It is my purpose in this chapter to lay down a few general principles to aid you in the practical problem of selecting the best diet for yourself. But it must be made clear at the outset that there can be no hard and fast rule. All human bodies are more or less alike, but on the other hand all are more or less different. Modern civilization has given very few bodies the chance to be perfect; nearly all have some weakness, some abnormality, and need some special modification in diet to fit their particular problem. The ideal in each case would be a complete study of the individual system. Some day, no doubt, medical science will analyze the digestive juices and the gland secretions and the blood-stream of every human being, and say, you need a certain percentage of starch and a certain percentage of protein; you need such and such proportion of phosphorus and iron; you should avoid certain acids—and so on. But at present we are devoting our science to the task of killing and maiming other people, instead of enabling ourselves to live in health and happiness; so it is that most of those who read this book will be too poor to command the advice of a diet specialist. The best you can do is to get a few general ideas and try them out, watching your own body and learning its peculiarities.
Human food contains three elements: proteins, fats and carbohydrates. The proteins are the body-building material, and the foods which are rich in proteins are lean meat, the white of eggs, milk and cheese, nuts, peas and beans. A certain amount of this kind of food is needed by the body. If it is missing, the body will gradually waste away. If too much of it is taken, the body can turn it into energy-making material, but this is a wasteful process, and the best evidence appears to be that it is a strain upon the system. Experiments conducted by Professor Chittenden of Yale have proven conclusively that men can live and maintain body weight upon much less protein food than previous dietetic standards had indicated.
The fats are found in fat meats and dairy products, and in nuts, olives, and vegetable oils. The body is prepared to digest and assimilate a certain amount of fat, no one knows how much. I have found in my own case that I require a great deal less than people ordinarily eat. I have for many years maintained good health upon a diet containing no more fat than one gets with lean meat once or twice a day. I never use butter or olive oil, nor any fat in cooking. My reason for this is that fats are the most highly concentrated form of food, and the easiest upon which to overeat. Excess of fat is a cause, not merely of obesity, but also of boils and pimples and "pasty" complexion, and other signs of a clogged blood-stream.
The third variety of food is the carbohydrates, and of these there are two kinds, starches and sugars. Starch is the white material of the grains and tubers; the principal food element of bread and cereals, rice, potatoes, bananas, and many prepared substances such as corn-starch, tapioca, farina and macaroni. Starchy foods compose probably half the diet of the average human being. In my own case, they compose about one-sixth, so you see to what extent my beliefs differ from the common. Starch is not really necessary in the diet at all. I have a friend who is subject to headaches, and finds relief from them by a diet of meat, salads, and fresh fruits exclusively. The first thing that excess of starch or sugar does is to ferment in the system, and cause flatulence and gas. But strange as it may seem, if the excess of starch is perfectly digested and assimilated into the system, the condition may be worse yet, because you may have a great quantity of energy-producing material, without the necessary mineral elements which the body requires in the handling of it.
If you cremate a human body and study the ashes chemically, you find a score or more of mineral salts. You find these in the blood, and no blood is normal and no body can be kept normal which does not contain the right percentage of these elements. It is not merely that they are needed to build bones and teeth; they are needed at every instant for the chemistry of the cells. Every time you move a muscle, you fill the cells of that muscle with a certain amount of waste matter. You may prove how deadly this matter is by binding a tight cord about your arm, and then trying to use the arm. We are only at the beginning of understanding the subtle chemistry of the body; but this much we know, the cells transform the waste products, and they are thrown out of the system as ammonia, uric acid, etc.; and for this process the blood must have a continual supply of many mineral salts.
So vital are they, and so fatal to health is their absence, that it is far better for you to eat nothing at all than to eat improperly balanced foods, or foods which are deficient in the organic salts. You may prove this to yourself by a simple experiment. Put two chickens in separate pens, where nobody can feed them but yourself. Feed one of them on water and white bread, or corn starch, or sugar, or any energy-making substance which contains little of the mineral elements. Feed the other chicken on plain water. You will find that the one which has the food will quickly become droopy and sickly; its feathers will fall out, it will have what in human beings would be known as headaches, colds, sore throats, decaying teeth and boils. At the end of a couple of weeks it will be a dead chicken. The one which you feed on water alone will not be a happy chicken, neither will it be a fat chicken, but it will be a live chicken, and a chicken without disease. I am going later on to discuss the subject of fasting. For the present I will merely say that a chicken which has nothing but water is living upon its own flesh, and therefore has a meat diet, containing the mineral elements necessary to the elimination of the fatigue poisons.
I am going to try not to be dogmatic in this book, and not to say things that I do not know. I confess to innumerable uncertainties about the subject of diet; but one thing I think I do know, and that is that human beings should eliminate absolutely from their food those modern artificial products, which look so nice, and are so easy to handle, and are put up in packages with pretty labels, and have been in some way artificially treated to remove the wastes and impurities—including the vital mineral salts. Among such food substances I include lard and its imitations made from cottonseed oil, white flour, all the prepared and refined cereals, polished rice, tapioca, farina, corn starch, and granulated and powdered sugar. Any of these substances will kill a chicken in a couple of weeks, and the only reason they take a longer time to kill you is because you mix them with other kinds of foods. But to the extent that you eat them, your diet is deficient; and do not console yourself with the idea that the mineral elements will be made up from other foods, because you don't know that, and nobody else knows it. Nobody knows just how much of any particular organic salt the body needs. All we know is that the primitive races, which ate natural foods, enjoyed vigorous health, while the American people, who consume the greatest proportion of the so-called "refined" foods, have the very best dentists and the very worst teeth in the world.
There are many kinds of sugar, found in the sugar-cane and the beet, and in all fruits. Sugar may also be made from any form of starch; this is glucose, which is put up in cans and sold as an imitation of maple syrup. The ordinary granulated and powdered sugar is made by taking from the natural syrup every trace of mineral elements; so I have no hesitation in saying that the ordinary cane sugar and beet sugar of our breakfast tables and our confectionery stores is not a food, but a slow poison. The causes of the wonderful progress of American dentistry, which is the marvel of the civilized world, are cane sugar, white flour, and the frying-pan, each of which dietetic crimes I shall take up in turn.
We have the richest country in the world; we eat more food, probably by 50 per cent, and we waste more food, probably by 500 per cent, than any other people in the world; and yet, go to any small farming community in America, and what do you find? You find the teeth of the young children rotting in their heads, and having to be pulled out before their second teeth come. You find these second teeth rotting often before the age of twenty. A friend of mine, who knows the American farmer, sums it up this way: "He has two things that he requires if he is to be really respectable and happy. First, he wants to get all the fireplaces in his home boarded up, and all the windows nailed tight; and second, he wants to get all his teeth out, and an artificial set installed. Out of the farmers' wives in my neighborhood, not one in ten keeps her own teeth until she is thirty."
If you go to the Balkans, where the peasants live on sour milk, with grains which they grind at home; or to southern Italy and Sicily, where they live on cheese and black bread and olives; or among savage people, where they hunt and fish and gather the natural fruits, you find old men without a single decayed tooth. There must be some reason for this, and the reason is found in our denatured grocery-store foods. The farmer's wife will gather up her eggs and her butter and cheeses, and take them to the store and bring back cans of lard and packages of sugar. The farmer will sell his perfectly good wheat and corn meal, and bring back in his wagon cases of "refined" cereal foods, for which he has paid ten times the price of the grain!
Dentists will tell you that the way candy injures the teeth is by sticking to them and fermenting, forming acids, which destroy the tooth structure. And that may be a part of the reason. But the principal reason why the teeth decay is because the blood-stream is abnormal, and is unable to keep up the repairs of the body. Your teeth are living structures, just as much as any other part of you, and they will resist decay if you supply them with the proper nourishment.
You need sugar; you need a considerable quantity of it every day. Nature provides this sugar in combination with the organic salts, and also with the precious vitamines, whose function in the body we are only beginning to investigate. All the mineral substances which give the color and flavor to oranges, apples, peaches, grapes, figs, prunes, raisins—all these you take out when you make sugar. Or perhaps you put in some imitations of them, made from coal tar chemicals, and drink them at your soda fountains! So little appreciation has the American farmer's wife of natural fruits, that when she preserves them, she considers it necessary to fill them full of cane sugar; in fact, she has a notion that they won't keep unless she cooks them up with sugar! So snobbish are we Americans about our eating, that we make the best of our foods into bywords. We make jokes in our comic papers about the "boarding-house prune"; and yet prunes and raisins are among the wholesomest foods we have, and if we fed them to our children instead of cakes and candy and coal-tar flavorings, our dental industry would rapidly decline.
And the same thing is true of bread. When I was a boy, I thought I had to have hot bread at least twice a day, and if I were called upon to eat bread that was more than a day old, I felt that I was being badly abused by life. I used to read fairy stories, in which something called "black bread" was mentioned, something obscure and terrible; the symbol of human misery was Cinderella sitting in the ashes and eating a crust of dry "black bread." But now since I have studied diet, I have taken my place with Cinderella. I can afford to buy whatever kind of bread I want; I can have the best white bread, piping hot, three times a day, if I want it; but what I eat three times a day is a crust of hard dry "black bread."
"Black bread" is the fairy story name for bread made of the whole grain. It is eaten that way by the peasant because he has no patent milling machinery at his disposal, to fan away the life-giving elements of his food. Nearly all the mineral elements of the grain are contained in the outer, dark-colored portion. The white part is almost pure starch; and when you use white flour, you are not merely starving your blood-stream, your bones, and your teeth, you are also depriving the digestive tract of the rough material which it is accustomed to handle, and which it needs to stimulate it to action. I am aware that whole grain products are a trifle less easy of digestion, but we should not pamper and weaken our digestive tract any more than we let our muscles get flabby for lack of action. We should require our stomachs to handle the ordinary natural foods, precisely as we accustom our body to react from cold water, and to stand honest hard work.
For ages the Japanese peasants have lived on rice, with a little dried fish. Quite recently there began to spread throughout Japan a mysterious disease known as beri-beri. It was especially prevalent in the army, and so the scientists of Japan set out to discover the cause, and it proved to be the modern practice of polishing rice, which takes off the outer coating of the grain. Rice is one of the most wholesome of foods, if it is eaten in the natural state; but in order to get it in that state in this country, you have to find a special food store of the health cranks, and have to pay a special price for it. You have to pay a higher price for whole wheat bread—because ninety-nine people out of a hundred are ignorant, and insist upon having their foodstuffs pretty to look at!
Probably you have read sea stories, and know of the horrors of scurvy. Scurvy and beri-beri are similar diseases, with a similar cause. The men on the old sailing ships used to have to live on white biscuit and salt meat, and they always knew that to recover from their gnawing illness, they must get to port and get fresh vegetables and fruits, especially onions and lemons, which contain the vitamines as well as the salts. But you will see the modern housewife going into the grocery store, and surveying the shelves of "package" goods, and in her ignorance picking out the scurvy-making products, and frequently paying for them a much higher price than for the health-making ones!
Then, when she has got her white flour, and her cane sugar, and her lard, she will take it home, and mix it up, and put it in the frying pan, and serve it hot to her husband and children. Nature has so constituted her husband and children that they digest starch before they digest fat; that is to say, the starch is digested mainly in the stomach, while the fat is digested mainly after the food has been passed on into the small intestine. But by frying the starch before it is eaten, the housewife carefully takes each grain of the starch and protects it with a little covering of fat. Thus the digestive juices of the stomach cannot get at the starch, and the starch goes down into the small intestine a good part undigested. If some evil spirit, wishing to make trouble for the human organism, had charge of the laying out of our diet, he could hardly devise anything worse than that. And yet it would be no exaggeration to say that the average American, especially the average farmer, eats out of a frying-pan. If his potatoes have to be warmed over, they go into the frying-pan; his precious batter-cakes and doughnuts are cooked in a frying-pan, and all his precious hot breads are mixed with lard. If it were not for the fact that you cannot broil a beefsteak over a modern gas range, I would tell you that the first step toward health for the average American would be to throw the frying-pan out of the window, and to throw the cook-book after it.
The whole modern art of cooking is largely a perversion; a product of idleness, vanity, and sensuality. It is one of the monstrous growths consequent upon our system of class exploitation. We have a number of idle people with nothing to do but eat, and who demonstrate their superiority to the rest of us by their knowledge of superior foods, and superior ways of preparing them. They have the wealth of the world at their disposal, also the services of their fellow man without limit, and they set their fellow man to work to enable them to give elaborate banquets, and to sit in solemn state and gorge themselves, and to have a full account of their behavior published in the next morning's newspapers. A great part of this perverse art we owe to what is called the "ancient régime" in France—a régime which starved the French peasantry until they were black skinned beasts hiding in caves and hollow trees. So it comes about that our modern food depravity parades itself in French names, and American snobbery requires of its devotees a course in the French language sufficient to read a menu card. Needless to say, this elaborate gastronomic art has been developed without any relation to health, or any thought of the true needs of the body. It is one of the products of the predatory system which we can say is absolute waste. Having done my own cooking for the past twenty-five years, I make bold to say that I can teach anybody all he needs to know about cooking in one lesson of half an hour, and that the total amount of cooking required for a large family can be done by one person in twenty minutes a day.
In the first place, a great many foods do not have to be cooked at all, and are made less fit by cooking. In the next place, the only cooking that is ever required is a little boiling, or in the case of meat, roasting or broiling. In the next place, the art of combining foods in cooking is a waste art, because no foods should be combined in cooking. Every food has its own natural flavor, which is lost in combination, and if anybody is unable to enjoy the natural flavors of simply cooked foods, there is one thing to say to that person, and that is to wait until he is hungry. Let him take a ten-mile walk in the open air, and he will have more interest in his next meal. I am not a fanatic, and have no desire to destroy the pleasures of life; I am recommending to people that they should seek the higher pleasures of the intellect, and those pleasures are not found in standing over a cook stove, nor in compelling others to stand over a cook stove. Moreover, I know that the artificial mixing of foods to tempt peoples' palates is one of the principal causes of overeating, and therefore of ill health, and therefore of the ultimate destruction of the pleasures of life.
I went out from the world of cooks before I was twenty. I wanted to write a book, and to be let alone while I was doing it. I lived by myself, and found out about cooking by practical experience. On a few occasions since then, I have lived in a house with a servant, and had some cooking done for me, but it was always because somebody else wanted it, and against my protest. In the last ten years we have had no servant in our home, and because I want my wife to give her energy to more important things than feeding me, I do my share of getting every meal. We have worked out a system of housekeeping by which we get a meal in five minutes, and when we finish it, it takes three minutes to clear things away.
If I tell you what I eat, please do not get the impression that I am advising you to eat these same things. My diet consists of the foods which I have found by long experience agree with me. There are many other foods which are just as wholesome, but which I do not eat, either because they don't happen to agree with me, or because I don't care for them so much. I am fond of fruit, and eat more of that than of anything else. It is not a cheap article of diet, but you can save a good deal if you buy it in quantities, as I do. A little later I am going to discuss the prices of foods.
For breakfast I eat a slice of whole wheat bread, three good-sized apples, stewed, and eight or ten dates. It takes practically no time to prepare this breakfast. The bread has to be baked, of course, but this is done wholesale; we buy four loaves at a time, and it is just as good at the end of a couple of weeks as when we buy it. When I lived in the world of cooks, I would call for apple sauce; which meant that somebody had to pare apples, cut them up, stew them, mix them with sugar, grate a little nutmeg over them, set them on ice, and serve them to me on a glass dish, with a little pitcher of cream. But now what happens is that I put a dozen apples in a big sauce-pan and let them simmer while I am eating. We have a rule in our family that we do not do any cooking except while we are eating, because if we try it at any other time of the day, we get buried in a book or in a manuscript, and forget about it until the smoke causes somebody in the street to summon the fire department. So the apples for my breakfast were cooked during last night's supper; and during the breakfast there will be some vegetable cooking for lunch.
At this lunch, which is my "square meal," I eat a large slice of beefsteak, say a third of a pound. Jack London used to say that the only man who could cook a beefsteak was the fireman of a railway locomotive, because he had a hot, clean shovel. The best imitation you can get is a hot, clean frying-pan; and when you are sure that it is hot, let it get hotter. The whole secret of cooking meat is to keep the juices inside, and to do that you must cook it quickly. When you slap it down on a hot frying-pan, the meat is seared, and the juices stay inside, and if you do not turn it over until it is almost ready to burn, you don't need to cook it very long on the other side. That is the one secret of cooking worth knowing; it doesn't cost anything, and saves time instead of wasting it. As I have never found anybody else capable of learning it, I reserve the cooking of the beefsteak as one of my family duties.
To continue the lunch, a slice of whole wheat bread, and a large quantity of some fresh salad, such as celery, or lettuce and tomatoes, without dressing. For a part of this may be substituted a vegetable, one or two beets or turnips, cooked during a previous meal, and warmed up in a couple of minutes; and we do not throw away the tops of the turnips and beets and celery, we put them on and cook them, and they serve for the next day's meal. If you would eat a large quantity of such "greens" once a day, you would escape many of the ills that your flesh is at present heir to. Finally, for dessert, an orange and a small handful of raisins, or one or two figs.
The evening meal will be the same as the breakfast; except once in a while when I am especially hungry, and want some meat. I am writing in the winter season, so the fruits suggested are those available in winter. The menu will be varied with every kind of fruit at the season when it is cheapest and most easily obtained. The beefsteak will appear at about three meals out of four; occasionally it will be replaced by the lean meat of pork or mutton, or by fish. The bread may be replaced by rice, or boiled potatoes, either white or sweet, and occasionally by graham crackers. I know that these contain a little fat and sugar, but I try not to be fanatical about my diet, and the rules I suggest do not carry the death penalty. There was a time when I used to allow my friends to make themselves miserable by trying to provide me with special foods when they invited me to a meal, but now I tell them to "forget it," and I politely nibble a little of everything, and eat most of what I find wholesome; if there is nothing wholesome, I content myself with the pretense of a meal. If I find myself in a restaurant, I quite shamelessly get a piece of apple or pumpkin pie, omitting most of the crust. As I don't go away from home more than once or twice a month, I do not have to worry about such indulgence. The main thing is to arrange one's home diet on sound lines, and learn to enjoy the simple and wholesome foods, of which there is a great variety obtainable, and at prices possible to all but the wretchedly poor.
In conclusion, since everybody likes to have a feast now and then, I specify that my diet regimen allows for holidays. Assuming that I am your guest for a day, and that you wish to "blow" me, regardless of expense, here will be the menu. Breakfast, some graham crackers, a bunch of raisins, a can of sliced pineapple in winter, or a big chunk of watermelon in summer. Dinner, or lunch, roast pork, a baked apple, a baked sweet potato and some spinach. Supper, lettuce, dates, and a dish of popcorn flavored with peanut butter. Try this next Christmas!
P. S. After this book had been put into type, I chanced to be looking over Herbert Quick's illuminating book, "On Board the Good Ship Earth." Discussing the importance of certain organic salts to the body, Dr. Quick states: "Animals have been fed, as an experiment, on foods deficient in phosphorus. For a while they seemed to do well. Then they collapsed. It takes only three months of a ration without phosphorus to wreck an animal. Individual creatures were killed after a month of this diet, and it was found that the flesh was taking the phosphate—for the phosphorus exists in the body in that form—from the bones to supply its need. In other words, the body was eating its own bones! When this process had robbed the bones to the limit, the collapse came, and the animal could never recover."