EXPERIMENT UPON ANIMALS
While I do not claim that the methods of animal feeding apply accurately to man, yet the digestive and the assimilative processes of animals are so closely related to the human processes, that the results obtained in animal nutrition are very instructive to the student of human food science.
About thirty years ago, when the scientific study of agriculture first became prevalent, an experiment was made in cooked food for animals, upon an extensive basis. At that time it was the universal belief that man owed much of his superiority over other animals to the use of cooked food. This argument was put forth with great force and appeared quite reasonable. It was asked whether animals other than man would be benefited by changing to a cooked bill of fare.
Governmental experiments on cooked food for animals
During this agitation numerous western farmers put their hogs, chickens, cows, horses, and sheep upon a cooked bill of fare, and many enthusiastic feeders claimed beneficial results. Later the various Governmental Experimental Stations took up the subject and made many careful, complete, and comparative tests of the effects of cooked and uncooked food for animals. The result did not show the expected thing. The cooking experiments in the majority of cases proved injurious, and the general decision of the Government investigators was that cooking food for animals was useless and detrimental to the great live stock industry. Stock food cookery has now become entirely obsolete.
Cooking a habit of civilization
Man is the only animal that cooks his food, and has made great progress in civilization while subsisting on a cooked diet, but cooking is no more the cause of his advancement than silk hats and swallow-tailed coats. He has advanced only according to the degree that he has thought, studied, and experimented. Cooking has undoubtedly enabled man to utilize many things as food, that he could not and would not have used otherwise, but whether this has aided or retarded in his material progress is yet an unsolved question.
FOOD COMBINATIONS
The following tables are designed to convey, in the most condensed and simplified form, the results of my investigations in regard to food combinations.
It is somewhat difficult to give in any one table exact information concerning food combinations under the varying conditions of the body and its ever-changing requirements. The best that can be done is to lay out such groups as are fundamentally harmonious from a chemical point of view.