Note 2 — Chapter II · HOUSING, TRAVEL AND POPULATION QUESTIONS

In the matter of food, chiefly, a great saving can be effected. Nothing is more painfully ludicrous—I use the incongruous collocution advisedly—than the spectacle every winter of money being laboriously accumulated for the provision of free meals for the poor, and spent, to a great extent, so wastefully as on meat soups and white bread. The crass ignorance of the poor, who will not touch wholemeal bread, and indeed regard the offer of it as something in the nature of an insult; and who cannot be induced to believe that meat is one of the least satisfactory and most expensive forms of nourishment, is of course responsible in great part for this error. If we would get our nitrogen from pulses, nuts, and use vegetable fats derived from nuts, and bread made from entire wheat-kernels finely ground (instead of being only half ground as in most “brown breads”)2 our “free dinner” charities would be able to feed at least twice or three times as many people for every pound collected as they do at present. But the proposal would probably excite an outcry and we should hear that the poor were being treated as animals and that we fain would fill their bellies with the husks that the swine do eat. But all kinds of influences will tend to eliminate flesh from the dietary of the new age. “Growing sentimentalism,” already in arms against the use of animals for highly necessary scientific investigations, will, as it develops, be revolted by the idea of killing for food; and the refinement of the future will come to regard the eating of dead bodies as very little better than cannibalism. Moreover, the constantly increasing demand of the new age upon bodily and nervous energies will call for nourishment suited to their supply. This, and the wastefulness of second-hand food, will banish all flesh from the bill of fare. Fish will be eaten longer than meat. But more than anything else, the need for economy will reform our dinner-tables, and eventually all food will have to be obtained directly from the soil, if we are to have food enough to nourish our overgrown population at all. We shall not be able to afford to waste the ground on pasturage. We must use it to produce cereals, nuts and fruits, which are not only a much more remunerative crop, but will also use up in their assimilation far less nervous and peptic energy—energy which we shall need to make the most of. The cereal foods—products of wheat, barley, maize, and perhaps still (to a certain extent) oats—which will form the staple of our diet, will be partially cooked at the granaries by dry heat; they will need very little treatment at home. Vegetables, cooked, not in the wasteful manner now in vogue, but by conservative methods which will preserve their valuable saline constituents, will have to be prepared in our own kitchens; but pulse in various forms (as pease, lentil flour, etc.) will be supplied to us almost wholly cooked. A cheap, nourishing and delicious dietary will thus be made available.