It will not do, however, to put all the blame on the domestic helpers. Only one family in twelve, even in our wealthy country, can afford to hire a cook. In the other eleven families the women of the house are personally responsible for the meals. Why are these generally so unsatisfactory?
Visitors from abroad who have asked themselves this question, usually answer it by saying that Americans have idolized and spoiled their women and are now paying the penalty.
"The European," says one of them, "takes it as a matter of course that the woman he marries will be his home-maker and housekeeper, able and willing, if necessary, to do the careful cooking on which his health and his enjoyment of life depend so largely. In America the main object of the women seems to be to throw off all the responsibilities of housekeeping so that they may either gad about socially or engage in outside employment. The necessary meals are hastily cooked, marketing is done by telephone, the grocer and butcher are foolishly trusted as to the quality of the raw material, and the results are such as we see—monotonous, unwholesome, insipid meals, followed by indigestion."
There is no doubt some truth in this foreigner's observations, though he takes no account of the many thousands of American wives who work as hard to make their homes abodes of comfort, health and happiness as their husbands do to supply the necessary cash.
On the American men falls a large share of the blame for existing conditions. Completely absorbed in their private and particular business they labored too long under the delusion that their whole duty consisted in supplying the cash needed for housekeeping. Their indifference to the sources and the quality of the raw material of the food they ate, brought into existence a horde of adulterators and poisoners on a scale never before witnessed anywhere—and that is another important reason why we are not a gastronomic nation. With such sophisticated material the best cooks in the world could not prepare appetizing, wholesome meals; and when meals are not appetizing, men lose interest in them, bolting their food, and passing on to things that seem more important and agreeable.
Adulterators and spoilers of food have existed since the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans and probably they flourished long before them; but never before had the far-famed "Yankee ingenuity" been brought to bear on the ignoble task of deceiving people as to what they were eating and drinking.
Of this ingenuity a striking illustration was given at Washington when the pure food agitators, headed by Dr. Wiley of the Department of Agriculture, gave an exhibit before Congress. On a table had been placed—along with other similarly fraudulent articles—a bottle of "honey." On the surface of it floated a bee. Now, the man who put that bee in the bottle had said to himself: "Nine persons out of ten will, on seeing it, conclude instantly that it got in accidentally and that it proves the honey to be genuine." But that bottle never contained any honey; it was filled with a sticky, sweet substance resembling honey in appearance, but instead of being made up of the products of the bee's beneficent floral industry, it contained ingredients some of which were injurious to health.
THE DANGER IN OUR FOOD.
That bottle was a sample of thousands of adulterated or entirely spurious "foods" for which American men and women had been for a long time spending good money in the belief that they were getting what they paid for.
A quarter of a century ago the food poisoners and adulterators spread a net of fraud across the United States, the like of which the world had never seen; and for a long time the American public, with the meekness (up to a certain point!) for which it has become notorious, submitted to this abuse, eating the drugged food and suffering the daily pangs of indigestion, wondering vaguely what was the matter—why Europeans found us a nation of dyspeptics—and paying fortunes to doctors, and to vendors of patent medicines, without being able to avert the final general breakdown.