To Panama and back

by Henry T. Byford

There is much to be said in favor of doing your cooking in your own mouth. Mouths are often the most unclean of cavities, yet who would not rather trust his own mouth than the methods of the average kitchen blunderer with her germ-laden, all-invading hands, tasting spoons, wandering hairs, dusty dishes, coughs, colds, salt rheums, etc. No one has seen the cook drinking out of the water bottle, tasting the food, and handling the salt, the dough, the waste-pail, the dish cloth, the berries and the bread with fingers that are licked instead of being washed every time she handles these things and her hair, but would wish to possess the jaw and juices of an animal to enable him to save the wages, waste and culinary wantonness of a cook; and avoid the appendicitis, gastric ulcer, fermentation, diabetes, Bright’s disease, entero-colitis and acid fermentation that have developed with the development of the art of eating. Modern cooking is a bold and unscrupulous attempt to create, by means of variously flavored, complicated mixtures, a desire for artificial food, instead of depending upon a natural appetite for a few simple articles, such as exists throughout the animal kingdom where irresponsible cooks have not interfered.

It is an open question whether the human system is not adapted to the consumption of much more uncooked food than is at present allowed, and whether the cooking in many instances does not destroy ferments that aid digestion, and does not thus render the digestion of foods more difficult or imperfect. Fresh raw milk is more nourishing and more easily digested by normal digestive organs than cooked milk, and this is true of eggs, oysters, beef, cheese, tomatoes, butter, etc. Celery, radishes, cucumbers, cresses, parsley, asparagus, onions, honey, fresh and dried fruits, nuts, aromatics, ripe olives, olive oil, smoked and dried meats, besides many other herbs and fruits that are habitually eaten raw in warm and tropical countries, ought to enter more extensively into our diet and be made to greatly reduce the amount of kitchen mixtures that now tempts us toward an overfed anemia, dyspeptic insomnia, toxic obesity and premature death. The above mentioned foods constitute an ample dietary for the average individual. By cooking we aim to facilitate and quicken the digestion of food, and render it more complete, forgetting that a larger amount of undigested debris might maintain a more normal action of the intestines.

Food kept for consumption in the winter time in cold climates, or in arid districts far away from its production, would in part require cooking, but that made of grains could be prepared at laboratories in a dry, unchangeable, sterile form, while some of the animal and fatty foods could be partly predigested and preserved for invalids. In fact, a diet could be planned that would render the kitchen unnecessary except as a place to make ready a hot drink or to warm food already prepared and preserved according to the dictates of science instead of by the art of uneducated, uncultured, unclean, bad-tempered, hap-hazard cooks.

The political crime of 1890 was the putting of sugar on the free list. It was a covert attack upon the women and children of the country by rendering it easier for them to slowly poison themselves i. e., to sweeten themselves to death. A relish for sweets has been given man to lead him to eat fruits and to chew his starchy food until it develops that sweet taste which indicates beginning digestion. It is this relish for sweet that leads herbivorous animals to chew their food so thoroughly. That a taste for sweets is not intended to lead people to eat artificial sweets is evident from the fact that, excepting honey, which is meant for bees, there is no such concentrated sweet as sugar to be found in nature. But man began to extract the sugar from the sugar cane, the beet and the grape and eat it in large quantities in its concentrated, unnatural form, and to put it in food that, without it, would not be relished, and which, therefore, should not be eaten until hunger gave its relish. As a consequence he has become the victim of salt rheums, pimples, hives and other agonies of itching and ugliness.

Sugar is the devil conjured by man to entertain his sweetheart or wife, and keep his children quiet. Sugar is the serpent of a civilized Eden. He corrupts the human body before it is developed, and after. He squanders the pocket money and perverts the appetite of the fairer half of humanity, until it thinks that it would starve without his support, and refuses to nourish itself without his aid. Let him be banished from the public view and be locked up again in the cane and the beet where he can be enjoyed only in harmless attenuations and in digestible quantities. A little of the devil goes a great way. Too much of him breeds disease and doctors to condemn and conduct us to the grave.

But the self-denial of such a return to nature and abandonment of the pleasure of eating a variety of complicated, fancifully flavored and abnormally tempting food mixtures is hardly to be expected of a gastronomically perverted humanity. Humanity knows enough to tempt itself, and it will do so. The rapidly multiplying wealthy class has the means of over-indulging itself, and will make use of them, and the common lot will follow suit. Deterioration, degeneration and individual extinction will be the logical result. Survival of the fittest thus becomes a matter of appetite. To kill oneself by degrees within the three-score-and-ten is becoming the easiest and most agreeable of occupations; much easier and more enjoyable than slowly dieting oneself to death, as Luigi Cornaro did at the age of 103 years. He ate but little here below, but ate that little long.

There are many who believe that what is generally adopted as a custom by the mass of the people must be right, and that since we have been eating as we now do for a long time, and are longer lived than formerly, we should continue doing so. Apropos of this I will quote from the writings of Volney, a Frenchman who traveled in the United States seventy years ago:

“I will venture to say that if a prize were proposed for the scheme of a regimen most calculated to injure the stomach, the teeth and the health in general, no better could be invented than that of Americans. In the morning at breakfast, they deluge their stomach with a quart of hot water, impregnated with tea, or slightly so with coffee, that is mere colored water; and they swallow, almost without chewing, hot bread, half-baked toast soaked in butter, cheese of the fattest kind, slices of salt or hung beef, ham, etc., all of which are nearly insoluble. At dinner, they have boiled pastes under the name of puddings, and the fattest are esteemed the most delicious; all their sauces, even for roasted beef, are melted butter; their turnips and potatoes swim in lard, butter, or fat; under the name of pumpkin pie their pastry is nothing but a greasy paste, never sufficiently baked; to digest these substances they take tea almost instantly after dinner, making it so strong that it is absolutely bitter to the taste, in which state it affects the nerves so powerfully that even the English find it brings on more obstinate restlessness than coffee. Supper again introduces salt meats or oysters. As Chastelux says, the whole day passes in heaping indigestions on one another; and to give tone to the poor, relaxed and wearied stomach, they drink Madeira rum, French brandy, gin or malt spirits, which complete the ruin of the nervous system.”

Man seems to be the only animal that doesn’t know how to eat. But as we have apparently eaten without knowing how, and have been dyspeptic for the seventy years since Volney wrote, and probably for seventy years before that, why not eat in this way and remain dyspeptic for the next seventy years? We have been dyspeptic so long that proper food and normal function might prove a disastrous change of environment to our stomachs. Innovations are apt to prove dangerous. Let us be conservative, and do right with caution. This precocious, overgrown, youthful country needs above all to be conservative, and above all wants conserves.

But since the agreeable gustatory occupation of doing the cooking in nature’s individual kitchen is denied us, we passengers are at the mercy of the ship’s cook. I wonder how clean he and his materials are. And as the process of swallowing and washing down his mixtures can not be made to occupy all of our waking hours, we will have to sandwich in a few games of cards, a few cotillions, cigars, siestas and, at appropriate times, a few turns of mal-de-mer.