We have now to suppose that a wholesome but plain meal of good bread, and well-cooked meat and vegetables, selected and prepared according to the principles which have been explained, is set before you, and that you are about to apply these to their proper office of nourishing your body; how will you proceed? You will introduce the food, morsel after morsel, into your digesting bag. Now while you are doing this, take care to bear in mind what you are about. You are swallowing substances that will need to be brought most thoroughly within the power of the saliva and stomach-juices, in order that these may perform their wondrous dissolving work. Do not, then, forget the mill. Those ivory teeth have not been planted so firmly in your jaws for no purpose. They are meant for work, and for hard work too. Food is not intended to be bolted, but to be ground. Do not furnish one single morsel with its pass until it has been reduced to the finest pulp; then the saliva will get to every grain of the store-starch, and change it into serviceable sugar and gum, and the stomach-juice and liver-juice will get to every fibre of the flesh-substance, and reduce it to milk-white liquid, capable of entering the channels of the supply-pipes. If you bolt, instead of thoroughly grinding your food in the mill, be assured that the heavy lumps will prove too much for your digesting bag, however strong that may be. The greater portion, after having oppressed the offended stomach with their unmanageable load, will cause griping and all sorts of annoyance, and will at last be dismissed from it, undissolved and without having furnished any nourishment.
Another important thing is to get enough food if you can; the body requires to be sufficiently nourished. On the other hand, however, be very careful that you do not attempt to get more than enough. If you do try to accomplish this you will fail in the attempt, and have to pay a heavy penalty for your failure. Thousands upon thousands of people do try, and do fail, and then pay such penalties. You have heard it said that enough is as good as a feast. This is only a half-truth, it does not go sufficiently far. Enough is far better than a feast, if “a feast,” means more than enough. There is more danger really in over-feeding, than under-feeding. Countless numbers of underfed countrymen work through a long life in the fields, in happiness and contentment, and arrive at old age, almost without an hour of illness. But every overfed man sooner or later has to go to bed, and send for the doctor to help him to get rid either of rheumatism, or fever, or gout, or inflammation, which are forms of disorder into which superfluous food often changes itself. The life of labor and short commons, has upon the whole a much larger share of happiness, than the life of laziness and luxury.
But what is enough? That in regard to the feeding is a very serious question. At the first glance, too, it seems to be one which is not altogether easy to answer, because some men require more food than others, just as some steam engines consume more coal than others, to keep themselves moving; and just as some lamps take more oil than others, to keep up their flames. It is, nevertheless, a question which may be very easily answered. Every man who eats his meal slowly and deliberately,—not forgetting the mill,—has had enough when his appetite is satisfied. Appetite really is Nature’s own guard. It is ruled, not by the state of the stomach, but by the condition of the blood. When so much blood has been taken from the supply-pipes of your body, by the working parts, that those pipes begin to be comparatively empty, their emptiness makes itself felt in your frame as hunger. Obedient to the hint, you find up food and eat. But while you are eating what happens? First you seize the food with all the keen relish of a hungry man. Then as you eat on, the relish becomes less and less, and if your meal be a simple one, when you have had enough, all relish has disappeared, and the very things that tasted so deliciously at first, are insipid, so that you find no farther enjoyment in the act of grinding and swallowing them. Go on eating after this, and the insipidity will be transformed into disgust; and if notwithstanding this you still persevere in forcing food into your stomach, that sensible organ will at last rebel against the tyranny, and return the whole which it has received upon your hands. Then it will be some little time before the stomach gets over the insult. Consequently the blood remains all this while in the impoverished state, and the result of the over-gorge is that the body itself is actually starved, instead of being feasted. If when your natural appetite for food is satisfied, and your enjoyment and relish of it have ceased, you have rich and high flavored dishes set before you, the high-flavors will then still prove agreeable to the palate, and act upon it as a sort of excitement, and the natural appetite will have its work superseded by a false and artificial one, and you will go on eating under this temptation, until your stomach is over-crammed. All the so-called luxuries of cooking are merely devices to make men eat more, who have already eaten enough.
But when men who have already eaten enough, eat more, what must happen? one of two things—either the stomach, being particularly vigorous, will get through an extra amount of work; then there will be more blood sent into the supply pipes than the body requires, and the frame will be everywhere stuffed and oppressed with the load, to the danger of inflammations, rheumatism, and other like disorders being set up: or the stomach will be unequal to the task of doing extra work; then the food which can not be digested will decay and putrify in the stomach and bowels, producing there all sorts of poison vapors and disagreeable products, which will lead to stomach and bowel disorders, until nature, or the doctor, finds some way for their removal, or until something worse takes place.
Thrice favored is he who is not daily exposed to the dangers of a luxurious table. Money, after all, is not in itself a blessing. It is only a blessing when it is possessed by those who know how to employ it for good purposes. In the hands of men who do not know how to employ it so, it often proves to be a curse.
Food which is already in a state of commencing putrefaction or decay, is always dangerous for this reason: it forms poison vapors and injurious products in the stomach, before its digestion can be completed in the natural way. If, however, meat about to be used is at any time found to be tainted, it will be at once rendered wholesome, if the most tainted part be cut away, the cut part being rubbed with a piece of charcoal, and the joint be then well boiled in water, in which a piece of charcoal has been placed.
Here, then, in conclusion, are two or three golden rules for the management of your feeding:
Never have any but the plainest and simplest food placed before you when you are hungry, whether you be rich or whether you be poor.
Eat of it until you find the relish for it disappearing.
There stop, and on no consideration swallow another mouthful, until the sense of appetite and relish comes back to you.