“Not unless your patronage is more Oriental than Celtic.”
“Healthy people have to have honest fare of about the type to which their environment has accustomed them, but intelligently supervised,—that’s the conclusion I’ve come to.”
“You may be right,” Billy said, “my general notion has always been that everybody ate wrong, and that everybody who would stand for it ought to be started all over again. I wouldn’t stand for it, so I’ve never looked into the matter.”
“People don’t eat wrong, that’s the really startling discovery I’ve made recently. I mean healthy people don’t.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Billy; “the way people eat is one of the most outrageous of the human scandals. I read the newspapers.”
“The newspapers don’t know,” Nancy said; 73 “the individual usually has an instinctive working knowledge of the diet that is good for him, and his digestional experiences have taught him how to regulate it to some extent.”
“How do you account for the clerk that orders coffee and sinkers at Child’s every day?”
“That’s exactly it,” Nancy said. “He knows that he needs bulk and stimulation. He’s handicapped by his poverty, but he gets the nearest substitute for the diet that suits him that he can get. If he could afford it he would have a square meal that would nourish him as well as warm and fill him.”
“I don’t see but what this interesting theory lets you out altogether. Why Outside Inn, with its foxy table d’hôte, if what’s one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and natural selection is the order of the day?”
“Outside Inn is all the more necessary to the welfare of a nation that’s being starved out by the high cost of living. All I need to do is to have a little more variety, to have all the nutritive requirements in each meal, and such generous servings that every patron can make out a meal satisfying to himself.”