This milk, and most of the milk in all our cities, goes into the kitchen; the blind, brainless, family-feeding kitchen, and from there is given us to drink.
What protest rises from the kitchens of New York, or Chicago, or any city? What mass-meeting of angry women, presenting to their legislators the horrible facts of strong men poisoned and babies slain by this or any other abomination in the food supply?
A young man writes a novel exhibiting the badness of our meat supply. Men become excited. Men take action. Men legislate. The great meat industries stagger under the shock, recover, and go on smiling. Before this meanwhile, and afterwards, the meat went into out kitchens and we ate it.
Being kitchen-minded we cannot see that health is a public concern; that the feeding of our people is one of the most vital factors in their health, and that the private kitchen with its private cook is not able to keep the public well.
Ask the physician, the sanitary expert. He will tell you that the great advance in sanitary science is in its battle with the filth diseases; and that we die worse than ever from food diseases.
In fighting the filth diseases we have the public forces to work with; compulsory systems of sewage and drainage, quarantine, isolation hospitals, and all the other maneuvers by which an enlightened public protects itself.
But who shall say what a child shall eat, or a man or woman? Is it not wholly their own affair?
We cry out upon our women for the falling birth rate;—why not say something about the death rate of their babies? The average family must have four, merely to maintain a stationary population, said Grant Allen; "two to replace themselves and two to die." The doctor will tell you that they die mostly of what are called "preventable diseases" and that those diseases are mainly of the alimentary canal.
Kitchen-fed are we all, and those of us who survive it, who become immune to it, cry loudly of its excellence! If we could once see outside of these ancient limits, once figure to ourselves the vision of a healthy world, and the noble duty of making it,—then we should no longer be kitchen-minded.
Our narrowness of vision, our petty self-interest, does not end its injuries with our bodily health. Its leaden limitation is felt in all the economic field.