MODERN FOOD

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 294, 6 May 1911, Page 6

MODERN FOOD

People fancy if they eat the healthiest and plainest food they may set all the other laws of health at defiance. It is the fashion of the age to begin life in an unnatural way. The mother shirks her maternal office, and dozens of so-called chemists come to the rescue. One moment's reflection would show that any other animal acting so would become extinct. I expect CO per cent, of mankind now are reared artificially during the first couple of years. I Some of our social reformers, such as | Dr. Truby King, seem to think this item alone may account for progressive degeneracy. But we will leave the germ and go to tins adult. The dietary has become complicated. We have tinned food, frozen food, and many exquisite preparations, in addition to rice, sago, tapioca, and arrowroot. We have the breads, the porridges, and the everincreasing special preparations of oats and wheat, even mixtures of them and barley. First oats with the English have always been in great demand, and we have oatina, quaker oats, garstina and endless preparations claiming to preserve the peculiar properties dissipated by long noiling. Oatmeal is a stupid preparation, consisting of a coarse and fine part, which should be separated by sifting, and if this were done the sixpence a pound preparations would be imitated. That "the law is a hass" in punishing a baker for selling light bread and allowing a miller to sell oatmeal at fid per lb seems apparent. Now we have preparations of oatmeal called Blank's patent groats—very excellent and very costly, also Blank's patent barley, and I do not know any other way to get barley flour. But £55 per ton, instead of £lO, is something for people in poor circumstances to think of. I believe there is a great movement in I England to go back to wholemeal bread. ' However will that agree with "the appendicitis?" I should think it will double it at least. The great cry is that we are giving all the phosphates to the animals—pigs, calves, horses, and also to fowls. Well, the animals will give them all back. Ground and calcined bone* can be got anywhere. Even the back of a hatchet and an old tin with a lot of ' fine nail holes for sifting will get bone flour, by no means disgusting in any way to mix with bread or porridge. Eating between meals, and the constant sucking of sugar or chocolate in • one form or another is a modernism, and the most ruinous, no doubt, we have got. I never meet women during the day without observing that their jaws are moving. Query, which is the greater curse—tobacco or sugar or chocolate? The vegetarians are making no headway. In Victoria Street, Auckland; Wil- . lis Street, Wellington, and also in Napier we have restaurants run by a religious sect where wheat, honey, nut butter, lentil soup, and so on, may be got for Is a meal. But Abraham, Job, and all Biblical characters kept flocks and lived on them. The very Passover needed a lamb. And we live in a country exporting butter and frozen meat, so that object lessons exist on all sides to show vegetarians are wrong. Even man's eyes show him to be a carnivorous animal, for he cannot see behind without turning his head. All herbivorous animals can see behind, for their eyes project. All savages have ! been cannibals. There is no doubt these I sanatorium® for preparing food began in | the United States. Battle Creek, near 1 Detroit, was, I fancy, the original. Prepared food put up exquisitely in packages must be a costly way of living. It always reminds me of the"widow's cruse," and coming famine. Yes, we have got to keep our body in health, and temptations are to be met in food as well as everywhere else. The taste: The soothing of the nerves, and a vast amount of suffering and cost are incurred by a, bad choice of foods. A return to the old ways and simpler diet would likely be better. Tobacco is the curse of man. Sugar and chocolate threaten worse to women and children. Maybe the religious vegetarians who started health buffets in our towns did it to be like the hermit in the "Vicar of Wakefield—"jNo beast that roams the valley free, to slaughter I condemn."