great
length in the most frank and scientific manner. Dr. Fischer gives the
analysis of “Nestle’s Food,” which he terms “a farinaceous, dried milk
food.” He shows that this food has not quite one-sixth the amount of
fat, and only one-third the amount of proteids that is to be found
in mother’s milk. Over one-half of the proteid matter has been made
insoluble by the drying process. Dr. Fischer refers to “Horlick’s
Malted Milk” and a preparation called “Milkine,” both of which he shows
to be about the same in food value or more properly speaking, in _lack_
of food value as that of “Nestle’s.”
By the exercise of reasonable thought and intelligence a child might be
raised without ever giving but few expressions or cries of disturbance
or illness. To begin with, the mother-to-be should surround herself
only with that which is the most pleasant and agreeable. Her diet
should be selected with great care. It should not be composed of too
much calcareous matter or starchy foods such as cereals, potatoes and
legumes which go to construct bone and cartilage. Moderate exercise
and deep breathing should be the most conspicuous part of the daily
duties. She should read the best books, write and compose the best
literature of which her mind is capable, she should endeavor to create
something, think the best and loftiest thoughts, hear the best music,
look upon the best works of art, and commune closely with nature in
all its solemnity, poetry and grandeur. This will endow her child with
a vivid and active imagination without which no great thing has ever
been accomplished. She should live as near as possible in the æsthetic
and keep her thoughts as near as possible to the domain of ethics.
She should endeavor to be all that she would have her child become in
character. If the unsatisfied want of a strawberry will in some strange
way, through the mind, leave its impression upon the body of her child,
how much more certain are the higher, nobler, grander thoughts to
leave their indelible impression upon the embryotic mind and heart.
When baby comes, the first thing done is to bundle it up in three feet
of foolish rags, putting its little limbs in a strait-jacket, depriving
it of its liberty and right to exercise which nature so strenuously
demands. When it is taken out into the air it is bundled and wrapped
and rolled into more and more wool, caps and cloaks, the air only being
allowed to touch a part of its face. It is propped up with pillows,
and when its little spine begins to ache and curve from the unnatural
weight it bears and it cries and weeps in anguish, telling in the
only language it has learned of the pain affectionate ignorance is
inflicting, it is given a dose of Lydia Killem’s Soothing Syrup, until
from the effect of the powerful drug and sheer exhaustion it falls into
slumber awakening only to suffer the same torture inflicted in the
same way again and again, day after day, until from want of natural
nourishment, fresh air, sunshine and exercise, its cheeks grow pale
and wan, its vitality is lowered from week to week, and it passes into
the great unknown from which it has just emerged--passes away like
a drop of dew that reflected for an hour the prismatic colors of a
morning sun, and faded forever from those who loved it most. Who is to
blame? Who is responsible for the tens of thousands of little ones who
come unbidden into a world and are thrust out of it by ignorance and
stupidity through a veil of sorrow and tears?
Mother’s milk is preferable to all foods for a baby, and upon it often
depends the question of life or death. Mother’s milk, upon which so
much depends, necessarily involves the question of the mother’s diet.
Good milk--good baby food, the thing upon which baby’s health, maybe
its life, depends, cannot be made out of such things as tea and toast,
coffee, vinegar, pickles and pastries, gravies and condiments, canned
foods, greasy meats, fermented bread, wines and beer.
There is no period in life when diet is so important as when it is
taken second-hand in the form of mother’s milk. The diet of the mother
should consist of pure, clean, wholesome, nourishing foods such as
fresh, unsterilized milk, cream, nuts, fresh ripe fruits, fresh green
vegetables, and newly laid eggs, all of which can be taken without
cooking, without devitalizing them with fire.
If the above foods are partaken of by the mother, it will stimulate the
secretions of the breast and purify its contents so that baby ills,
especially such ailments as “three months’ baby colic,” would never be
known.
A mother should never nurse her baby when she is in the least
over-heated or chilled with cold or laboring under any great emotion,
such as grief, sympathy or anger. Fear and anger change the milk of the
mother to a poison. Children have been thrown into spasms and known to
die from nursing just after the mother had undergone these conditions.
It is customary to begin feeding children at the age of nine months
such things as oatmeal, crackers, and white bread. It would be very
difficult to select anything in the food line more mischievous than
these articles. They are composed very largely of starch, which the
infant stomach cannot digest, and none of its intestinal organs can
assimilate.
The making and selling of penny confections ought to be prohibited
by law. The man who makes the all-day sucker and other cheap filthy
candies and confections to give to innocent children for their pennies
is a criminal, and ought to be deprived of his liberty, and put out
of business. It is not uncommon for children at the age of ten,
especially in cities, to be afflicted with well-developed cases of
acute indigestion, which stunts the growth of both body and brain, from
the baneful effects of which they never can recover.
It looks incredible indeed that from the great faculties of teachers,
in no institution of learning in this land has there ever come one
suggestion--one hint, as to what kind of material would make the best
blood, build the best body and brain. It seems as if the thought would
sometimes come to these instructors of the youth of the land that the
brain of the children with which they are so industriously laboring
depends entirely for its size, quality and activity upon the body,
and the body depends entirely upon the material out of which it is
constructed. Some day the professors will begin to think along these
lines, and the food question will become a part of the school and
college curriculum.
FOOD VALUES AND TABLES.
The following tables were compiled from analyses made by government
experts in the Agricultural Department at Washington.
We give a table on flesh foods, not because we endorse or recommend
them, but because it affords an opportunity of comparison, which is the
best means of acquiring knowledge:
The superiority of nuts in every life-giving property will be noticed
at a glance--for instance, the fuel value of pork-sides, the meat which
contains the greatest amount of fat, and but little else, is only about
2,500 heat calories per pound, while all the shelled nuts given in the
table except one show a fuel value in excess of the fattest meat, while
most of them run above 3,000, or from thirty to fifty per cent. greater
than meat as a fuel or heat producing article.
The thing, however, that makes nuts such an excellent article of food
is that their nutritive elements are almost perfectly proportioned;
that is to say, a normal body requires so much water, proteins,
carbohydrates, mineral salts and fat to sustain it healthfully each
twenty-four hours, and in nuts these elements are found more correctly
proportioned according to the requirements of the body than in any
other article of food known to science: