Climate and Health in Hot Countries and the Outlines of Tropical Climatology / A Popular Treatise on Personal Hygiene in the Hotter Parts of the World, and on the Climates That Will Be Met Within Them.

by George Michael James Giles

Vegetables.

—A free supply of these is essential to healthy nutrition in all climates, and especially so in the Tropics, where it is desirable to restrict the amount of meat consumed. English folk might with great advantage take lessons from our neighbours across the channel, by introducing to their tables plats of vegetables served up alone, and flavoured with some tasty stock, or with simply a little butter. Well cooked, and served piping hot, such dishes are most tempting and wholesome, and may most advantageously take the place of meat dishes at the mid-day meal in hot climates; besides which it is as great a mistake to mask the delicate flavour of early peas and French beans by eating them with meat, as it would be to try to appreciate the flavour of a vintage claret under like circumstances. Where vegetables are scarce, it is well to investigate the dietary of the native races amongst whom one lives, as even in long-settled colonies it is astonishing how often excellent articles of food are entirely neglected by European residents. Served up as haricots verts, the soy bean (Glycine soja) or the lablab bean (Dolichos lablab) cut at the same stage of maturity, as is customary with the ordinary French bean, are excellent and are specially valuable, as they come on at a time when little else is obtainable; but in spite of this, they are very rarely eaten by Europeans. Then too a great variety of succulent leaf plants form an excellent substitute for spinach, and a variety of herbs, wild or cultivated, suitable for serving up in this way, are usually known to the indigenous inhabitants of any country; the very young tops of gram (Cicer arietinaum), for example, are excellent eating. During the Cgaleka campaign, the troops were often for long periods quite without vegetables, and one day the writer, wandering among the kraals near the camp, found some Kaffir women busily gathering a wild plant with small succulent leaves. On discovering that they were picking it for food, a basketful was purchased from them, and when cooked, furnished an excellent dish, almost indistinguishable from genuine spinach. Arrangements were then made to supply the entire detachment once or twice a week; and the men remained throughout the year entirely free from scurvy, a disease which has nearly always given rise to a certain amount of trouble in prolonged military operations in that part of the world, and notably in the Boer concentration camps during the late war.

Many vegetables, too, are excellent when cut very young, which are scarcely eatable when mature. This is especially the case with the bhindi, one of the commonest of the few hot weather Indian vegetables; but your native gardener likes to see them “large and fine,” and will never cut them young enough unless this is insisted upon by his customer. Many vegetables such as pumpkins, onions and tomatoes, may be kept a long time if hung up in an airy place so that they do not come in contact with each other; and where the plan is not practised by those who supply the market, it is well to bear this point in mind, so as to lay by a timely supply against the “rainy day” when vegetables will be scarce. There can be little doubt that the inclusion of a certain amount of uncooked vegetable food in the dietary is always desirable, but salads are too often a dangerous luxury, owing to the very obvious danger from the fertilisers that may have been used in their cultivation, and on this account it is better to avoid them, unless one is absolutely certain as to the conditions under which they are grown; the more as an adequate supply of vegetable acids and salts can usually be taken in the form of fruit. Cucumbers and tomatoes, which can be peeled, need not of course be included in this general law against leaf salads, but tomatoes should always be peeled, as the skin is extremely indigestible, and is a frequent cause of diarrhœa. By dipping it for an instant in boiling water, the skin may be removed with the greatest ease without crushing the tomato.

Fruit.

—The remarks that have been made as to the avoidance of raw vegetables that cannot be peeled apply necessarily to fruit, and those in which this is impossible should always be cooked. Provided the fruit be sound—neither over nor under ripe—a certain amount may always be taken by most persons with advantage, but during hot weather, when the digestive organs are feeble and irritable, it is well to avoid fruit such as apples, which are naturally rather hard of digestion, even when in the best condition. For the same reason, the harder portion of a melon near the skin should be avoided, as hard melons, like any other indigestible matter, may cause looseness; but it is a mistake to imagine that they can cause cholera, a superstition which leads many people to deny themselves the indulgence in this very wholesome and delicious fruit. The origin of this fallacy is no doubt to be found in the fact that cholera is usually at its worst during the melon season, but there is no causal connection between these merely coincident facts.

Bread.

—When manufactured by the unsuperintended native, the conditions under which this almost indispensable article of food is prepared are too often unspeakably nasty; but a good deal more might be done to ameliorate this than is usually attempted, by the occasional unofficial superintendence of customers, and by the boycotting of such bakers as refuse to maintain a decent standard of cleanliness. It is quite possible that the result of such a visit may lead the enquirer to “cry off” bazaar-made bread for the rest of his life, for it is an absolute fact that a surprise visit of this sort once revealed the fact that several lepers were employed in kneading the European bread supply; but it is surely undesirable that such enormities should be perpetrated unchecked, and there can be no doubt that at least some improvement might be secured if people would but interest themselves in the matter. When good bread cannot be obtained, it should be remembered that it is quite possible for it to be made at home with baking powder, by the use of which the trouble and uncertainty involved in the use of yeast may be avoided.

Investigations conducted under the Food and Drugs Act have, however, shown that the acid ingredient of many baking powders is alum, which is injurious, if taken for any time in so large a quantity as is required to raise bread, so that perhaps it is safer to use cream of tartar and bicarbonate of soda, mixed separately with the flour in the proportion of 16 by weight of the former to 7 of the latter; a bare teaspoonful of the tartar, to an eggspoon of soda, for each nine tablespoons of flour, is the housewife’s way of getting a sufficiently near approach to chemical accuracy.

Other foodstuffs.

—Most Oriental nations depend largely for their supply of nitrogenous or proteid food on pulses of various sorts, and, weight for weight, many of these are far more nutritious even than meat. No doubt religious and economical considerations have had much to say in the development of this preference, but, on the other hand, the minute regulations to be found in many religious codes are very often based on really sound sanitary notions that have grown up as the result of traditional experience, and it is probable that the repugnance of the Hindu for meat food, though doubtless carried too far, is based on something more than a mere whim of ritual, and that the introduction of pulses into our dietary as a partial substitute for meat would be advantageous, at any rate during the great heats. At such seasons, the kidneys have all they can do to clear off the waste materials that naturally result from the work of the body, and as meat always contains a large amount of these same waste materials that have originated in the work of the animal that furnished the meat, it is obvious that its extensive use must throw an additional strain on already over-taxed organs. Caution in this matter is, of course, doubly necessary in persons who suffer from either gouty or rheumatic tendencies. The two most palatable among the commoner pulses are lentils (Lens esculenta) and thur dal. (Cajanus Indicus), the latter of which often finds its way to Anglo-Indian tables, but might be more extensively eaten with advantage. All pulses require very thorough cooking, and should be reduced to an absolute pulp by the process; for under other circumstances, they are apt to prove extremely indigestible, whereas when properly treated they are absorbed with the greatest facility.