We are fond of what is agreeable to the eye as well as pleasant to the taste, and therefore we love to have our bread made of the whitest and finest of the wheat. Attaching superior excellence to what thus pleases the eye, we call the good Scotch bannock an inferior food, and the wholesome black bread of the north of Europe a disgusting article of diet. When our experience and knowledge are local and confined, our opinions necessarily partake of a similar character.
In regard to the different qualities of wheaten flour, our judgments are not so severe. All things which pertain to this aristocratic grain—this staff of English life—like the liveries and horses of a great man—are treated with a certain degree of respect. Still, they are only the appendages of the noble seed, and the more thoroughly they are got rid of, the better the kernel is supposed to become.
In many of our old-fashioned families, indeed, the practice still lingers of baking bread from the whole meal of wheat for common use in the kitchen or hall, and for occasional consumption on the master's table. An enthusiastic physician also now and then rouses himself, and does battle with the national organs of taste on behalf of the darker bread, and the browner flour—and dyspeptic old gentlemen or mammas who have over-pampered their sickly darlings, listen to his fervid warnings, and the star of the brown loaf is for a month or two in the ascendant.
But gradually the warning sound is lost to the alarmed ear, and the pulses of the commoved air waft it on to mingle with the thousand other long-quenched voices which people the distant realms of space, and form together that unutterable harmony which, by consent of the poets, is named the music of the spheres.
There are times, however, when good men, though aware of this passing tendency of human efforts, and of the thankless impotency of a struggle against the public voice—that vox populi which wise men (so-called) have pronounced to be also vox Dei—will nevertheless return to what they believe to be a useful though unvalued labour. The present is one in which any thing which can be said in favour of the less-valued parts of our imperial grain, will be more readily listened to than at any other period in the life-time of the existing generation; and being listened to, may be productive of the greatest national good.
I propose, therefore, to show, in an intelligible manner, that whole meal flour is really more nourishing, as well as more wholesome, than fine white flour as food for man.
The solid parts of the human body consist, principally, of three several portions: the fat, the muscle, and the bone. These three substances are liable to constant waste in the living body, and therefore must be constantly renewed from the food that we eat. The vegetable food we consume contains these three substances almost ready formed. The plant is the brick-maker. The animal voluntarily introduces these bricks into its stomach, and then involuntarily—through the operation of the mysterious machinery within—picks out these bricks, transports them to the different parts of the body, and builds them into their appropriate places. As the miller at his mill throws into the hopper the unground grain, and forthwith, by the involuntary movements of the machinery, receives in his several sacks the fine flour, the seconds, the middlings, the pollard, and the bran; so in the human body, by a still more refined separation, the fat is extracted and deposited here, the muscular matter there, and the bony material in a third locality, where it can not only be stored up, but where its presence is actually at the moment necessary.
Again, the fluid parts of the body contain the same substances in a liquid form, on their way to or from the several parts of the body in which they are required. They include also a portion of salt or saline matter which is dissolved in them, as we dissolve common salt in our soup, or Epsom salts in the pleasant draughts with which our doctors delight to vex us. This saline matter is also obtained from the food.
Now, it is self-evident, that that food must be the most nourishing which supplies all these ingredients of the body most abundantly on the whole, or in proportions most suited to the actual wants of the individual animal to which it is given.
How stands the question, then, in regard to this point between the brown bread and the white—the fine flour, and the whole meal of wheat?