Chapter IV: Introduction (2)

The ultimate and most scientific end that can be attained in the study of the food question is, to find in foods the exact requirements of a normal body; in other words, a perfectly balanced bill of fare. This is rendered extremely difficult when we subsist upon foods which have been changed by any process from their elemental condition; but in subsisting upon natural or elementary foods it is but a matter of time when the taste will dictate the quality, and hunger the quantity, and the perfectly balanced bill of fare becomes possible.

THE PREPARATION OF FOOD.

Many good women have spent the best part of their lives, and volume after volume has been written in the endeavor to tell the world how to prepare foods. The very words, “prepare foods,” suggest to the mind that they are not right; that nature has not finished her work; that something must be done to them before they are fit to convert into human energy.

It suggests that they must be fixed, mixed, mashed, smashed, bruised, ground, shredded, heated, steamed, baked, boiled, oiled, roasted, toasted, greased, sweetened, soured, fermented, raised, mushed up, wet up, dried out, or in some way changed from the way in which they were handed to us by the provident hand of nature.

The securing of food is the chief business of every living thing on this globe. The necessity of doing this has shaped to a very large degree both the body and the mind. It made for man hands suitable for plucking fruit, nuts, and things that grew above his head high up in the air and sunshine. It gave to the lion claws and tusks to catch and tear his food. It gave to the hog a snout with which to root in the ground. It gave to the stork and the crane long legs and bills. It gave to the giraffe a long neck with which to reach buds and leaves. It gave to the honey bee an organ to collect honey, a sack in his own body to carry it, and intelligence enough to make his cell in which to deposit it for future use.

In the process of ages, want creates all that is necessary. Food taken as nature made it will produce a natural being. When it is changed, mixed, distilled and concentrated, it is unnatural, and it will necessarily produce an unnatural being. For, as man is the net product of his food, as is his food, so he must be. There is no problem in philosophy more obvious than this.

It may be argued that our present methods of feeding are the product of heredity, and with the long ages we have changed the artificial into the natural. This is not true, because the ultimate end of artificialism, that is, the violation of natural law, is extermination. There is no such thing as getting used to the wrong thing.

A human being can never get used to whiskey and tobacco. They will stimulate the nervous system above par, only to drop it farther below each time they are touched. They leave their withering trail through the body and brain of the real man, and sink lower and lower each day the hopes, aspirations and emotions. They cover the faculties with a callous veneering that finally becomes impervious to the sweetest senses of the human heart.

Foods should be changed as little as possible from their elementary condition. The idea of preparing foods should be allowed to fade entirely from the human mind. It is well to remember that they have been prepared once by a supreme intelligence, and it is seriously to be doubted if the puny biped called man can very much improve them.

When the average mind thinks of uncooked foods, it is wont, it seems, to fly to a meat store, more politely called a butcher shop, for proof infallible that the scheme is wrong; and draw a picture of one dining from the swinging carcass of a cow or hog, or going to the corn bin and gnawing through a crack at an ear of yellow corn.

Instead, picture a dainty table in a quiet corner, covered with spotless linen and laden with milk, cream, egg-nog, pecan meats, walnuts, almonds, grapes, grape fruit, bananas, pears, apples, dates, figs and raisins, luscious red melons and golden cantaloupes, lettuce, cucumbers, ripe olives, celery, olive oil and a dozen other delicious things, all of which being natural, satisfy hunger, furnish the highest form of nutrition, and quickly appeal to and excite the highest sense of taste and enjoyment. It is too bad that so many good people go through the world from the cradle to the coffin, and, after leaving the maternal fount, never enjoy, never taste, one good, clean, pure, delicious meal.

PREPARATION OF UNCOOKED FOODS.

The idea of _preparing_ foods is so firmly fixed in the minds of women that the very suggestion of lessening their labors in this direction suggests the idea of limiting the family rations,--depriving the table of its pleasure and luxury; therefore, it sometimes meets with more or less opposition. Experience has shown that men are more willing to accept the elementary food idea than women, particularly when it promises to lighten the labors of their wives, mothers and daughters.

There has been for many thousand years a sort of competition between housewives, hotels, and all public and private eating-places, as to which could prepare the greatest variety of foods, the result of which is that the table is held responsible for over ninety per cent. of all human ills.

This result is not sufficiently creditable to cause thinking people to clamor for its continuation. It reminds me of the consolation that I received once from a gentleman with whom I was playing a game of billiards. It was my off-day. The balls would neither “hit” nor “hurdle,” while his plays were all graceful and effective; and I was enjoying the supreme pleasure of seeing him make all the points beside paying for the games. In answer to my complaint upon missing a simple shot, he said, “Oh, this is nothing. I have seen luck run this way for three or four hours, and all of a sudden get worse.”

The best foods need the least preparation. Geographic and climatic conditions, under which most of us live, of course, make harvesting and garnering necessary; and in order to store certain foods for winter use, certain preparations become necessary; but when we come to prepare them for the table, the effort should be to bring them back as nearly as possible to their original condition.

All fruits from which the moisture has been evaporated, so that they will keep from season to season, only need to have the moisture again restored to them by being soaked in pure water at about the temperature of the blood. This is the most healthful and delicious way evaporated or dried fruits can be prepared.

That food is most healthful and will give to animal life its highest form that can be taken most nearly in its natural condition. There is nothing more obvious and certain than this. This course of reasoning leads us to the inevitable conclusion that fruits, nuts, green plants,--that is, plants containing much chlorophyll, comprise an absolutely perfect diet.

Nearly every step in civilization has been taken in the direction of lightening human labor, except in the art of preparing foods. This has been doubled and trebled a thousand times, and laid upon the delicate shoulders of woman. The rail-road train would never have been invented had it not been that man objected to toting burdens on his back. The telephone and telegraph were the outgrowth of man’s protest against the courier system. The inventions of all the marvelous machines to which we point as evidences and marks of our great civilization, originated in the one thought, the saving of human labor. But the stomach is a veritable gehenna, and the appetite its grizzly gorgon that holds millions of women in a worse bondage than the negro suffered in the South before the war.

EFFECTS OF COOKING FOOD.

In all nature there are two great forces working, as it were, against each other; namely, construction and destruction. That is to say, nature is, on the one hand, assembling together certain elements and building them into forms we call life, and on the other it is breaking down, changing and dissipating these elements, which process we call death or destruction.

In the process of construction, the vegetable or plant takes up from the mineral kingdom inorganic matter, and converts it into organic or living matter, such as is found in fruits, nuts, cereals,--the natural foods of man. It is only through this process that mineral elements can build or become a part of animal life.

One of the most potent and effective agencies known to change and demolish materials is fire. When we apply it to our food in the process of cooking, it results in such a change as destroys the elementary plant form, and the mineral elements return to their inorganic condition. It cannot be otherwise, insomuch as it possesses absolutely no element of construction.

At about 145° F. certain properties in plant life are destroyed. For instance, a leaf of cabbage, if emersed in water that can easily be endured by the bare hand, will wilt, showing that part of its cellular life is destroyed at that temperature.

The heat can be increased until all plant life is destroyed. This becomes important when we remember that animal life is supported and entirely constructed from plant life. The living plant possesses all the elements from which animal life is made. Therefore, the question would naturally arise in the mind of any thinking person, “Why destroy in part the plant life before feeding it to the animal? In what possible way can the application of heat improve it?” Our education, our science and learning, are of small value, if they do not teach us how to build the highest form of animal life from the material used.

Many articles of our food are subjected to an intense dry heat, ranging from 300° to 400° F., in the vain hope that in some way they may be improved. Bread browned in an oven is partly changed to ashes. It is half destroyed. Were it kept there twice as long it would be wholly destroyed.

Yet millions of people insist on eating those supercooked foods. They insist on wheat being made into Zwieback, which might be described as a bit of ashes held together by a little gluten, without ever spending one moment in thinking of the real difference in food value, between this stuff and the grain in its original state.

Of all the curious customs into which people have evolved, cooking seems to be the strangest and to possess the least excuse for existence. It has made of woman a slave. It has made of the stomach a _potpourri_ for everything living or dead. It so changes the properties of foods that no chemist living can analyze them. It is the chief cause of mixing food products, which is the principal cause of overeating, which, in its turn, is the genesis of nearly all stomach and intestinal disorders. It has changed man into an omnivorous, and in some cases into a carnivorous animal.

COOKING MILK.

The custom of cooking or sterilizing milk, due to ignorance, is little less than criminal.

Cooking milk is recommended by certain alleged dietetic authorities on the ground that it kills bacteria. They probably forget, maybe do not know, that all the five digestive fluids are strongly germicidal. The bacteria that may exist in milk, of which so much fear is entertained, could not live an instant after coming in contact with the gastric juice which is strongly aciduous, to say nothing of contact with the saliva, bile, and pancreatic and intestinal juices.

Milk, however, should be taken with some intelligence. A valuable lesson in its proper use can be learned from the calf, or nursing infant, which draw and swallow it in small quantities and which keep up a continuous motion of the jaws as if in chewing, thus pumping into the mouth enough saliva to aid nature in the first process of digestion.

Milk can be thoroughly insalivated by taking it into the mouth and mixing it with other foods which have been thoroughly masticated and are ready for swallowing.

The too free use of boiled or sterilized milk will produce scurvy in children, and when scurvy exists both sterilized and raw milk must be discontinued. It is certainly, therefore, much better to commence at once the use of milk in its natural condition than to risk the development of scurvy and then be compelled to entirely do without such a valuable food.

Sterilized milk lacks freshness. It tastes dead, and to a very great extent it is dead. Milk is rich in albuminoids, derived, as it is, from tissues that contain them, and are present in a vitalized form as proteids. The change that takes place in boiling is the coagulation of the proteid molecules, which sets free the inorganic molecules, thus rendering them as to the iron and fluorine unabsorbable, and as to the phosphates unassimilable. It is this most vital change that takes place when milk is cooked.

The use of sterilized milk becomes especially serious when it is remembered that children require both phosphatic and ferric proteids in a living form which are contained only in the natural or uncooked milk.

When adults have long violated the dietetic laws by overfeeding,--consuming large quantities of food and drink that have been devitalized by fire and fermentation,--milk is, in many cases, the one food that will restore a normal condition; especially is this true in advancing old age when the organs of digestion become weak, and the requirements of the body are more like those of the infant. Milk is then of more and more importance as an article of food.

FLESH FOODS.

There is no disputing the fact that many thousands of people appear to attain a very fine physical development and seem to maintain good health who subsist upon a mixed diet, including meat. It is unquestionably true that meat will sustain life, and it is equally true that life can be sustained without it.

The objections to meat are: First, it is laden with the poisons that come from the torn-down tissue and urea of the animal, all of which must be taken into the blood and disposed of by the excretory organs of the body which are always worked to their normal capacity to carry off the waste products that come from our own body; and when laden with that of another animal, they are often taxed beyond their power.

Second, recent experiments in the State of Ohio and Illinois developed the fact that about 76 per cent. of the best cattle in these two States are diseased. The majority of them have tuberculosis. All readers of this book may not be willing to wholly eschew the juicy sirloin, or even the fat pork chop; but we do believe that when they have thought the matter seriously over without the consultation of appetite, they will decide that the flesh of another animal is not only hazardous, but wholly unnecessary as an article of food.

If one decides that meats are absolutely necessary, it should be his object to take it in its best and most nutritive form. Cooking cannot possibly improve it. The only change that heat could possibly make would be to convert part of its nutritive value into heat and pass it off into the atmosphere. Inasmuch, therefore, as heat is merely an expression of energy, the energy or heat lost in cooking might be applied to the body if the meat were eaten without the application of fire.

The most popular reason given for cooking meat is that it kills disease germs. In the first place, nothing should be eaten that contains disease germs, and in the second place, heat does not kill them. The germs cannot be destroyed until the meat is destroyed of which they are a part. In partly cooked or rare meats no germs are destroyed, and it is admitted by all authorities that rare meats are more easily digested and far more nutritious than those well done. There is no reason why the rare meat idea should not be carried to its logical end, and the food served entirely raw.

In the form of meat there is nothing more nourishing than beefsteak a la Tartar (see recipe), or Hamburger steak, uncooked, dried beef, jerked venison, etc. All of these are much to be preferred to the cooked article.

If cooking were abolished the taste and requirements of the body would very soon solve the meat question. People would eat shell fish, dried and smoked meat, and possibly beefsteak a la Tartar so long as the body called for or demanded them, and _no longer_. This would also solve several other great questions with which misguided individuals, societies, churches, political parties and State legislatures are vainly struggling.

It is impossible to keep alive the appetite for such stimulants as tobacco, fermented and distilled liquors, tea and coffee, when the body is correctly fed. A being who subsists upon clean, elementary foods would have no more desire for stimulants and narcotics than a horse or a dog would have for a Manhattan cocktail.

It is the changing, the perverting, the cooking and the artificializing of foods that creates and keeps alive these abnormal desires. If we feed the body upon elementary foods, in the state in which nature created them, we can depend upon it to suggest to us daily that which it needs. The strange faculty of hunger was made a part of the human organism, to perform this specific work.

NUTS.

Nuts, one of the best articles of food known to science, the thing which helped to lift primitive man from a gibbering anthropoid to the Greek Apollo, are by many people the most misunderstood and maligned articles in all the dietetic catalogue. The nut is commonly used now, and for many decades has been used, as a confection, or to finish off the alleged good dinner; and while it was the only decent article of diet eaten during the feast, yet owing to its geographical position in the “potpourri” it was charged up with a lot of mischief for which it was in no wise responsible.

There are many intelligent people who sincerely believe the nut to be an indigestible and harmful article of food, and we quite agree with them when it is eaten about number 21 at a swell course dinner. But when given an opportunity and eaten as a decent nut should be, it is one of the most delicious, harmless, healthful and hygienic articles of food that ever graced a civilized table.

It is encouraging, however, when we know that the nut is rapidly gaining in appreciation and popularity. The great food reform movement that is now sweeping over this country and civilized Europe has caused thousands of people to abandon the use of flesh foods, and the natural substitute therefor is nuts.

The pecan nut, which has been considered in the South for many decades as a wild, prodigal growth of no great importance, is now being cultivated, harvested and husbanded as one of the most profitable, as well as one of the most important, articles of food grown in that balmy clime.

The Agricultural Department of our national government has just published a pamphlet on the subject of budding and growing the pecan. Pecan orchards are being planted in various localities in the South, and several States have adopted measures to encourage this industry. During the next few years this movement will undoubtedly receive the attention it has so long merited. It looks as though within the next few years we might see the boundless plains of Texas converted into pecan orchards instead of cattle ranches. It looks as though in the near future we might see great pecan shelling mills instead of the slaughter house. The food elements necessary to sustain life are probably better proportioned in the pecan than in any other nut known. There are over fifty varieties of this splendid nut now grown in the Southern States.

In any large market can be found from fifteen to eighteen different kinds of nuts, all of which possess very superior life-giving properties.

Nuts are especially to be recommended as an article of food, owing to the fact that they have not yet been very much contaminated by the cook stove. The lowly peanut, which has hitherto been considered worthy of no place on the American table, possesses most excellent food properties, equal to some and superior to many of the more expensive varieties.

Nuts should be thoroughly masticated. They should be reduced by the teeth to a perfect emulsion before entering the stomach, and not more than two ounces eaten at a meal. Two ounces of pure fat is enough to supply the demands of a normal body for twenty-four hours. By consulting our table on nuts, a correct idea can be gained as to the quantity of each variety that should be consumed each day. Almonds, peanuts and Brazil nuts should be blanched--that is, the inner covering should be removed before eating.

It is amazing to think of the kind of food that alleged civilized people subsist upon, when nature spreads before them its vast fields and stores of fruits and nuts that have waved to and fro in the pure air and sunshine, that have drawn their substances from old Mother Earth and filtered them through a hundred feet of pure white wood--life-giving substances that have responded to the warm embraces of summer and spring--substances that have fed the swelling bud, burst it into bloom, and filled it with fragrance and honey, sweet as Araby’s fabled rose--foods born from the fecund womb of Mother Earth, fed on the fragrance and wrapped in the many-hued swaddling clothes of odorous blossoms, and rocked by every pure and passing breeze in the life-giving cradle of summer and spring, and nursed to maturity at the breast of maternal nature and cooked by the fires of the eternal sun.

FRUITS.

In subsisting upon elementary foods, fruits constitute the second most important article of diet. They occupy a most conspicuous place in the needs of the human body.

The succulent class, such as apples, oranges, grapes, peaches, plums, pineapples, and all the juicy berries, possess great germicidal properties, in addition to their value as food. They seem to be designed by nature to destroy pathogenic bacteria in other foods while giving to the body their own nutrition.

It would astonish the average omnivorous Englishman or American to know what magnificent specimens of manhood are built almost entirely from fruits in some of the South Sea Islands. According to the most authentic history of man, fruits were undoubtedly his first and primitive diet. Primitive man was active, nimble and agile. Fruits left no deposits in his veins and arteries to age and stiffen them. Fruits made for him pure blood, and breathing the open air kept it pure. His surplus energy demanded activity which kept the pure blood surging through his veins. Long life, superior power and endurance were the results.

It is a hopeful sign, however, for the future health and longevity of our race that the demand for and consumption of fruits are rapidly increasing.

Each distinct genera of fruit has a specific effect or office to perform in the human body. Oranges, while possessing about the same food value as milk, acts directly upon and stimulates the activity of the liver, while apples are the best remedy known for that “dark brown” taste so often experienced next morning after the course dinner.

The best thing to do with an elegant course dinner late in the evening is to leave it on the table; but insomuch as the appetite is generally our complete master and law giver, we know this will not be done. Therefore, the next best thing to do after such a debauch is to make an entire breakfast of tart apples, thoroughly masticated.

The juice of the pineapple, which contains much hydrochloric acid, is among the best remedies known for diphtheria. When this disease first makes its appearance, if the juice of well-ripened pineapples be given freely to the patient it will not only destroy diphtheria germs, but will stimulate activity of the excretory organs, which is an action always desired in such cases.

The banana will supply the body with all the elements of nourishment that is obtained from cereals. Many cases of chronic stomach disorder have been permanently cured under the direction of the authors by eliminating wholly all cooked cereals and breads of every description and substituting therefor the simple diet of very ripe bananas.

It is believed by many people who are very fond of fruits that bananas do not agree with them. Close observation will show in every instance that this condition is the result of other things with which the fruit is mixed in the stomach and the trouble can be overcome by making an entire meal occasionally on fruits and nuts or fruit alone. The juice of strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and dewberries is very delicious and healthful. When it is pressed out and the refuse discarded there is no better food in the fruit family. But the large amount of seeds these berries contain, which are very hard and entirely insoluble, produces in many people violent irritation of the mucous membranes of the intestinal tract which manifests itself in many harmful ways.

Grape fruit contains many very pronounced and valuable medicinal properties. It is a natural antidote for biliousness when taken naturally, but the practice of eating it with sugar counteracts almost entirely its medicinal value, as the consumption of cane sugar is one of the causes of torpidity of the liver. Therefore, in taking sugar with grape fruit you are working one agency against another. Like nuts, the most desirable feature about fruits is that they are not an article commonly considered necessary to be cooked. Of course, the cook has undertaken in many ways to improve them by the application of his art, but up to date has been unsuccessful, as is evidenced by the fact that nearly all fruits are used in their natural or elementary state.

In living upon uncooked foods we must necessarily depend very largely upon fruits and nuts, but we should exercise judgment, patience and toleration. We must remember that we often suffered for our wrong eating, and accommodating nature may have partially adjusted our bodies to these incorrect habits. Therefore, when correct methods of eating are employed, the wrong must be undone and overcome, and the stomach sometimes rebels against the change. However, the body will adjust itself much quicker to the right than the wrong, and when the adjustment is once made and the natural dietetic law obeyed, perfect health, strength, endurance and vitality are the inevitable results.

CEREALS.

The literary fabric of the ancient world has been woven from a warp of fiction and a woof of fact. When we turn to it we find the beautiful, the poetic, the absurd and the true so mixed together that scholars of every nation regard their separation as worthy of their most profound thought.

It was from this confusion that the word “cereal” came. Ceres was a goddess worshipped by the ancient Romans. She occupies a most conspicuous place in the beautiful myths that adorn the classic literature of those ancient peoples. She was considered the head of the Agricultural Department. Her special duty was to sit on fleecy clouds and pour from the hollow of her mythical hand floods of sunshine and showers of rain over the grainfields of the Cæsars. Therefore, all grains grouped together were called cereals.

These articles were first used only when in a green or soft state--that is, from the time the grains began to form in a milky condition until they ripened and become so hard as to hazard the integrity of the teeth. Later they were soaked in water to soften them, and then in warm water, which saved time and facilitated the work of preparation. This custom evolved into the use of hot water, then hotter water, until boiling or the present method of cooking resulted.

In order to facilitate and lighten the labor in the preparation of cereals, they were pounded, crushed and broken, which custom very naturally evolved into the modern grinding and bolting mill. When cereals are in a milky state before they become hardened, before nature throws around them an envelope of cellulose for their protection, they are easy of digestion, and are excellent food. But when they have become thoroughly ripened and hardened, each molecule of starch, of which they are so largely composed, is enclosed in another envelope which is almost impervious to the digestive fluids.

It has been shown by modern research that cooking does not break up this covering. The modern methods of grinding and cooking cereals render mastication unnecessary as far as pulverizing them is concerned. Therefore, they pass the taste-buds under false pretenses; they deprive them of their rights; they do not have time to perform their duties, hence they do not pour into the mouth the amount of saliva necessary to perform the first step in digestion.

Soft, mushy foods are also responsible for the woeful decay of teeth, which is such a conspicuous mark of civilized man. Nature will not keep alive or produce, generation after generation, any part of the anatomy that is not used. Her system of economy is perfect.

When cereals are taken in their natural state, or not too completely pulverized, so that the teeth may be employed in their final and complete grinding, they constitute a valuable food for a normal, healthy person. This would also be better for the teeth, and make cereal substances much easier to digest and more thoroughly convertible into energy. Under the present dietetic régime, in which cereals are regarded as the staff of life, it is safe to say that more than fifty per cent. of all stomach disorders are caused by undigested cereal starch.

VEGETABLES.

The word “vegetable,” in its broadest sense, is used to describe everything of an herbaceous character,--everything in plant life, not merely food products.

When we consider only that portion which is used to support animal life, its meaning becomes much narrowed. When we consider that portion used as food by _man_, it is more narrowed still. But when we come to consider that which is or can be used in an uncooked state, it becomes more limited still.

Some very high authorities claim that vegetables are wholly unnecessary in the sustenance of the human body, but experience has led us to the conclusion that those containing much chlorophyl, such as lettuce, cabbage, celery, spinach, parsley, onions, watercress, dandelion, etc., are very necessary and valuable articles of food, and many vegetables that can be taken in an uncooked form are found to be very rich in the organic salts so essential to the maintenance of health.

In the selection of foods, one of the safest rules to be governed by is that all articles that can be used in their natural condition, as they are handed to us by Mother Nature, if they do not offend the sense of taste and smell, are good food, and, on the contrary, all articles that have to be ground, mixed, fixed, cooked, greased, mushed and mussed up, are not only unnecessary, but are not good foods.

Aside from the fact that the adoption of uncooked foods will produce the highest form of physical, mental and moral health, its next most important office is to do away with the enormous labor and complications in the preparation of foods.

BREAD--FERMENTATION.

In considering the adoption of uncooked foods in the household, bread becomes the most serious problem with which the housewife has to deal. It has become one of the most important articles of food, and is deserving of the most serious consideration here, because of the fact that in the process of making, fermentation, one of the most deleterious processes known in the culinary art, is introduced.

The evils which follow the cooking or super-heating of all other articles of food cease with their cooking, which consist principally in lessening their food value. But bread, the so-called staff of life, is not only subjected to the devitalizing process of baking, but is infected with a germ that converts a large amount of the nutritive value of the grain into carbon dioxide poison.

The first step in nature’s process of disintegration--that is, the changing of matter back into its original elements, is fermentation. When foods ferment in the stomach, it is because too much has been eaten, or that combinations have been put together, the chemical properties of which act with violence, one upon the other. The stomach being unable to dispose of the burden, nature, in her kindness, aids in its disposition by an attempt at disintegration by fermentation or decay.

From the standpoint of him who knows the Laws that govern Health, it is indeed amazing to contemplate the means men and women have employed to harm themselves--to shorten their lives--to change their mental condition from happiness to unhappiness.

One of the quickest known methods for the accomplishment of these ends is the use of fermented foods. As an instrument for making disease, indigestion, irritation of the mucous membranes, nervousness, and troubles of all sorts in all the intestinal machinery, it is the most effective and successful thing ever employed.

People seem not to be content with subjecting their foods to a powerful heat and robbing them of their original elements--devitalizing them, changing their life-giving carbon into carbonic acid gas--changing the starch into dextrine, etc. But to make sure they are thoroughly unfit for use introduce yeast germs into dough and allow it to stand over night in a nice, warm, comfortable place, so as to be certain that the few germs will multiply themselves into millions and billions more.

We do not wish to spoil the reader’s appetite for fermented bread; but since we are discussing the subject, let us tell the truth about it. Bread rises when infected with the yeast germ, because millions of these little worms have been born and have died, and from their dead and decaying bodies there arises a gas just as it does from the dead body of a hog, or any other animal. This gas being confined in the dough, expands, and the whole mass rises. It is at this particular point that it becomes fit for baking--fit for _human food_. Think of it! It is at this point that it is supposed to be the proper material out of which to make the best quality of flesh and blood. It looks incredible, indeed, that such a process has found favor all these years among a sane, sensible and civilized people.

In reference to fermentation, Dr. E. P. Miller, an eminent authority on the subject, writes: “Fermentation passes through three different stages or processes. In the first one, yeast fermentation converts starch and sugar into yeast germs, and during the process carbon dioxide poison and alcohol are developed.

“In the second, acetic fermentation changes the alcohol and other substances containing it into acetic acid or vinegar.

“The third stage is putrefaction, by which the decomposition of food substances containing nitrogen, such as albumen, gluten, casein, etc., takes place by being converted into dead and putrid matter. Digestion is not fermentation and the digestive fluids are not ferments, as has long been supposed. Digestion is a physiological process, and hence should not be considered as any part of the normal digestive acts.

“Fermentation does not exist in any portion of the alimentary canal under healthy conditions. The difference between digestion and fermentation is the difference between taking nutritive material, foods, and converting them into living tissue, as takes place under the true digestive process, or taking these nutritive materials, as is done by the yeast germ, and starting them on the way to destruction, putrefaction and death.

“One is a process by which nutritive material is used for the support and maintenance of life. The other takes nutritious material and converts it into death--starts it on the way to corruption. The one is health-giving and life-maintaining, the other is disease-producing and death-dealing.”

The process of fermenting bread is exactly the same as that which is carried on in the vat for making beer, or through which the grain passes in making whiskey and through which fruit passes in making brandies and wines. It creates in the human organism the same set of conditions that is created in the production of nearly all intoxicating beverages; therefore, what seems to be the natural appetite for intoxicants is a false cry of perverted nature first created and set in motion by what we are pleased to call the staff of life--_fermented bread_.

The temperance people would do well to go into their laboratories and study causes instead of spending so much nervo-mental force in dealing with effects. They would be entitled to the profoundest respect of the thinking world if they would solve the question of why people desire intoxicants, instead of trying to close a few rum-shops by calling on the police.

No man or woman who will live for six months on pure, clean, uncooked foods can possibly keep alive an appetite for stimulants or narcotics. From this rule there is absolutely no variance. There can be no room in the human body, a body made of nature’s unchanged foods, for such foreign elements as tobacco and rum.

Note:--Fermented bread has come into such general use and occupies
such an important position in modern cookery that we feel justified
in digressing in this one instance and giving a recipe for a pure,
unfermented wheat bread. See recipes.

CONDIMENTS.

The use of condiments must have originated in the desire to supply something that was missing in the taste of cooked foods, and it is undoubtedly true that in the process of cooking the nature of many food products becomes so changed that they taste flat and insipid. For instance, a sweet turnip is tasty and liked by many in its raw state, but when it is cooked it seems to need salt or something to give it flavor and life.

In boiling or cooking in heated water the mineral elements are 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.