(Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and his conclusions as to what to eat.)
(Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and his conclusions as to what to eat.)
Students of the body assure us that every particle of matter which composes it is changed in the course of seven years. It is obvious that everything that is a part of the body has at some time to be taken in as food; so the problem of our diet today is the problem of what our body shall consist of seven years from now, and probably a great deal sooner.
I begin this discussion by telling my own personal experiences with food. I am not going to recommend my diet for anyone else; because one of the first things I have to say about the subject is that every human individual is a separate diet problem. But I am going to try to establish a few principles for your guidance, and more especially to point out the commonest mistakes. I tell about my own mistakes, because it happens that I know them more intimately.
I was brought up in the South, where it is the custom of people to give a great deal of time and thought to the subject of eating. Among the people I knew it was always taken for granted that there should be at least one person in the kitchen devoting all her time to the preparing of delicious things for the family to eat. This person was generally a negress, and, needless to say, she knew nothing about the chemistry of foods, nothing about their constituents or nutritive qualities. All she knew was about their taste; she had been trained to prepare them in ways that tasted best, and was continually being advised and exhorted and sometimes scolded by the ladies of the family on this subject. At the table the family and the guests never failed to talk about the food and its taste, and not infrequently the cook would be behind the door listening to their comments; or else she would wait until after the meal, for the report which somebody would bring her.
In addition to this, the ladies of the family were skilled in what is called "fancy cooking." They did not bother withthe meats and vegetables, but they mixed batter cakes, and made all kinds of elaborate desserts, and exchanged these treasures and the recipes for them with other ladies in the neighborhood. In addition to this, there were certain periods of the week and of the year especially devoted to the preparing and consuming of great quantities of foods. Once every seven days the members of the family expressed their worship of their Creator by eating twice as much as usual; and at another time they celebrated the birth of their Redeemer by overeating systematically for a period of two or three weeks. Needless to say, of course, the children brought up in such an environment all had large appetites and large stomachs, and their susceptibility to illness was recognized by the setting apart for them of a whole classification of troubles—"children's diseases," they were called. In addition to children's diseases, there were coughs and colds and sore throats and pains in the stomach and constipation and diarrhea, which the children shared with their adults.
I had a little more than my share of all these troubles. Always a doctor would be sent for, and always he was wise and impressive, and always I was impressed. He gave me some pills or a bottle of liquid, a teaspoonful every two hours, or something like that—I can hear the teaspoon rattle in the glass as I write. I had a profound respect for each and every one of those doctors. He was wisdom walking about in trousers, and whenever he came, I knew that I was going to get well; and I did, which proved the case completely.
Then I grew up, and at the age of eighteen or nineteen became possessed of a desire for knowledge, and took to reading and studying literally every minute of the day and a good part of the night. I seldom let myself go to sleep before two o'clock in the morning, and was always up by seven and ready for work again. I did this for ten years or so, until nature brought me to a complete stop. During these ten years I was a regular experiment station in health; that is, I had every kind of common ailment, and had it over and over again, so that I could try all the ways of curing it, or failing to cure it, and keep on trying until I was sure, one way or the other. I came recently upon a wonderful saying by John Burroughs, which will be appreciated by every author. "This writing is an unnatural business. It makes your head hot and your feet cold, and it stops the digesting of your food."
This trouble with my digestion began when I was writing my second novel, camping out on a lonely island at the foot of Lake Ontario. I went to see a doctor in a nearby town, and he talked learnedly about dyspepsia. The cause of it, he said, was failure of the stomach to secrete enough pepsin, and the remedy was to take artificial pepsin, obtained from the stomach of a pig. He gave me this pig-pepsin in a bottle of red liquid, and I religiously took some after each meal. It helped for a time; but then I noticed that it helped less and less. I got so that a simple meal of cold meat and boiled potatoes would stay in my stomach for hours, in spite of any amount of the pig-pepsin; I would lie about in misery, because I wanted to work, and my accursed stomach would not let me.
All the time, of course, I was using my mind on this problem, groping for causes. I found that the trouble was worse if I worked immediately after eating. I found also that it was worse when I was writing books. When I got sufficiently desperate, I would stop writing books and go off on a hunting trip. I would tramp twenty miles a day over the mountains, looking for deer, and I would come back at night too tired to think, and in a week or two every trace of my trouble would be gone. So my life regimen came to be—first the writing of a book, and then a hunting trip to get over the effects of it. But as time went on, alas, I noticed that the recuperation was more slow and less certain. The working times grew shorter, and the hunting times grew longer, until finally I had got to a point where I couldn't work at all; I would go to pieces in a few days if I tried it. It was apparently the end of my stomach, and the end of my sleeping, and the end of my writing books. My teeth were decaying, not merely outside but inside; I would have abscesses, and most frightful agonies to endure. I would lie awake all night, and it would seem to me that I could feel my body going to pieces—an extremely depressing sensation!
I had been trying experiments all this time. I had been going to one doctor after another, and had got to realize that the doctors only treated symptoms; they treated the "diseases" when they appeared—but nobody ever told you how to keep the "diseases" from appearing. Why could there not be a doctor who would look you over thoroughly, and tell you everything that was wrong with you, and how to set it right?A doctor who would tell you exactly how to live, so that you might keep well all the time! I was studying economics, and becoming suspicious of my fellow man; it occurred to me that possibly it might be embarrassing to a doctor, if he cured all his patients, and taught them how to live, so that none of them would ever have to come to him again. It occurred to me that possibly this might be the reason why "preventive medicine," constructive health work, was getting so little attention from the medical fraternity.
Two things that plagued me were headache and constipation, and they were obviously related. For constipation, the world had one simple remedy; you "took something" every night or every morning, and thought no more about it. My stout and amiable grandmother had drunk a glass of Hunyadi water every morning for the last thirty or forty years, and that she finally died of "fatty degeneration of the heart" was not connected with this in the mind of anyone who knew her. As for the headaches, people would tell you this, that, and the other remedy, and I would try them—that is, unless they happened to be drugs. I was getting more and more shy of drugs. I had some blessed instinct which saved me from stimulants and narcotics. I had never used tea, coffee, alcohol or tobacco, and in my worst periods of suffering I never took to putting myself to sleep with chloral, or to stopping my headaches with phenacetin.
At the end of six or eight years of purgatory, I came upon a prospectus of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. This seemed to me exactly what I wanted; this was constructive, it dealt with the body as a whole. So I spent a couple of months at the "San," and paid them something like a thousand dollars to tell me all they could about myself.
The first thing they told me was that meat-eating was killing me. It was perfectly obvious, was it not, that meat is a horrible feeding place for germs, that rotten meat is dreadfully offensive, and likewise digested meat—consider the excreta of cats, for example! I listened solemnly while Doctor Kellogg read off the numbers of billions of bacteria per gram in the contents of the colon of a carnivorous person. It certainly seemed proper that the author of "The Jungle" should be a vegetarian, so I became one, and did my best to persuade myself that I enjoyed the taste of the patent meat-substitutes which are served in hundred calory portions in the big Sanitarium dining-room.
There also I met Horace Fletcher, and learned to chew every particle of food thirty-two times, and often more. I exercised in the Sanitarium gymnasium, and watched the sterilized dancing—the men with the men and the women with the women. I was patiently polite with the Seventh Day Adventist religion, and laid in a supply of postage stamps on Friday evening. Finally, and most important of all, I went once a day to the "treatment rooms," and had my abdomen doctored alternately with hot cloths and ice. By this means I kept up a flow of blood in the intestinal tract, and stimulated these organs to activity; so my constipation was relieved, and my headaches were less severe—so long as I stayed at the Sanitarium, and was boiled and frozen once every day. But when I left the Sanitarium, and abandoned the treatments, the troubles began to return. Meantime, however, I had written a book in praise of vegetarianism—a book which has got into the libraries, and cannot be got out again!
I went on to a new variety of health crank, the real "nature cure" practitioners. Vegetarianism was not enough, they insisted; the evil had begun long before, when man first ruined his food and destroyed its nutritive value by means of fire. There was only one certain road to health, and that was by the raw food route, the monkey and squirrel diet. I had gone out to California for a winter's rest, and decided I would give this plan a thorough trial. For five months I lived by myself, and the only cooked food I ate was shredded wheat biscuit. For the rest I lived on nuts and salads and fresh and dried fruits; and during this period I enjoyed such health as I had never known in my life before. I had literally not a single ailment. I was not merely well, but bubbling over with health. I had a friend who said it cheered him up just to see me walk down the street.
I thought that it was entirely the raw food, and that I had solved the problem forever; but I overlooked the fact that during those five months I had done no hard brain work, no writing. I went back to writing again, and things began to go wrong; my wonderful raw foods took to making trouble in my stomach—and I assure you that until you try, you have no idea the amount of trouble that can be made in your stomach by a load of bananas and soaked prunes which has gone wrong! For a year or two I agonized; I could not give up my wonderful raw food diet, because I had always beforeme the vision of those months in California, and could not understand why it was not that way again.
But the time came when I would eat a meal of raw food, and for hours afterwards my stomach would feel like a blown-up football. Then somebody gave me a book by Dr. Salisbury on the subject of the meat diet. Of all the horrible things in the world, a meat diet sounded to me the worst; I had been a vegetable enthusiast for three years, and thought of eating meat as you would think of cannibalism. But there has never been a time in my life when I would not hear something new, and give it a trial if it sounded well; so I read the books of Doctor Salisbury, which have long been out of print, and have been curiously neglected by the medical profession. Salisbury was a real pioneer, an experimenter. He wrote in the days before the germ theory, and so missed his guess regarding tuberculosis, but he perceived that most of the common diseases are caused by dietetic errors, and he set to work to prove it. He showed that hog cholera and army diarrhea are the same disease, and come from the same cause. He took a squad of men and fed them on army biscuit for two or three weeks, until they were nearly dead, and then he put them on a diet of lean beef and completely cured them in a few days. He did this same thing with one kind of food after another, and in each case he would bring his men as near to death as he dared, and then he would cure them. He showed that meat is the only food which contains all the elements of nutrition, the only food upon which a person can live for an unlimited period. As Salisbury said, "Beef is first, mutton is second, and the rest nowhere."
It was his idea that tuberculosis of the lungs is caused by spores of fermenting starch clogging the minute blood vessels. He claimed that there is an early stage of tuberculosis, in which the spores are floating in the blood stream; he put large numbers of patients upon a diet of lean beef, ground and cooked, and he cured them of tuberculosis, and if one of them would break the diet and yield to a craving for starch or sugar, Salisbury claimed that he could find it out an hour or two later by examining a drop of their blood under the microscope. In his books he described vividly the effects of an excess of starch and sugar in the diet. He called it "making a yeast-pot of your stomach"; and you can imagine how that hit my stomach, full of half digested bananas and prunes!
I tried the Salisbury diet, and satisfied myself of this one fact, that lean meat is for brain-workers the most easily assimilated of all foods. Salisbury claimed that you could not overeat on meat, but I do not believe there is any food you cannot overeat on, nor do I believe that anyone should try to live on one kind of food. We are by nature omnivorous animals. Our digestive tracts are similar to those of hogs and monkeys, which eat all varieties of food they can get. One of the common errors of the nature cure enthusiast is to cite the monkey and the squirrel as fruit and nut-eating animals, when the fact is that monkeys and squirrels eat meat when they can get it, and the ardor with which they go bird-nesting is evidence enough that they crave it. If there is any race of man which is vegetarian, you will find that it is from necessity alone. The beautiful South Sea Islanders, who are the theme of the raw fooders' ecstasy, spend a lot of their time catching fish, and sometimes they kill a pig, and celebrate the event precisely as Christians celebrate the birth of their Redeemer.
From this you may be able to guess my conclusions, as the result of much painful blundering and experimenting. So far as diet is concerned, I belong to no school; I have learned something from each one, and what I have learned from a trial of them all is to be shy of extreme statements and of hard and fast rules. To my vegetarian friends who argue that it is morally wrong to take sentient life, I answer that they cannot go for a walk in the country without committing that offense, for they walk on innumerable bugs and worms. We cannot live without asserting our right to subject the lower forms of life to our purposes; we kill innumerable germs when we swallow a glass of grape juice, or for that matter a glass of plain water. I shall be much surprised if the advance of science does not some day prove to us that there are rudimentary forms of consciousness in all vegetable life; so we shall justify the argument of Mr. Dooley, who said, in reviewing "The Jungle," that he could not see how it was any less a crime to cut off a young tomato in its prime, or to murder a whole cradleful of baby peas in the pod!
There is no question that meat-eating is inconvenient, expensive, and dirty. I have no doubt that some day we shall know enough to be able to find for every individual a dietwhich will keep him at the top of his power, without the maintenance of the slaughter-house. But we do not possess that knowledge at present; at least, I personally do not possess it. I happen to be one of those individuals—there are many of them—with whom milk does not agree; and if you rule out milk and meat, you find yourself compelled to get a great deal of your protein from vegetable sources, such as peas, beans and nuts. All these contain a great deal of starch, and thus there is no way you can arrange your diet to escape an excess of starch. Excess of starch, so my experience has convinced me, is the deadliest of all dietetic errors. It is also the commonest of errors, the cause, not merely of the common throat and nose infections, but of constipation, and likewise of diarrhea, of anemia, and thus, through the weakening of the blood stream, of all disorders that spring from this source—decaying teeth and rheumatism, boils, bad complexion, and tuberculosis. Starch foods are the cheapest, therefore they form the common diet of the poor, and are responsible for the diseases of undernourishment to which the poor are liable.
On the other hand, of course, there are perfectly definite diseases of overnourishment; high blood pressure, which culminates in apoplexy; kidney troubles, which result from the inability of these organs to eliminate all the waste matter that is delivered to them; fatty degeneration of the heart, or of the liver, or any of the vital organs. You may cause a headache by clogging the blood stream through overeating, or you may cause it by eating small quantities of food, if those foods are unbalanced, and do not contain the mineral elements necessary to the making of normal blood. Whatever the trouble with your health, it is my judgment that in two cases out of three you will find it dates back to errors in diet. I do not think I exaggerate in saying that a knowledge of what to eat and how much to eat is two-thirds of the knowledge of how to keep yourself in permanent health.
(Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they play in the making of health and disease.)
(Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they play in the making of health and disease.)
It is my purpose in this chapter to lay down a few general principles to aid you in the practical problem of selecting the best diet for yourself. But it must be made clear at the outset that there can be no hard and fast rule. All human bodies are more or less alike, but on the other hand all are more or less different. Modern civilization has given very few bodies the chance to be perfect; nearly all have some weakness, some abnormality, and need some special modification in diet to fit their particular problem. The ideal in each case would be a complete study of the individual system. Some day, no doubt, medical science will analyze the digestive juices and the gland secretions and the blood-stream of every human being, and say, you need a certain percentage of starch and a certain percentage of protein; you need such and such proportion of phosphorus and iron; you should avoid certain acids—and so on. But at present we are devoting our science to the task of killing and maiming other people, instead of enabling ourselves to live in health and happiness; so it is that most of those who read this book will be too poor to command the advice of a diet specialist. The best you can do is to get a few general ideas and try them out, watching your own body and learning its peculiarities.
Human food contains three elements: proteins, fats and carbohydrates. The proteins are the body-building material, and the foods which are rich in proteins are lean meat, the white of eggs, milk and cheese, nuts, peas and beans. A certain amount of this kind of food is needed by the body. If it is missing, the body will gradually waste away. If too much of it is taken, the body can turn it into energy-making material, but this is a wasteful process, and the best evidence appears to be that it is a strain upon the system. Experiments conducted by Professor Chittenden of Yale have proven conclusively that men can live and maintain body weight uponmuch less protein food than previous dietetic standards had indicated.
The fats are found in fat meats and dairy products, and in nuts, olives, and vegetable oils. The body is prepared to digest and assimilate a certain amount of fat, no one knows how much. I have found in my own case that I require a great deal less than people ordinarily eat. I have for many years maintained good health upon a diet containing no more fat than one gets with lean meat once or twice a day. I never use butter or olive oil, nor any fat in cooking. My reason for this is that fats are the most highly concentrated form of food, and the easiest upon which to overeat. Excess of fat is a cause, not merely of obesity, but also of boils and pimples and "pasty" complexion, and other signs of a clogged blood-stream.
The third variety of food is the carbohydrates, and of these there are two kinds, starches and sugars. Starch is the white material of the grains and tubers; the principal food element of bread and cereals, rice, potatoes, bananas, and many prepared substances such as corn-starch, tapioca, farina and macaroni. Starchy foods compose probably half the diet of the average human being. In my own case, they compose about one-sixth, so you see to what extent my beliefs differ from the common. Starch is not really necessary in the diet at all. I have a friend who is subject to headaches, and finds relief from them by a diet of meat, salads, and fresh fruits exclusively. The first thing that excess of starch or sugar does is to ferment in the system, and cause flatulence and gas. But strange as it may seem, if the excess of starch is perfectly digested and assimilated into the system, the condition may be worse yet, because you may have a great quantity of energy-producing material, without the necessary mineral elements which the body requires in the handling of it.
If you cremate a human body and study the ashes chemically, you find a score or more of mineral salts. You find these in the blood, and no blood is normal and no body can be kept normal which does not contain the right percentage of these elements. It is not merely that they are needed to build bones and teeth; they are needed at every instant for the chemistry of the cells. Every time you move a muscle, you fill the cells of that muscle with a certain amount of waste matter. You may prove how deadly this matter is by bindinga tight cord about your arm, and then trying to use the arm. We are only at the beginning of understanding the subtle chemistry of the body; but this much we know, the cells transform the waste products, and they are thrown out of the system as ammonia, uric acid, etc.; and for this process the blood must have a continual supply of many mineral salts.
So vital are they, and so fatal to health is their absence, that it is far better for you to eat nothing at all than to eat improperly balanced foods, or foods which are deficient in the organic salts. You may prove this to yourself by a simple experiment. Put two chickens in separate pens, where nobody can feed them but yourself. Feed one of them on water and white bread, or corn starch, or sugar, or any energy-making substance which contains little of the mineral elements. Feed the other chicken on plain water. You will find that the one which has the food will quickly become droopy and sickly; its feathers will fall out, it will have what in human beings would be known as headaches, colds, sore throats, decaying teeth and boils. At the end of a couple of weeks it will be a dead chicken. The one which you feed on water alone will not be a happy chicken, neither will it be a fat chicken, but it will be a live chicken, and a chicken without disease. I am going later on to discuss the subject of fasting. For the present I will merely say that a chicken which has nothing but water is living upon its own flesh, and therefore has a meat diet, containing the mineral elements necessary to the elimination of the fatigue poisons.
I am going to try not to be dogmatic in this book, and not to say things that I do not know. I confess to innumerable uncertainties about the subject of diet; but one thing I think I do know, and that is that human beings should eliminate absolutely from their food those modern artificial products, which look so nice, and are so easy to handle, and are put up in packages with pretty labels, and have been in some way artificially treated to remove the wastes and impurities—including the vital mineral salts. Among such food substances I include lard and its imitations made from cottonseed oil, white flour, all the prepared and refined cereals, polished rice, tapioca, farina, corn starch, and granulated and powdered sugar. Any of these substances will kill a chicken in a couple of weeks, and the only reason they take a longer time to killyou is because you mix them with other kinds of foods. But to the extent that you eat them, your diet is deficient; and do not console yourself with the idea that the mineral elements will be made up from other foods, because you don't know that, and nobody else knows it. Nobody knows just how much of any particular organic salt the body needs. All we know is that the primitive races, which ate natural foods, enjoyed vigorous health, while the American people, who consume the greatest proportion of the so-called "refined" foods, have the very best dentists and the very worst teeth in the world.
There are many kinds of sugar, found in the sugar-cane and the beet, and in all fruits. Sugar may also be made from any form of starch; this is glucose, which is put up in cans and sold as an imitation of maple syrup. The ordinary granulated and powdered sugar is made by taking from the natural syrup every trace of mineral elements; so I have no hesitation in saying that the ordinary cane sugar and beet sugar of our breakfast tables and our confectionery stores is not a food, but a slow poison. The causes of the wonderful progress of American dentistry, which is the marvel of the civilized world, are cane sugar, white flour, and the frying-pan, each of which dietetic crimes I shall take up in turn.
We have the richest country in the world; we eat more food, probably by 50 per cent, and we waste more food, probably by 500 per cent, than any other people in the world; and yet, go to any small farming community in America, and what do you find? You find the teeth of the young children rotting in their heads, and having to be pulled out before their second teeth come. You find these second teeth rotting often before the age of twenty. A friend of mine, who knows the American farmer, sums it up this way: "He has two things that he requires if he is to be really respectable and happy. First, he wants to get all the fireplaces in his home boarded up, and all the windows nailed tight; and second, he wants to get all his teeth out, and an artificial set installed. Out of the farmers' wives in my neighborhood, not one in ten keeps her own teeth until she is thirty."
If you go to the Balkans, where the peasants live on sour milk, with grains which they grind at home; or to southern Italy and Sicily, where they live on cheese and black bread and olives; or among savage people, where they hunt andfish and gather the natural fruits, you find old men without a single decayed tooth. There must be some reason for this, and the reason is found in our denatured grocery-store foods. The farmer's wife will gather up her eggs and her butter and cheeses, and take them to the store and bring back cans of lard and packages of sugar. The farmer will sell his perfectly good wheat and corn meal, and bring back in his wagon cases of "refined" cereal foods, for which he has paid ten times the price of the grain!
Dentists will tell you that the way candy injures the teeth is by sticking to them and fermenting, forming acids, which destroy the tooth structure. And that may be a part of the reason. But the principal reason why the teeth decay is because the blood-stream is abnormal, and is unable to keep up the repairs of the body. Your teeth are living structures, just as much as any other part of you, and they will resist decay if you supply them with the proper nourishment.
You need sugar; you need a considerable quantity of it every day. Nature provides this sugar in combination with the organic salts, and also with the precious vitamines, whose function in the body we are only beginning to investigate. All the mineral substances which give the color and flavor to oranges, apples, peaches, grapes, figs, prunes, raisins—all these you take out when you make sugar. Or perhaps you put in some imitations of them, made from coal tar chemicals, and drink them at your soda fountains! So little appreciation has the American farmer's wife of natural fruits, that when she preserves them, she considers it necessary to fill them full of cane sugar; in fact, she has a notion that they won't keep unless she cooks them up with sugar! So snobbish are we Americans about our eating, that we make the best of our foods into bywords. We make jokes in our comic papers about the "boarding-house prune"; and yet prunes and raisins are among the wholesomest foods we have, and if we fed them to our children instead of cakes and candy and coal-tar flavorings, our dental industry would rapidly decline.
And the same thing is true of bread. When I was a boy, I thought I had to have hot bread at least twice a day, and if I were called upon to eat bread that was more than a day old, I felt that I was being badly abused by life. I used to read fairy stories, in which something called "black bread" was mentioned, something obscure and terrible; the symbol ofhuman misery was Cinderella sitting in the ashes and eating a crust of dry "black bread." But now since I have studied diet, I have taken my place with Cinderella. I can afford to buy whatever kind of bread I want; I can have the best white bread, piping hot, three times a day, if I want it; but what I eat three times a day is a crust of hard dry "black bread."
"Black bread" is the fairy story name for bread made of the whole grain. It is eaten that way by the peasant because he has no patent milling machinery at his disposal, to fan away the life-giving elements of his food. Nearly all the mineral elements of the grain are contained in the outer, dark-colored portion. The white part is almost pure starch; and when you use white flour, you are not merely starving your blood-stream, your bones, and your teeth, you are also depriving the digestive tract of the rough material which it is accustomed to handle, and which it needs to stimulate it to action. I am aware that whole grain products are a trifle less easy of digestion, but we should not pamper and weaken our digestive tract any more than we let our muscles get flabby for lack of action. We should require our stomachs to handle the ordinary natural foods, precisely as we accustom our body to react from cold water, and to stand honest hard work.
For ages the Japanese peasants have lived on rice, with a little dried fish. Quite recently there began to spread throughout Japan a mysterious disease known as beri-beri. It was especially prevalent in the army, and so the scientists of Japan set out to discover the cause, and it proved to be the modern practice of polishing rice, which takes off the outer coating of the grain. Rice is one of the most wholesome of foods, if it is eaten in the natural state; but in order to get it in that state in this country, you have to find a special food store of the health cranks, and have to pay a special price for it. You have to pay a higher price for whole wheat bread—because ninety-nine people out of a hundred are ignorant, and insist upon having their foodstuffs pretty to look at!
Probably you have read sea stories, and know of the horrors of scurvy. Scurvy and beri-beri are similar diseases, with a similar cause. The men on the old sailing ships used to have to live on white biscuit and salt meat, and they always knew that to recover from their gnawing illness, they must get to port and get fresh vegetables and fruits, especiallyonions and lemons, which contain the vitamines as well as the salts. But you will see the modern housewife going into the grocery store, and surveying the shelves of "package" goods, and in her ignorance picking out the scurvy-making products, and frequently paying for them a much higher price than for the health-making ones!
Then, when she has got her white flour, and her cane sugar, and her lard, she will take it home, and mix it up, and put it in the frying pan, and serve it hot to her husband and children. Nature has so constituted her husband and children that they digest starch before they digest fat; that is to say, the starch is digested mainly in the stomach, while the fat is digested mainly after the food has been passed on into the small intestine. But by frying the starch before it is eaten, the housewife carefully takes each grain of the starch and protects it with a little covering of fat. Thus the digestive juices of the stomach cannot get at the starch, and the starch goes down into the small intestine a good part undigested. If some evil spirit, wishing to make trouble for the human organism, had charge of the laying out of our diet, he could hardly devise anything worse than that. And yet it would be no exaggeration to say that the average American, especially the average farmer, eats out of a frying-pan. If his potatoes have to be warmed over, they go into the frying-pan; his precious batter-cakes and doughnuts are cooked in a frying-pan, and all his precious hot breads are mixed with lard. If it were not for the fact that you cannot broil a beefsteak over a modern gas range, I would tell you that the first step toward health for the average American would be to throw the frying-pan out of the window, and to throw the cook-book after it.
The whole modern art of cooking is largely a perversion; a product of idleness, vanity, and sensuality. It is one of the monstrous growths consequent upon our system of class exploitation. We have a number of idle people with nothing to do but eat, and who demonstrate their superiority to the rest of us by their knowledge of superior foods, and superior ways of preparing them. They have the wealth of the world at their disposal, also the services of their fellow man without limit, and they set their fellow man to work to enable them to give elaborate banquets, and to sit in solemn state and gorge themselves, and to have a full account of their behaviorpublished in the next morning's newspapers. A great part of this perverse art we owe to what is called the "ancient régime" in France—a régime which starved the French peasantry until they were black skinned beasts hiding in caves and hollow trees. So it comes about that our modern food depravity parades itself in French names, and American snobbery requires of its devotees a course in the French language sufficient to read a menu card. Needless to say, this elaborate gastronomic art has been developed without any relation to health, or any thought of the true needs of the body. It is one of the products of the predatory system which we can say is absolute waste. Having done my own cooking for the past twenty-five years, I make bold to say that I can teach anybody all he needs to know about cooking in one lesson of half an hour, and that the total amount of cooking required for a large family can be done by one person in twenty minutes a day.
In the first place, a great many foods do not have to be cooked at all, and are made less fit by cooking. In the next place, the only cooking that is ever required is a little boiling, or in the case of meat, roasting or broiling. In the next place, the art of combining foods in cooking is a waste art, because no foods should be combined in cooking. Every food has its own natural flavor, which is lost in combination, and if anybody is unable to enjoy the natural flavors of simply cooked foods, there is one thing to say to that person, and that is to wait until he is hungry. Let him take a ten-mile walk in the open air, and he will have more interest in his next meal. I am not a fanatic, and have no desire to destroy the pleasures of life; I am recommending to people that they should seek the higher pleasures of the intellect, and those pleasures are not found in standing over a cook stove, nor in compelling others to stand over a cook stove. Moreover, I know that the artificial mixing of foods to tempt peoples' palates is one of the principal causes of overeating, and therefore of ill health, and therefore of the ultimate destruction of the pleasures of life.
I went out from the world of cooks before I was twenty. I wanted to write a book, and to be let alone while I was doing it. I lived by myself, and found out about cooking by practical experience. On a few occasions since then, I have lived in a house with a servant, and had some cooking donefor me, but it was always because somebody else wanted it, and against my protest. In the last ten years we have had no servant in our home, and because I want my wife to give her energy to more important things than feeding me, I do my share of getting every meal. We have worked out a system of housekeeping by which we get a meal in five minutes, and when we finish it, it takes three minutes to clear things away.
If I tell you what I eat, please do not get the impression that I am advising you to eat these same things. My diet consists of the foods which I have found by long experience agree with me. There are many other foods which are just as wholesome, but which I do not eat, either because they don't happen to agree with me, or because I don't care for them so much. I am fond of fruit, and eat more of that than of anything else. It is not a cheap article of diet, but you can save a good deal if you buy it in quantities, as I do. A little later I am going to discuss the prices of foods.
For breakfast I eat a slice of whole wheat bread, three good-sized apples, stewed, and eight or ten dates. It takes practically no time to prepare this breakfast. The bread has to be baked, of course, but this is done wholesale; we buy four loaves at a time, and it is just as good at the end of a couple of weeks as when we buy it. When I lived in the world of cooks, I would call for apple sauce; which meant that somebody had to pare apples, cut them up, stew them, mix them with sugar, grate a little nutmeg over them, set them on ice, and serve them to me on a glass dish, with a little pitcher of cream. But now what happens is that I put a dozen apples in a big sauce-pan and let them simmer while I am eating. We have a rule in our family that we do not do any cooking except while we are eating, because if we try it at any other time of the day, we get buried in a book or in a manuscript, and forget about it until the smoke causes somebody in the street to summon the fire department. So the apples for my breakfast were cooked during last night's supper; and during the breakfast there will be some vegetable cooking for lunch.
At this lunch, which is my "square meal," I eat a large slice of beefsteak, say a third of a pound. Jack London used to say that the only man who could cook a beefsteak was the fireman of a railway locomotive, because he had a hot,clean shovel. The best imitation you can get is a hot, clean frying-pan; and when you are sure that it is hot, let it get hotter. The whole secret of cooking meat is to keep the juices inside, and to do that you must cook it quickly. When you slap it down on a hot frying-pan, the meat is seared, and the juices stay inside, and if you do not turn it over until it is almost ready to burn, you don't need to cook it very long on the other side. That is the one secret of cooking worth knowing; it doesn't cost anything, and saves time instead of wasting it. As I have never found anybody else capable of learning it, I reserve the cooking of the beefsteak as one of my family duties.
To continue the lunch, a slice of whole wheat bread, and a large quantity of some fresh salad, such as celery, or lettuce and tomatoes, without dressing. For a part of this may be substituted a vegetable, one or two beets or turnips, cooked during a previous meal, and warmed up in a couple of minutes; and we do not throw away the tops of the turnips and beets and celery, we put them on and cook them, and they serve for the next day's meal. If you would eat a large quantity of such "greens" once a day, you would escape many of the ills that your flesh is at present heir to. Finally, for dessert, an orange and a small handful of raisins, or one or two figs.
The evening meal will be the same as the breakfast; except once in a while when I am especially hungry, and want some meat. I am writing in the winter season, so the fruits suggested are those available in winter. The menu will be varied with every kind of fruit at the season when it is cheapest and most easily obtained. The beefsteak will appear at about three meals out of four; occasionally it will be replaced by the lean meat of pork or mutton, or by fish. The bread may be replaced by rice, or boiled potatoes, either white or sweet, and occasionally by graham crackers. I know that these contain a little fat and sugar, but I try not to be fanatical about my diet, and the rules I suggest do not carry the death penalty. There was a time when I used to allow my friends to make themselves miserable by trying to provide me with special foods when they invited me to a meal, but now I tell them to "forget it," and I politely nibble a little of everything, and eat most of what I find wholesome; if there is nothing wholesome, I content myself with the pretense of ameal. If I find myself in a restaurant, I quite shamelessly get a piece of apple or pumpkin pie, omitting most of the crust. As I don't go away from home more than once or twice a month, I do not have to worry about such indulgence. The main thing is to arrange one's home diet on sound lines, and learn to enjoy the simple and wholesome foods, of which there is a great variety obtainable, and at prices possible to all but the wretchedly poor.
In conclusion, since everybody likes to have a feast now and then, I specify that my diet regimen allows for holidays. Assuming that I am your guest for a day, and that you wish to "blow" me, regardless of expense, here will be the menu. Breakfast, some graham crackers, a bunch of raisins, a can of sliced pineapple in winter, or a big chunk of watermelon in summer. Dinner, or lunch, roast pork, a baked apple, a baked sweet potato and some spinach. Supper, lettuce, dates, and a dish of popcorn flavored with peanut butter. Try this next Christmas!
P. S. After this book had been put into type, I chanced to be looking over Herbert Quick's illuminating book, "On Board the Good Ship Earth." Discussing the importance of certain organic salts to the body, Dr. Quick states: "Animals have been fed, as an experiment, on foods deficient in phosphorus. For a while they seemed to do well. Then they collapsed. It takes only three months of a ration without phosphorus to wreck an animal. Individual creatures were killed after a month of this diet, and it was found that the flesh was taking the phosphate—for the phosphorus exists in the body in that form—from the bones to supply its need. In other words, the body was eating its own bones! When this process had robbed the bones to the limit, the collapse came, and the animal could never recover."
(Discusses various foods and their food values, the quantities we need, and their money cost.)
(Discusses various foods and their food values, the quantities we need, and their money cost.)
I think there is no more important single question about health than the question of how much food we should eat. It is one about which there is a great deal of controversy, even among the best authorities. We shall try here for a common-sense solution. At the outset we have to remind ourselves of the distinction we tried to draw between nature and man. To what extent can civilized man rely upon his instincts to keep him in perfect health?
Let us begin by considering the animals. How is their diet problem solved? Horses and cattle in a wild state are adjusted to certain foods which they find in nature, and so long as they can find it, they have no diet problem. Man comes, and takes these animals and domesticates them; he observes their habits, and gives to them a diet closely approaching the natural one, and they get along fairly well. But suppose the man, with his superior skill in agriculture, taking wild grain and planting it, reaping and threshing it by machinery, puts before his horse an unlimited quantity of a concentrated food such as oats, which the horse can never get in a natural state—will that horse's instincts guide it? Not at all. Any horse will kill itself by overeating on grain.
I have read somewhere a clever saying, that a farm is a good place for an author to live, provided he can be persuaded not to farm it. But once upon a time I had not heard that wise remark, and I owned and tried to run a farm. I had two beautiful cows of which I was very proud, and one morning I woke up and discovered that the cows had got into the pear orchard and had been feeding on pears all night. In a few hours they both lay with bloated stomachs, dying. A farmer told me afterwards that I might have saved their lives, if I had stuck a knife into their stomachs to let out the gas. I do not know whether this is true or not. But my two dead cows afford a perfect illustration of the reasonwhy civilized man cannot rely upon his instincts and his appetites to tell him when he has had enough to eat. He can only do this, provided he rigidly restricts himself to the foods which he ate in the days when his teeth and stomach and bowels were being shaped by the process of natural selection. If he is going to eat any other than such strictly natural foods, he will need to apply his reason to his diet schedule.
In a state of nature man has to hunt his food, and the amount that he finds is generally limited, and requires a lot of exercise to get. Explorers in Africa give us a picture of man's life in the savage state, guided by his instincts and very little interfered with by reason. The savages will starve for long periods, then they will succeed in killing a hippopotamus or a buffalo, and they will gorge themselves, and nearly all of them will be ill, and several of them will die. So you see, even in a state of nature, and with natural foods, restraint is needed, and reason and moral sense have a part to play.
What do reason and moral sense have to tell us about diet? Our bodily processes go on continuously, and we need at regular intervals a certain quantity of a number of different foods. The most elementary experiment will convince us that we can get along, maintain our body weight and our working efficiency upon a much smaller quantity of food than we naturally crave. Civilized custom puts before us a great variety of delicate and appetizing foods, upon which we are disposed to overeat; and we are slow observers indeed if we do not note the connection between this overeating and ill health. So we are forced to the conclusion that if we wish to stay well, we need to establish a censorship over our habits; we need a different diet regimen from the haphazard one which has been established for us by a combination of our instincts with the perversions of civilization.
Up to a few years ago, it was commonly taken for granted by authorities on diet that what the average man actually eats must be the normal thing for him to eat. Governments which were employing men in armies, and at road building, and had to feed them and keep them in health, made large scale observations as to what the men ate, and thus were established the old fashioned "diet standards." They are expressed in calories, which is a heat unit representing the quantity of fuel required to heat a certain small quantity of water a certain number of degrees. In order that you mayknow what I am talking about, I will give a rough idea of the quantity of the more common foods which it takes to make 100 calories: one medium sized slice of bread, a piece of lean cooked steak the size of two fingers, one large apple, three medium tablespoonfuls of cooked rice or potatoes, one large banana, a tablespoonful of raisins, five dates, one large fig, a teaspoonful of sugar, a ball of butter the size of your thumbnail, a very large head of lettuce, three medium sized tomatoes, two-thirds of a glass of milk, a tablespoonful of oil. You observe, if you compare these various items, how little guidance concerning food is given by its bulk. You may eat a whole head of lettuce, weighing nearly a pound, and get no more food value than from a half ounce of olive oil which you pour over it. You may eat enough lean beefsteak to cover your plate, and you will not have eaten so much as a generous helping of butter. A big bowl of strawberries will not count half so much as the cream and sugar you put over them. So you may realize that when you eat olive oil, butter, cream, and sugar, you are in the same danger as the horse eating oats, or as my two cows in the pear orchard; and if some day a surgeon has to come and stick a knife into you, it may be for the same reason.
The old-fashioned diet standards are as follows: Swedish laborers at hard work, over 4,700 calories; Russian workmen at moderate work, German soldiers in active service, Italian laborers at moderate work, between 3,500 and 3,700 calories; English weavers, nearly 3,500 calories; Austrian farm laborers, over 5,000 calories. Some twenty years ago the United States government made observations of over 15,000 persons, and established the following, known as the "Atwater standards": men at very hard muscular work, 5,500 calories; men at moderately active muscular work, 3,400 calories; men at light to moderate muscular work, 3,050 calories; men at sedentary, or women at moderately active work, 2,700 calories.
In the last ten or fifteen years there has arisen a new school of dietetic experts, headed by Professors Chittenden and Fisher of Yale University. Professor Chittenden has published an elaborate book, "The Nutrition of Man," in which he tells of long-continued experiment upon a squad of soldiers and a group of athletes at Yale University, also upon average students and professors. He has proved conclusively that all these various groups have been able to maintain full bodyweight and full working efficiency upon less than half the quantity of protein food hitherto specified, and upon anywhere from one-half to two-thirds the calory value set forth in the former standards.
When I first read this book, I set to work to try its theories upon myself. During the five or six months that I lived on raw food, I took the trouble to weigh everything that I ate, and to keep a record. It is, of course, very easy to weigh raw foods exactly, and I found that I lived an active life and kept physical health upon slightly less than 2,500 calories a day. I have set this as my standard, and have accustomed myself to follow it instinctively, and without wasting any thought upon it. Sometimes I fall from grace; for I still crave the delightful cakes and candies and ice cream upon which I was brought up. I always pay the penalty, and know that I will not get back to my former state of health until I skip a meal or two, and give my system a chance to clean house. The average man will find the regimen set forth in this book austere and awe-inspiring; I do not wish to pose as a paragon of virtue, so perhaps I should quote a sarcastic girl cousin, who remarked when I was a boy that the way to my heart was with a bag of ginger-snaps. I live in the presence of candy stores and never think of their existence, but if someone brings candy into the house and puts it in front of me, I have to waste a lot of moral energy in letting it alone. A few years ago I had a young man as secretary who discovered this failing of mine, and used to afford himself immense glee by buying a box of chocolates and leaving it on top of my desk. I would give him back the box—with some of the chocolates missing—but he would persist in "forgetting it" on my desk; he would hide and laugh hilariously behind the door, until my wife discovered his nefarious doings, and warned me of them.
Professor Chittenden states quite simply the common sense procedure in the matter of food quantity. Find out by practical experiment what is the very least food upon which you can do your work without losing weight. That is the correct quantity for you, and if you are eating more, you certainly cannot be doing your body any good, and all the evidence indicates that you are doing it harm. You need not have the least fear in making this experiment that you will starve yourself. Later on, in a chapter on fasting, I shall prove toyou that you carry around with you in your body sufficient reserve of food to keep you alive for eighty or ninety days; and if you draw on a small quantity of this you do not do yourself the slightest harm. Cut down the amount of your food; eat the bulky foods, which contain less calory value, and weigh yourself every day, and you will be surprised to discover how much less you need to eat than you have been accustomed to.
One of the things you will find out is that your stomach is easily fooled; it is largely guided by bulk. If you eat a meal consisting of a moderate quantity of lean meat, a very little bread, a heaping dish of turnip greens, and a big slice of watermelon, you will feel fully satisfied, yet you will not have taken in one-third the calory value that you would at an ordinary meal with gravies and dressings and dessert. The bulky kind of food is that for which your system was adapted in the days when it was shaped by nature. You have a large stomach, many times as large as you would have had if you had lived on refined and concentrated foods such as butter, sugar, olive oil, cheese and eggs. You have a long intestinal tract, adapted to slowly digesting foods, and to the work of extracting nutrition from a mass of roughage. You have a very large lower bowel, which Metchnikoff, the Russian scientist, one of the greatest minds who ever examined the problems of health, declares a survival, the relic of a previous stage of evolution, and a source of much disease. The best thing you can do with that lower bowel is to give it lots of hay, as it requires; in other words, to eat the salads and greens which contain cellulose material. This contains no food value, and does not ferment, but fills the lower bowel and stimulates it to activity.
If you eat too much food, three things may happen. First, it may not be digested, and in that case it will fill your system with poisons. Second, it may be assimilated, but not burned up by the body. In that case it has to be thrown out by the kidneys or the sweat glands, and this puts upon these organs an extra strain, to which in the long run they may be unequal. Or third, the surplus material may be stored up as fat. This is an old-time trick which nature invented to tide you over the times when food was scarce. If you were a bear, you would naturally want to eat all you could, and be as fat as possible in November, so that you might be ableto hunt your prey when you came out from your winter's sleep in April. But you are not a bear, and you expect to eat your regular meals all winter; you have established a system of civilization which makes you certain of your food, and the place where you keep your surplus is in the bank, or sewed up in the mattress, or hidden in your stocking. In other words, a civilized man saves money, and the habit of storing globules of grease in the cells of his body is a survival of an old instinct, and a needless strain upon his health. Not merely does the fat man have to carry all the extra weight around with him, but his body has to keep it and tend it; and what are the effects of this is fully shown by life insurance tables. People who are five or ten per cent over weight have five or ten per cent more chance of dying all the time, while people who are five or ten per cent under weight have five or ten per cent more than the average of life expectation. There is no answer to these figures, which are the result of the tabulation of many hundreds of thousands of cases. The meaning of them to the fat person is to put himself on a diet of lean meat, green vegetables and fresh fruits, until he has brought himself down, not merely to the normal fatness of the civilized man, but to the normal leanness of the athlete, the soldier on campaign, and the student who has more important things to think about than stuffing his stomach.
There is, of course, a certain kind of leanness which is the result of ill health. There are wasting diseases; tuberculosis, for example, and anemia. There are people who worry themselves thin, and there are a few rare "spiritual" people, so-called, who fade away from lack of sufficient interest in their bodies. That is not the kind of leanness that I mean, but the active, wiry leanness, which sometimes lives a hundred years. Nearly always you will find that such people are spare eaters; and you will find that our ideal of rosy plumpness, both for adults and children, is a wholly false notion. We once had in our home as servant an Irish girl, who was what is popularly called "a picture of health," with those beautiful flaming cheeks that Irish and English women so often have. She was in her early twenties, and nobody who knew her had any idea but that her health was perfect. But one morning she was discovered in bed with one side paralyzed, and in a couple of weeks she was dead with erysipelas.The color in her cheeks had been nothing but diseased blood vessels, overloaded with food material; and with the blood in that condition, one of the tiny vessels in the brain had become clogged.
In the same way I have seen children, two or three years old, plump and rosy, and considered to be everything that children should be; but pneumonia would hit them, and in two or three days they would be at death's door. I do not mean that children should be kept hungry; on the contrary, they should have four or five meals a day, so that they do not have a chance to become too hungry. But at those meals they should eat in great part the bulky foods, which contain the natural salts needed for building the body. If a child asks for food, you may give it an apple, or you may give it a slice of bread and butter with sugar on it. The child will be equally well content in either case; but it is for you, with your knowledge of food values, to realize that the bread with butter and sugar contains two or three times as much nutriment as the apple, but contains practically none of the precious organic salts which will make the child's bones and teeth.
So far I have discussed this subject as if all foods grew on bushes outside your kitchen door, and all you had to do was to go and pick off what you wanted. But as a matter of fact, foods cost money, and under our present system of wage slavery, the amount of money the average person can spend for food is strictly limited. In a later book I am going to discuss the problem of poverty, its causes and remedies. All that I can do here is to tell you what foods you ought to have, and if society does not pay you enough for your work to enable you to buy such foods, you may know that society, is starving you, and you may get busy to demand your rights as human beings. Meantime, however, such money as you do have, you want to spend wisely, and the vast majority of you spend it very unwisely indeed.
In the first place, a great many of the simplest and most wholesome foods are cheap—often because people do not know enough to value them. We insist upon having the choice cuts of meats, because they are more tender to the teeth, but the cheaper cuts are exactly as nutritious. We insist upon having our meats loaded with fat, although fatness is an abnormal condition in an animal, and excess of fat is agrave error in diet. I live in a country where jack rabbits are a pest, and in the market they sell for perhaps one-fourth the cost of beef, and yet I can hardly ever get them, because people value them so little as food; they prefer the meat of a hog which has been wallowing in a filthy pen, and has been deliberately made so fat that it could hardly walk!
I have already spoken of prunes, a much despised and invaluable food. All the dried fruits are rich in food values, and if we could get them untreated by chemicals, they would be worth their cost. I was brought up to despise the cheaper vegetables, such as cabbage and turnips; I never tasted boiled cabbage until I was forty, and then to my great surprise I made the discovery that it is good. Raw cabbage is as valuable as any other salad; it is a trifle harder to digest for some people, but I do not believe in pampering the stomach. Both potatoes and rice are cheap and wholesome, if only we would get unpolished rice, and if we would leave the skins on the potatoes until after they are cooked. Nearly all the mineral salts of the potato are just under the outer skin, and are removed by the foolish habit of peeling them.
The prices of food differ so widely at different seasons and in different parts of the world, that there is not much profit in trying to figure how cheaply a person can live. I have found that I spend for the diet I have indicated here, from sixty to eighty cents a day. I do not buy any fancy foods, but on the other hand, I do not especially try to economize; I buy what I want of the simple everyday foods in their season. Most everyone will find that it is a good business proposition to buy the foods which he needs to keep in health. If the average workingman would add up the money he spends, not merely in the restaurants, but in the candy stores, the drug stores, the tobacco stores, and the offices of doctors and dentists, he would find, I think, that he could afford to buy himself the necessary quantity of wholesome natural foods. For a family of three, in the place where I live, enough of these foods can be purchased for a dollar a day, and this is about one-fourth what common labor is being paid, and one-eighth of what skilled labor is being paid. I will specify the foods: a pound and a half of shoulder steak, a loaf of whole wheat bread or a box of shredded wheat biscuit, a head of cabbage, a pound of prunes, and four or five pounds of apples.
There are many ways of saving in the purchase of food if you put your mind upon it. If you are buying prunes, you may pay as high as fifty cents or a dollar a pound for the big ones, and they are not a bit better than the tiny ones, which you can buy for as low as eight cents a pound in bulk. When bread is stale, the bakers sell it for half price, despite the fact that only then has it become fit to eat. If you buy canned peaches, you will pay a fancy price for them, and they will be heavy with cane sugar; but if you inquire, you find what are known as "pie peaches," put up in gallon tins without sugar, and at about half the price. The butcher will sell you what he calls "hamburg steak" at a very low price, and if you let him prepare it out of your sight, he will fill it with fat and gristle; but let him make some while you watch, and then you have a very good food. One of my diet rules is that I do not trust the capitalist system to fix me up any kind of mixed or ground or prepared foods. I have not eaten sausage since I saw it made in Chicago.
Also there is something to know about the cooking of foods, since it is possible to take perfectly good foods and spoil them by bad cooking. Once upon a time our family discovered a fireless cooker, and thought that was a wonderful invention for an absent-minded author and a wife who is given to revising manuscripts. But recent investigations which have been made into the nature of the "vitamines," food ferments which are only partly understood, suggest that prolonged cooking of food may be a great mistake. The starch has to be cooked in order to break the cell walls by the expansion of the material inside. Twenty minutes will be enough in the case of everything except beans, which need to be cooked four or five hours. Meat should be eaten rare, except in the case of pork, which harbors a parasite dangerous to the human body; therefore pork should always be thoroughly cooked. The white of eggs is made less digestible by boiling hard or frying. Eggs should never be allowed to boil; put them on in cold water, and take them off as soon as the water begins to boil. It is not necessary to cook either fresh fruit or dried. The dried fruits may be soaked and eaten raw, but I find that several fruits, especially apples and pears, do not agree with me well if they are eaten raw, so I stew them for fifteen or twenty minutes. I have no objection to canned fruits and vegetables, provided one takesthe trouble in opening them to make sure there is no sign of spoiling. If you put up your own fruits, do not put in any sugar. All you have to do is to let them boil for a few minutes, and to seal them tightly while they are boiling hot. The whole secret of preserving is to exclude the air with its bacteria.
If you live on a farm, you will have no trouble in following the diet here outlined, for you can produce for yourselves all the foods that I have recommended; only do not make the mistake of shipping out your best foods, and taking back the products of a factory, just because you have read lying advertisements about them. Take your own wheat and oats and corn to the mill, and have it ground whole, and make your own breads and cereals. Try the experiment of mixing whole corn meal with water and a little salt, and baking it into hard, crisp "corn dodgers." I do not eat these—but only because I cannot buy them, and have no time to make them.
Another common article of food which I do not recommend is salted and smoked meats. I do not pretend to know the effects of large quantities of salt and saltpetre and wood smoke upon the human system, but I know that Dr. Wiley's "poison squad" proved definitely that a number of these inorganic minerals are injurious to health, and I prefer to take fresh meat when I can get it. I use a moderate quantity of common salt on meat and potatoes, because there seems to be a natural craving for this. I know that many health enthusiasts insist that I am thus putting a strain on my kidneys, but I will wait until these health enthusiasts make clear to me why deer and cattle and horses in a wild state will travel many miles to a salt-lick. I have learned that it is easy to make plausible statements about health, but not so easy to prove them. For example, I was told that it is injurious to drink water at meals, and for years I religiously avoided the habit; but it occurred to some college professor to find out if this was really true, and he carried on a series of experiments which proved that the stomach works better when its contents are diluted. The only point about drinking at meals is that you should not use the liquid to wash down your food without chewing it.
I can suggest two other ways by which you may save money on food. One is by not eating too much, and anotheris by eating all that you buy. The amount of food that is wasted by the people of America would feed the people of any European nation. The amount of food that is thrown out from any one of our big American leisure class hotels would feed the children of a European town. I think it may fairly be described as a crime to throw into the garbage pail food which might nourish human life. In our family we have no garbage pail. What little waste there is, we burn in the stove, and my wife turns it into roses. It consists of the fat which we cannot help getting at the butcher's, and the bones of meat, and the skins of some fruits and vegetables. It would never enter into our minds to throw out a particle of bread, or meat, or other wholesome food. If we have something that we fear may spoil, we do not throw it out, but put it into a saucepan and cook it for a few minutes. If you will make the same rule in your home, you will stop at least that much of the waste of American life; and as to the big leisure class hotels, and the banquet tables of the rich—just wait a few years, and I think the social revolution will attend to them!