STARTLING as are the facts in the foregoing chapter, they do not tell the whole story. We have seen that the non-condimental chemical preservatives used by the food poisoners are highly objectionable on two grounds: (1) because they are usually injurious and often deadly; and (2) because they enable unscrupulous persons to use the filthiest, rottenest material and so doctor it as to deceive the consumer into believing it to be wholesome food, whereas it may, and often does, result in ptomaine poisoning.
But there is a third indictment against the food sophisticators. The chemicals they use, not only make the food they manipulate dangerous to eat, but they also diminish and often completely destroy its Flavor.
This destruction of the food Flavors may seem to those who have given no special attention to this matter a thing to be regretted, indeed, but not an actual crime. That it is a real crime, because it helps to undermine the consumers' health, I shall demonstrate in this chapter. It is necessary to know the facts now to be set forth in order to realize the full significance of the deplorable state of affairs to be revealed in the next chapter, entitled Our Denatured Foods. That chapter will continue the subject of Ungastronomic America, wherefore Chapter II may be regarded as an Intermezzo—but a most important one, for it contains truths that are of vital importance to everybody. Indeed, it is chiefly for the sake of impressing these truths on as many intelligent persons as possible that I am writing this book.
SENSUAL INDULGENCE AS A DUTY.
Too long we have been allowing covetous manufacturers and dealers and incompetent or indolent cooks to spoil our naturally good food. We have done this because we have not as a nation understood that there is nothing in the world on which our health and hourly comfort, our happiness and our capacity for hard work, depend so much as on the Flavor of food—those savory qualities which make it appetizing and enjoyable and therefore digestible and helpful.
It is not too much to say that the most important problem now before the American public is to learn to enjoy the pleasures of the table and to insist on having savory food at every meal.
There was a time when it would have been considered rank heresy to express such an opinion, and even to-day there are millions of honest folk who hold that the enjoyment of a good meal is merely a form of sybaritic indulgence.
When Ruskin wrote his "Modern Painters" he referred to the indulgence of taste as an "ignoble source of pleasure." He lived to realize the foolishness of this sneer; in one of those amusing footnotes which he contributed to the final edition of that great work, and in which he often assails his own former opinions with merciless severity, he denounces the "cruelty and absurdity" of his failing to learn to appreciate the dainties provided by his father. But his earlier opinion reflected the general attitude of the time toward the pleasures of the table.
Fortunately, in our efforts to fight the great American plague—dyspepsia—we are no longer seriously hampered by that Puritan severity which caused the father of Walter Scott, when young Walter one day expressed his enjoyment of the soup, to promptly mix with it a pint of water to take the devil out of it.
America's leading educator, Ex-President Eliot of Harvard, has expressed the more rational view of our time in these words: "Sensuous pleasures, like eating and drinking, are sometimes described as animal, and therefore unworthy, but men are animals and have a right to enjoy without reproach those pleasures of animal existence which maintain health, strength, and life itself."