Sugar will make fat, and so will starch, cream, rice, butter, and fat meat. As milk will make muscle and fat and bones, it is the best kind of food. Here, again, it is the earth that sends us our food. Fat meat comes from animals well fed on grain and grass; sugar, from sugar-cane, maple-trees, or beets; oil, from olive-trees; butter, from cream; and starch, from potatoes, and from corn, rice, and other grains.
Green apples and other unripe fruits are not yet ready to be eaten. The starch which we take for food has to be changed into sugar, before it can mix with the blood and help feed the body. As the sun ripens fruit, it changes its starch to sugar. You can tell this by the difference in the taste of ripe and unripe apples.
CANDY.
Most children like candy so well, that they are in danger of eating more sugar than is good for them. You would starve if fed only on sugar.
We would not need to be quite so much afraid of a little candy if it were not for the poison with which it is often colored.
Even what is called pure, white candy is sometimes not really such. There is a simple way by which you can find this out for yourselves.
If you put a spoonful of sugar into a tumbler of water, it will all dissolve and disappear. Put a piece of white candy into a tumbler of water; and, if it is made of pure sugar only, it will dissolve and disappear.
If it is not, you will find at the bottom of the tumbler some white earth. This is not good food for anybody. Candy-makers often put it into candy in place of sugar, because it is cheaper than sugar.
REVIEW QUESTIONS.
1. Why do we need food?