As to quantity, with the healthy child, playing at will, there need be very little restraint. Few children will eat too much of perfectly simple food, such as this table includes. Let cake or pastry or sweetmeats enter in, and of course, as long as the thing tastes good, the child will beg for more. English children are confined to this simple diet; and though of course a less exacting climate has much to do with the greater healthfulness of the English than the American people, the plain but hearty and regular diet of childhood has far more.
Our young American of seven, at a hotel breakfast, would call for coffee and ham and eggs and sausages and hot cakes. His English cousin would have no liberty to call for anything. In fact, it is very doubtful if he would be brought to table at all; and if there, bread and milk or oatmeal and milk would form his meal.
By this time I do not doubt our baby has your heartiest pity, and you are saying, "What! no snacks? no cooky nor cake nor candy? no running to aunt or grandmother or tender-hearted cook for goodies? If that must be so, half the pleasure of childhood is lost."
Perhaps; but suppose that with that pleasure some other things are also lost. Suppose our baby to have begun life with a nervous, irritable, sensitive organization, keenly alive to pain, and this hard regimen to have covered these nerves with firm flesh, and filled the veins with clean, healthy blood. Suppose headache is unknown, and loss of appetite, and a bad taste in the mouth, and all the evils we know so well; and that work and play are easy, and food of the simplest eaten with solid satisfaction. The child would choose the pleasant taste, and let health go, naturally; for a child has small reason, and life must be ordered for it. But if the mother or father has no sense or understanding of the laws of food, it is useless to hope for the wholesome results that under the diet of our baby are sure to follow.
By seven some going to school has begun; and from this time on the diet, while of the same general character, may vary more from day to day. Habits of life are fixed during this time; and even if parents dislike certain articles of food themselves, it is well to give no sign, but as far as possible, accustom the child to eat any wholesome food. We are a wandering people, and sooner or later are very likely to have circumnavigated the globe, at least in part. Our baby must have no antipathies, but every good thing given by Nature shall at least be tolerated. "I never eat this," or "I never eat that," is a formula that no educated person has a right to use save when some food actually hurtful or to which he has a natural repulsion is presented to him. Certain articles of diet are often strangely and unaccountably harmful to some. Oysters are an almost deadly poison to certain constitutions; milk to others. Cheese has produced the same effect, and even strawberries; yet all these are luxuries to the ordinary stomach.
Usually the thing to guard against most carefully is gluttony, so far as boys are concerned. With girls the tendency often is to eat far too little. A false delicacy, a feeling that paleness and fragility are beautiful and feminine, inclines the young girl often to eat less than she desires; and the stomach accustoms itself to the insufficient supply, till the reception of a reasonable meal is an impossibility. Or if they eat improper food (hot breads and much fat and sweets), the same result follows. Digestion, or rather assimilation, is impossible; and pasty face and lusterless eyes become the rule. A greedy woman is the exception; and yet all schoolgirls know the temptation to over-eating produced by a box of goodies from home, or the stronger temptation, after a school-term has ended, to ravage all cake-boxes and preserve-jars. Then comes the pill or powder, and the habit of going to them for a relief which if no excess had been committed, would have been unnecessary. Patent medicines are the natural sequence of unwholesome food, and both are outrages on common-sense.
We will take it for granted, then, that our baby has come to boyhood and youth in blissful ignorance of their names or natures. But as we are not in the least certain what personal tastes he may have developed, or what form his life-work is to take,—whether professional or mercantile or artisan in one of the many trades,—we can now only give the regimen best adapted for each.
Supposing his tastes to be scholarly, and a college and professional career to be chosen, the time has come for slight changes in the system of diet,—very slight, however. It has become a popular saying among thinkers upon these questions, "Without phosphorus, no thinking;" and like all arbitrary utterances it has done more harm than good. The amount of phosphorus passing through the system bears no relation whatever to the intensity of thought. "A captive lion," to quote from Dr. Chambers, one of the most distinguished living authorities on diet, "a leopard, or hare, which can have wonderfully little to think about, assimilates and parts with a greater quantity of phosphorus than a professor of chemistry working hard in his laboratory; while a beaver, who always seems to be contriving something, excretes so little phosphorus that chemical analysis cannot detect it."
Phosphatic salts are demanded, but so are other salts, fat, and water; and the dietaries that order students to live upon fish, eggs, and oysters, because they are rich in phosphorus, without which the brain starves, err just so far as they make this the sole reason,—the real reason being that these articles are all easily digested, and that the student, leading an inactive muscular life, does not require the heavy, hearty food of the laborer.
The most perfect regimen for the intellectual life is precisely what would be advised for the growing boy: frequent small supplies of easily-digested food, that the stomach may never be overloaded, or the brain clouded by the fumes of half-assimilated food. If our boy trains for a foot-race, rows with the college crew, or goes in for base-ball, his power as a brain-worker at once diminishes. Strong muscular action and development hinder continuous mental work; and the literary life, as a rule, allows no extremes, demanding only mild exercise and temperance as its foundation-stones. But our boy can well afford to develop his muscular system so perfectly that his mild exercise would seem to the untrained man tolerably heavy work.