Culinary Chemistry / The Scientific Principles of Cookery, with Concise Instructions for Preparing Good and Wholesome Pickles, Vinegar, Conserves, Fruit Jellies, Marmalades, and Various Other Alimentary Substances Employed in Domestic Economy, with Observations on the Chemical Constitution and Nutritive Qualities of Different Kinds of Food.

by Friedrich Christian Accum

NATIONS LIVING WHOLLY UPON VEGETABLE FOOD.

The variety of alimentary substances used not only by individuals, but among whole nations, are prodigiously diversified, and climate seems to have some effect in producing the diversity of taste, though it must in a great measure depend upon the natural productions of particular countries, their religion, and their commercial intercourse.

A vegetable diet seems suitable to the hot countries under the Equator, and we accordingly find nations there, who have completely adopted it, and who abstain so much the more from all animal food, in as much as it is an article of their religious faith.

Potatoes, chesnuts, and the leguminous and cereal seeds, satisfy the want of the Alpine peasant, and numerous tribes solely feed on vegetables and water. In the most remote antiquity, we read of whole nations in Africa, and of the Indian priests, who lived entirely on vegetable substances. Some wandering Moors subsist almost entirely on gum senegal.