The Book of Life

by Upton Sinclair

When I first read this book, I set to work to try its theories upon myself. During the five or six months that I lived on raw food, I took the trouble to weigh everything that I ate, and to keep a record. It is, of course, very easy to weigh raw foods exactly, and I found that I lived an active life and kept physical health upon slightly less than 2,500 calories a day. I have set this as my standard, and have accustomed myself to follow it instinctively, and without wasting any thought upon it. Sometimes I fall from grace; for I still crave the delightful cakes and candies and ice cream upon which I was brought up. I always pay the penalty, and know that I will not get back to my former state of health until I skip a meal or two, and give my system a chance to clean house. The average man will find the regimen set forth in this book austere and awe-inspiring; I do not wish to pose as a paragon of virtue, so perhaps I should quote a sarcastic girl cousin, who remarked when I was a boy that the way to my heart was with a bag of ginger-snaps. I live in the presence of candy stores and never think of their existence, but if someone brings candy into the house and puts it in front of me, I have to waste a lot of moral energy in letting it alone. A few years ago I had a young man as secretary who discovered this failing of mine, and used to afford himself immense glee by buying a box of chocolates and leaving it on top of my desk. I would give him back the box—with some of the chocolates missing—but he would persist in "forgetting it" on my desk; he would hide and laugh hilariously behind the door, until my wife discovered his nefarious doings, and warned me of them.

Professor Chittenden states quite simply the common sense procedure in the matter of food quantity. Find out by practical experiment what is the very least food upon which you can do your work without losing weight. That is the correct quantity for you, and if you are eating more, you certainly cannot be doing your body any good, and all the evidence indicates that you are doing it harm. You need not have the least fear in making this experiment that you will starve yourself. Later on, in a chapter on fasting, I shall prove to you that you carry around with you in your body sufficient reserve of food to keep you alive for eighty or ninety days; and if you draw on a small quantity of this you do not do yourself the slightest harm. Cut down the amount of your food; eat the bulky foods, which contain less calory value, and weigh yourself every day, and you will be surprised to discover how much less you need to eat than you have been accustomed to.

One of the things you will find out is that your stomach is easily fooled; it is largely guided by bulk. If you eat a meal consisting of a moderate quantity of lean meat, a very little bread, a heaping dish of turnip greens, and a big slice of watermelon, you will feel fully satisfied, yet you will not have taken in one-third the calory value that you would at an ordinary meal with gravies and dressings and dessert. The bulky kind of food is that for which your system was adapted in the days when it was shaped by nature. You have a large stomach, many times as large as you would have had if you had lived on refined and concentrated foods such as butter, sugar, olive oil, cheese and eggs. You have a long intestinal tract, adapted to slowly digesting foods, and to the work of extracting nutrition from a mass of roughage. You have a very large lower bowel, which Metchnikoff, the Russian scientist, one of the greatest minds who ever examined the problems of health, declares a survival, the relic of a previous stage of evolution, and a source of much disease. The best thing you can do with that lower bowel is to give it lots of hay, as it requires; in other words, to eat the salads and greens which contain cellulose material. This contains no food value, and does not ferment, but fills the lower bowel and stimulates it to activity.

If you eat too much food, three things may happen. First, it may not be digested, and in that case it will fill your system with poisons. Second, it may be assimilated, but not burned up by the body. In that case it has to be thrown out by the kidneys or the sweat glands, and this puts upon these organs an extra strain, to which in the long run they may be unequal. Or third, the surplus material may be stored up as fat. This is an old-time trick which nature invented to tide you over the times when food was scarce. If you were a bear, you would naturally want to eat all you could, and be as fat as possible in November, so that you might be able to hunt your prey when you came out from your winter's sleep in April. But you are not a bear, and you expect to eat your regular meals all winter; you have established a system of civilization which makes you certain of your food, and the place where you keep your surplus is in the bank, or sewed up in the mattress, or hidden in your stocking. In other words, a civilized man saves money, and the habit of storing globules of grease in the cells of his body is a survival of an old instinct, and a needless strain upon his health. Not merely does the fat man have to carry all the extra weight around with him, but his body has to keep it and tend it; and what are the effects of this is fully shown by life insurance tables. People who are five or ten per cent over weight have five or ten per cent more chance of dying all the time, while people who are five or ten per cent under weight have five or ten per cent more than the average of life expectation. There is no answer to these figures, which are the result of the tabulation of many hundreds of thousands of cases. The meaning of them to the fat person is to put himself on a diet of lean meat, green vegetables and fresh fruits, until he has brought himself down, not merely to the normal fatness of the civilized man, but to the normal leanness of the athlete, the soldier on campaign, and the student who has more important things to think about than stuffing his stomach.

There is, of course, a certain kind of leanness which is the result of ill health. There are wasting diseases; tuberculosis, for example, and anemia. There are people who worry themselves thin, and there are a few rare "spiritual" people, so-called, who fade away from lack of sufficient interest in their bodies. That is not the kind of leanness that I mean, but the active, wiry leanness, which sometimes lives a hundred years. Nearly always you will find that such people are spare eaters; and you will find that our ideal of rosy plumpness, both for adults and children, is a wholly false notion. We once had in our home as servant an Irish girl, who was what is popularly called "a picture of health," with those beautiful flaming cheeks that Irish and English women so often have. She was in her early twenties, and nobody who knew her had any idea but that her health was perfect. But one morning she was discovered in bed with one side paralyzed, and in a couple of weeks she was dead with erysipelas. The color in her cheeks had been nothing but diseased blood vessels, overloaded with food material; and with the blood in that condition, one of the tiny vessels in the brain had become clogged.

In the same way I have seen children, two or three years old, plump and rosy, and considered to be everything that children should be; but pneumonia would hit them, and in two or three days they would be at death's door. I do not mean that children should be kept hungry; on the contrary, they should have four or five meals a day, so that they do not have a chance to become too hungry. But at those meals they should eat in great part the bulky foods, which contain the natural salts needed for building the body. If a child asks for food, you may give it an apple, or you may give it a slice of bread and butter with sugar on it. The child will be equally well content in either case; but it is for you, with your knowledge of food values, to realize that the bread with butter and sugar contains two or three times as much nutriment as the apple, but contains practically none of the precious organic salts which will make the child's bones and teeth.

So far I have discussed this subject as if all foods grew on bushes outside your kitchen door, and all you had to do was to go and pick off what you wanted. But as a matter of fact, foods cost money, and under our present system of wage slavery, the amount of money the average person can spend for food is strictly limited. In a later book I am going to discuss the problem of poverty, its causes and remedies. All that I can do here is to tell you what foods you ought to have, and if society does not pay you enough for your work to enable you to buy such foods, you may know that society, is starving you, and you may get busy to demand your rights as human beings. Meantime, however, such money as you do have, you want to spend wisely, and the vast majority of you spend it very unwisely indeed.

In the first place, a great many of the simplest and most wholesome foods are cheap—often because people do not know enough to value them. We insist upon having the choice cuts of meats, because they are more tender to the teeth, but the cheaper cuts are exactly as nutritious. We insist upon having our meats loaded with fat, although fatness is an abnormal condition in an animal, and excess of fat is a grave error in diet. I live in a country where jack rabbits are a pest, and in the market they sell for perhaps one-fourth the cost of beef, and yet I can hardly ever get them, because people value them so little as food; they prefer the meat of a hog which has been wallowing in a filthy pen, and has been deliberately made so fat that it could hardly walk!

I have already spoken of prunes, a much despised and invaluable food. All the dried fruits are rich in food values, and if we could get them untreated by chemicals, they would be worth their cost. I was brought up to despise the cheaper vegetables, such as cabbage and turnips; I never tasted boiled cabbage until I was forty, and then to my great surprise I made the discovery that it is good. Raw cabbage is as valuable as any other salad; it is a trifle harder to digest for some people, but I do not believe in pampering the stomach. Both potatoes and rice are cheap and wholesome, if only we would get unpolished rice, and if we would leave the skins on the potatoes until after they are cooked. Nearly all the mineral salts of the potato are just under the outer skin, and are removed by the foolish habit of peeling them.

The prices of food differ so widely at different seasons and in different parts of the world, that there is not much profit in trying to figure how cheaply a person can live. I have found that I spend for the diet I have indicated here, from sixty to eighty cents a day. I do not buy any fancy foods, but on the other hand, I do not especially try to economize; I buy what I want of the simple everyday foods in their season. Most everyone will find that it is a good business proposition to buy the foods which he needs to keep in health. If the average workingman would add up the money he spends, not merely in the restaurants, but in the candy stores, the drug stores, the tobacco stores, and the offices of doctors and dentists, he would find, I think, that he could afford to buy himself the necessary quantity of wholesome natural foods. For a family of three, in the place where I live, enough of these foods can be purchased for a dollar a day, and this is about one-fourth what common labor is being paid, and one-eighth of what skilled labor is being paid. I will specify the foods: a pound and a half of shoulder steak, a loaf of whole wheat bread or a box of shredded wheat biscuit, a head of cabbage, a pound of prunes, and four or five pounds of apples.