vegetables are withdrawn, should be used as “soup stock” thickened with bread, rice, or sliced vegetables, and seasoned with meat, if meat is used at all. Containing as it does a large percentage of the salts from the vegetables, this water supplies the necessary “seasoning” far better than artificial salt. Turnips, instead of being sliced before boiling, should be boiled whole. Onions are every way better boiled before peeling. At first, the taste, accustomed to the flavor (!) of depleted vegetables,—or rather to the condiments with which they are prepared, has to be educated to the real flavor of whole food. And, again, such food being more nutritious, less in amount must be eaten, upon pain of indigestion. “No wonder if this generation finds itself degenerating. Like a ship built of rotten timber, a man fed on depleted food goes all very well in good weather and with a light load; but when one can neither bear an average load, nor undergo unusual fatigue, let him cross-question his cook.”[62]
[62] Charles D. Hunter, M.D., F.C.S., in Herald of Health.
The truth is that, to a very great degree, we build our bodies out of blood made from impure materials: (1) in part from food depleted by cooking or improper cooking, (2) in part from substances which, as all are agreed, can be “indulged in” only to a limited extent (who can define the limit?), (3) in great measure, from fermented, instead of well-digested food;—and having thus built up “fossil” bodies (still more fossilized by the use of unnatural drinks which “prevent
the waste of tissue”), there must be sickness. There is no escape from it, except by a “right about face.” The zymotic, and the various acute diseases, so called, are in point of fact acute remedies for chronic disease.
CHAPTER XII.
WHEAT-MEAL VS. “ENTIRE FLOUR.”
Without doubt, certain brands of “whole-wheat flour,” so called, are a great improvement over the article in universal demand among poor and rich alike, the white flour of commerce, in this: they are, when made by honest manufacturers, less impoverished than the white flours. In public and in private, I have advised their use instead of white flour, but solely upon the ground that the wheat is less robbed of certain of its invaluable constituents in the former; but I can not conceive it possible to separate the hull from the kernel without real loss, even if the hull were, in itself, objectionable, which, so far from being true, is, in my opinion, a mistake and a very serious one. The theory upon which the objection to the outside coat of the grain rests, is that this coat is composed of woody fiber, entirely indigestible and devoid of nutritive matters, and, worst of all, say these honest objectors, the hulls are coarse, sharp-edged, and irritating to the stomach and intestines, and therefore injurious in their action, especially in the case of “sensitive and delicately organized individuals.” I will not stop to discuss the question as
to the propriety of the phrase sensitive and delicately organized, as applied to the class of poor, suffering wretches who by reason of their gross habits—and I mean simply the dietetic habits of the people, not the mechanic, the artisan, the small trader, nor yet the factory hand, nor the wretched poor, but the human race, from the kings, queens, and presidents all along the line—who by reason, I repeat, of the universal system of diet, have become dyspeptic. I can not, however, forbear the remark, that the most sensitive and delicately organized individuals, among the most noble of all animals next to man,—and in some aspects far superior to him,—the horse, in his finest and most delicate state, finds a perfect food in the whole grain, chewing it himself. I may be, in the minds of some, weakening my argument by comparing the digestive apparatus of man with that of the horse, but I am desirous of impressing upon the minds of my readers the well-known but imperfectly considered fact, that our horse-fanciers,—who dote on their hundred-thousand-dollar animals, and who would place before them the most costly and complicated dishes, certainly would feed them on the finest and whitest of flour,—“Imperial Granum” even, at drug-store prices, if it were desirable, or even not pernicious in a health point of view,—really keep their dearest pets on bread and water; and that, because of this, and the absence of all the hot, stimulating articles, solid or fluid, indulged in by their owners, and their regular and moderate diet of uncooked food, and their superior hygiene in certain essential matters, our thorough-bred
horses are generally saved from becoming fat, sick, mean, wheezy, or dyspeptic, like their masters and mistresses, men, women, and children.