CHAPTER XXXI.

FOOD IN ITS RELATION TO HEALTH, BEAUTY, AND PLEASURE.

THE

HE subject of food, viewed scientifically, is too deep to be entered upon in a work of this kind, as the reader may judge when informed that great masters of dietetics have differed even as to the classification of food, and, therefore, of course, as to many details regarding it. Dunglison's summary of the simplest classification will receive the most general acceptance. He says that in nitrogenized food is included the fibrinous, albuminous, caseinous, and gelatinous elements; and that in non-nitrogenous food is included the amylaceous, saccharine, and oleaginous elements. Lastly, then, come the inorganic elements of food He remarks, further, that the second category might be further simplified, for amylaceous food is convertible into sugar during digestion, and from either oleaginous matter may be formed.

What we have more particularly to consider is, not the scientific aspect of food as related to the human body, but the ordinary practices as to eating that lie before us in our daily walks in life. Even within this sphere the subject is so vast that it can be at best but skimmed over here. Since the primitive apple, through which man fell from grace, the tillers of the soil have made the earth to yield of its goodly fruits, and river, ocean, and air have been laid under contribution for the sustenance of the body and the gratification of the palate of mankind.

In the course of this process, certain countries have developed particular dishes, and their inhabitants have imbibed particular tastes. Hence, home-staying people have come to regard their tastes as the natural and true standard, and often decline even to make trial of new dishes, whether from their own

or other lands. But all tastes, including that in eating, depend upon education. What one is brought up to in childhood to eat, he generally eats with greater relish than he eats anything else. The ability, however, to acquire new tastes lasts through life, and one of the chief differences between cultivated and uncultivated people is, that the former, as compared with the latter, prolong through life to some degree childhood's capacity for acquisition of all sorts, including what relates to the delectation of the palate.

This difference among mankind is enormous. Nothing more clearly marks the provincial, the untraveled man, than the perfect self-satisfaction with which he holds that everything that enters into his habits, including the food he eats, represents the sole proper, preordained ways of the best-constituted man. Nothing can swerve him from the fixed idea that he possesses the true standard of food. He likes it, and therefore it is the best possible food, and no addition to or subtraction from it could be made without marring his bill of fare. Content with the wretched cooking to which he is often habituated, he will marvel at the discomfiture of some experienced traveler in face of the viands which he relishes as the best on earth.

Just the very reverse is the man of education, especially if he has been a traveler, and has seen many countries and many different ways. He believes, with Brillat Savarin, that he who discovers a new dish contributes more to the happiness of mankind than he who discovers a new star. He philosophically perceives that what has been to him previously unknown is equivalent, so far as he is concerned, to having been just discovered, and he sets himself to acquire new tastes in dishes, and does acquire them, if not with the facility of youth, at least with an advantage which not even youth possesses-a discriminative palate, that renders every new enterprise an acquisition likely to be successful in true directions. That there are

false directions is undeniable, for some food has been derived, not from choice, but from necessity.

In 1835 the tomato was just beginning to appear in this country as an article of food, excepting with the populations around New Orleans. Millions of people here had never heard of it, thousands had not more than seen it, or had more than taken a fugitive taste of it as grown for curiosity in a garden, and then known as a love-apple. Very few tables in the United States except those of the creoles of New Orleans and vicinity, or else people in the North, of French or Spanish extraction, ever had the tomato served on table in any form. It took years and years for general acquirement of taste for it, not because every one was trying to like it and could not, but because the majority of people assumed that they could never learn to like it, and would not try. We have been in a remote settlement where we were obliged to send some hundreds of miles for celery to make salad, and heard it described by the young lady of the house as tasting like raw rhubarb-tops, and not for worlds would she touch the salad into which it was made, because of the presence in it of sweet-oil, although fat pork was the habitual food of the region.

This same indisposition to acquire new tastes pervades all the affairs of life with such people. We knew one such, where the person wept the first time that she was obliged to sleep on a hair-mattress instead of the accustomed feather-bed, and yet some months afterward she came very near weeping again because she had to sleep on a feather-bed instead of the hair-mattress, which in the meantime she had been using upon compulsion.

Many instances we could adduce in support of the point to which we are speaking. The point is that, with very many people, variety is not the spice of life. It takes a certain amount of general education, thought, and experience, and a certain

consequent ductility of mind, to make variety seem the spice of life. Old age brings to the majority of people dislike for variety of all sorts. They do not wish to learn more, to do differently in any respect from what they happen latterly to have fallen into the way of doing. They sometimes desire never to go beyond the limits of their city, town, or village; then never to go beyond the enclosure of the dwelling; and, with a final degeneration, they sometimes bring up, while still in the enjoyment of good health, by frequenting only one room, and being perfectly satisfied in only one chair. As these same traits are observable in lesser degree even in youth, it follows, manifestly, that some persons are born old.

On the other hand, with well-adjusted mental and bodily mechanism, coupled with education, variety at all ages never ceases to be the spice of life; and, so far as food is concerned, variety may, in a certain sense, be said directly to represent life. The more various the diet, the better is the health and the enjoyment of existence. When we find nations so situated as to be obliged to subsist chiefly on one article of food, we find the system liable to specific disorders. Only recently, Dr. Takaki, of Japan, has accomplished a good work there in ameliorating the condition of the sailors of the Japanese navy, through his recommendation to the government to substitute bread, wheat, and beans for a part of the daily ration of rice. Although rice is good food, yet by itself it is unequal to nourishing the system properly, and, in consequence of eating it as their almost exclusive diet, the Japanese sailors had been dreadfully afflicted with the disease known as beriberi.

It is not difficult for the Japanese to adopt new practices, however unaccustomed they may be. We remember once conversing with an educated Japanese, and his saying, "Yes, we want to adopt everything." He was too intelligent a man not to have known that, in adopting everything indiscriminately,