Chapter IV · FIRE AND FOOD Part II.

There is a big school in England to-day, headed by certain medical men of ability and renown, who became aware many years ago of the deleterious effects of cooking certain foods.

I cannot enter now into an analysis of all their views. I shall, however, select from among their ranks the man whom I believe to be at once the most able, the most courageous, and the most independent of them all,—I refer to the eminent specialist who until lately was Senior Physician to the Glasgow Hospital for Women, and is now Superintendent of Cancer Research, Battersea Hospital, Robert Bell, M.D., F.R.F.P.S., etc.

Although Dr. Bell’s investigations appear to have led him to observe particularly the relationship of diet to the etiology of cancer in the human body, I do not think that this need necessarily prevent us from attempting a general application of his principles to our daily life; more especially as he reiterates again and again the great importance of keeping the body healthy, and not merely safeguarding it against positive disease.

Dr. Bell recognises a great vitalising agent in human life⁠[97] which he calls nuclein. He points out that “the most powerful antiseptic in the pharmacopœia will not prevent bacteria establishing themselves in a wound, and it is only the independent action of the vital energy of the cellular tissue which prevents infection and promotes healing.... Now this healthy vitality can only be assured by supplying the cellular tissues freely with pabulum, derived from vital elements contained in the products of the vegetable kingdom, to which may be added, milk, eggs and cheese.”⁠[98]⁠

He warns us that “the animal organism is in constant conflict with disease, which, however ... is impotent ... so long as the cells which make up the human microcosm are fortified and nourished by vivifying material.”⁠[99]⁠

Dr. Bell then proceeds: “Chemically it [the vitalising agent] is nuclein, and is identical with that substance which is contained in every fruit, vegetable, seed and nut in their ripe condition, and therefore are adapted for the food of man. Cook these, however, and this vital and vivifying constituent ... is nullified.”⁠[100]⁠

Elsewhere Dr. Bell refers to “the vital principle of ripe vegetables and fruits”⁠[101] and “a vital quality in vegetables and fruit which is destroyed by heat.”⁠[102] We shall see that the existence of this “vital principle” or “vital quality” is abundantly demonstrated by the most recent research.

I am unfortunately unable in the small compass of this work to deal adequately with Dr. Bell’s able treatment of this subject; I can but recommend the reader to refer to his original treatises; and by way of summing up his case I cannot do better than quote verbatim a few convenient digests of his views which I have been able to find in his most recent works.

While making certain suggestions about diet, the learned Doctor writes as follows:—

“It is essential that the food should, to a large extent, consist of uncooked fruits, nuts and vegetables, and that butcher meat be completely abstained from. I do not insist that no cooked vegetables or fruit be partaken of, but these should never predominate, as it is essential that the vital principle and unaltered condition of the chlorophyl be retained in their natural state, and that the vegetable salts contained in all vegetable matter remain as Nature has provided them. Therefore vegetables should never be boiled but cooked by steam, and should never be overcooked. Cooking has the effect of reducing, not only the nutritive value of these articles, but renders them more indigestible, and induces the habit of neglecting complete mastication, which is a most important factor in the process of digestion. Moreover, the living principle, and the natural salts of fruits and vegetables, are indispensable to the healthy vigour of the cells of our body, and, without which it is impossible for them to retain or regain their physiological activity. Milk, eggs, either switched up with milk or in milk puddings, or very lightly cooked, also cheese, are excellent adjuncts, but never to the exclusion in any way of salads, fruit and nuts. Even unfired bread is to be preferred.”⁠[103]⁠

I do not quite follow Dr. Bell in his sweeping condemnation of butcher meat; I incline more to the moderate view of the Catholic Church, that butcher meat should be avoided only at frequent intervals, and sometimes for long periods at a stretch; but I entirely agree with his strictures against cooking (some of which we shall see confirmed in a somewhat startling manner in what follows), and I also believe that his contention that most diseases, cancer and rheumatism particularly, are nutriment diseases, whose best prophylactic is a sane diet, is true and has been demonstrated beyond doubt.⁠[104]⁠

A few more very helpful passages from Dr. Bell’s books will assist in emphasising this question of the cooking of food.

In Health at its Best versus Cancer, Dr. Bell says: “We will ascertain, if we consider the subject carefully, that the nutritive properties of vegetables and fruits are materially modified in the process of cooking. Not only is their value as an article of diet reduced, but their digestibility also. Besides these, in no small degree, their nourishing constituents are removed, and what is of equal moment, their therapeutic⁠[105] activity is thereby diminished.

“Let us consider what effect boiling produces upon vegetables or any other of the various articles included in our dietary.

“Does the albumen present remain in its natural condition with its latent vital energy still unimpaired?—Certainly not; its essential characteristics are entirely destroyed, its composition altered and its nutritive value reduced pro rata. Then it must be conceded the therapeutic and also the sustaining value of the vegetable or fruit is seriously reduced by the removal of the soluble salts which are carried away in solution during the process of cooking.”⁠[106]⁠

Here Dr. Bell proceeds to describe a simple experiment by means of which his contention is demonstrated.⁠[107]⁠

“Does it not follow, then,” Dr. Bell continues, “that cooking not only diminishes the food value of vegetables and fruit, but also destroys those qualities which are evidently essential as factors in the maintenance of healthy cell metabolism? I am certain it does.”⁠[108]⁠

Dr. Bell then argues that the same effect is produced on meat by cooking,⁠[109] and concludes by pointing out that the only articles of food which do not appear to be deteriorated by cooking are eggs and milk, and those which contain a large amount of farinaceous material, such as the cereals, potatoes, etc.⁠[110]⁠

In dealing with the whole of this subject it should, moreover, be borne in mind that while there can be no question about the positive and recognised dangerous diseases which are induced by dietetic errors, there are also a host of obscure, unclassified and frequently undiagnosable disorders and indispositions resulting from the mistakes which we make with our food, which though they may not be fatal, lower vitality, produce an atonic condition in which, as I have shown elsewhere, sexual potency in particular is very much reduced, if not suspended, and generally lessen the capacity for enjoying life.⁠[111]⁠

It seems to me these results of dietetic errors are almost worse than the former, because, being obscure, they are not traced to any particular cause and cling to the sufferer until he is mercifully released from an existence he has ceased to regard as a pleasure.

When it is remembered that the determination of a type as also that of individual characteristics, is now believed to be dependent largely upon the secretion of certain internal glands of the human body, the importance of the chemical constitution of our diet in regard to health and immunity from disease would not appear to require much demonstration; and yet so powerful has been the influence of a creed that despises the body and its needs, and unduly exalts the soul, that the tendency has been, particularly in countries defiled and blighted by Puritanism, to regard the whole question of food as a painful subject, as something gross and material, to pay too much attention to which is tantamount to pagan worldliness.

I have shown elsewhere⁠[112] the havoc the Puritans made of the Englishman’s food and drink in the seventeenth century; but this is only one of the many heavy prices we have had to pay for our negative creed in this country. A still more insidious and yet less apparent consequence, is the prejudice which now seems to reign everywhere in modern European communities in regard to enjoying the pleasures of the body. And among these pleasures, of course, eating and drinking come in for their share of censure. What the healthy palate approves of and enjoys, you would have thought, would be likely to prove beneficial to the body; and this instinctive critic of our means of nourishment, far from being flouted, ought to have been the first authority to receive not only respect but also obedience. This fact notwithstanding, it is only too true that, in many wide circles to-day, it is believed that provided that a meal is filling—that is to say, provided that it gives a feeling of repletion—it is regarded as sufficient and adequate. To demand any more is to be stared at with grieved astonishment by bilious and pious eyes, blurred and dulled by years of indigestion, constipation, and every other modern means of mortifying the flesh.

This may appear to many readers an exaggeration. Maybe it is a little exaggerated in regard to the present world. But unfortunately the present world is the outcome of the nineteenth century. And even if it wished to live more rationally and in a less pious fashion now, it has neither the means, the traditions, nor the health to do so. Throughout the nineteenth century my remarks would have applied, and it was during this century, particularly, that the greatest errors were made in regard to our drink and our feeding generally—errors for which we are only now beginning to realise the enormous price we have paid.

But cooking an article of food once is bad enough—although in my opinion in the case of certain foods not wholly to be deprecated or avoided⁠[113]⁠—there is, however, absolutely nothing to be said for the habit, almost universal in Europe and all countries like Europe to-day, of cooking foodstuffs twice and sometimes three times. This process simply reduces the whole product, whatever it may be—meat, vegetable or cereal—to so much waste matter, frequently poisonous, and always injurious; and yet so deeply rooted is the belief that food only requires to be filling, and so great is the ignorance which Protestantism particularly of the Puritan breed, has cultivated in regard to all questions of the body, that millions of the working and poorer middle classes of Europe are now allowed to perpetrate this dietetic crime, year in, year out, and no one says them nay.

I shall now attempt to show how, in the light of the most recent research, and in regard only to certain highly important but relatively very minute constituents of our food, cooking may not only be bad, but at times positively fatal. But I should like to remind the reader, before I start, that while all that follows does not in any way affect the general arguments of Dr. Bell, which in the main I believe to be acceptable, it affords an extraordinary confirmation of the importance he attaches to that element in meat, vegetables and fruit, which he calls roughly “the vital principle.”

It is not generally known that the body requires not only nourishment in bulk, that is to say, ounce for ounce compensation for solid substances and liquids expended and otherwise lost every twenty-four hours, but that it also needs to absorb certain imponderables, consisting of minute but vastly important constituents of plants or animal matter, which make the nourishment it absorbs profitable and useful. The importance of these constituents is enhanced by the fact that the animal body is apparently incapable of synthesising them itself, and therefore depends entirely upon an external source for its supply.

The absence of these minute but important constituents from diet may, according to their nature, either arrest growth or expose the human subject from which they are absent to disease and death. It is now no longer a matter of conjecture, but of positive proof, that while a man or an animal may be feeding on a diet which appears exactly to compensate for losses in bodily constituents, that man or animal may actually have ceased growing, may be gradually dying, or may be threatened with the most foul diseases if these imponderabilia are absent from its diet.

In the words of the distinguished Committee responsible for the Report on the Present State of Knowledge concerning Accessory Food Factors (Vitamines):⁠[114] “For many years past it has been customary to estimate the nutritive requirements of the animal organism in terms of what have been for long regarded as the four fundamental food units, namely protein, carbohydrate, fat, and inorganic material, and to underestimate, if not entirely neglect, the possible significance of other less clearly defined dietary constituents.”⁠[115]⁠

Thus it was customary to measure the amount of food required by a human being or an animal in calories; and if there appeared to be a sufficiency of calories in a diet, it was deemed adequate not only for keeping the body alive, but also for keeping it healthy and vigorous.

We were solemnly assured, for instance, by the glib scientist, that since margarine was equivalent in calories to butter, therefore, since things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another, margarine must equal butter. Our stomachs, our palates, our digestions, in fact a whole chorus of our tissues, protested against this bland scientific falsehood. But the authority of Science is such nowadays that a poor human stomach stands but a small chance against it.

It is gratifying to be able to record the fact, however, that in the end the stomach proved right—that between the common margarine, made from vegetable oil, and butter there is a difference, and a difference so great that whereas a man can survive on a diet in which his fat consists of butter, he could not survive, and a child could not even grow, on a diet in which the fat constituent consisted of vegetable margarine.

The difference between margarine, as generally sold to-day, and butter is that in the latter a certain very essential property is present, which is absent from the former. That essential property C. Funk has called “Vitamine.”

To quote again the report above mentioned, the Committee writes: “What can be said precisely at present is that if minute amounts of certain constituents are removed from natural foods, such foods wholly fail to support nutrition, and grave symptoms of disease may supervene.”⁠[116]⁠

These vitamines, or essential accessory food factors, are of two kinds:—

1. Growth-promoting.

2. Disease-preventing.

But even the vitamines of the first group may also be regarded, in a sense, as prophylactic, seeing that their absence from food not only arrests growth, but also exposes the body to bacterial infection of every kind. Thus, to the shortage of animal fats during the winter of 1918–1919, was undoubtedly due the rigorous influenza epidemic which carried away such large numbers of people in Europe. While, as I shall show later, the absence of one class of vitamines of this group may directly cause one or two specific diseases.

The diseases known to be caused by the absence of the disease-preventing vitamines from diet are scurvy, beri-beri and rickets in infants.

Group one, or the growth-promoting vitamines, have been termed by Collum and Davis: “Fat-soluble A,” and “Water-soluble B.”⁠[117]⁠

“Practically all investigators in this field of research,” says the Committee I am quoting, “have now admitted their belief in the indispensability of the two accessory factors, ‘fat-soluble A’ and ‘water-soluble B’ for growth and nutrition of the animal organism.”⁠[118] When Fat-soluble A is absent from a diet, this deficiency leads to—

(a) Gradual cessation of growth.

(b) The breaking down of resistance to bacterial infections of all kinds, particularly those affecting the lungs.

(c) Rickets in infants.

(d) A general lack of tone, debility, depression, skin troubles, conjunctivitis.

When water-soluble B is absent from a diet, this deficiency leads to—

(a) Immediate cessation of growth.

(b) Rapid decline, which may terminate fatally.

(c) Beri-beri.

(d) A general lack of tone, debility, nervous trouble, depression.

As will be seen from (d) in each list—and this fact is most important—a number of vague disorders, none of them amounting actually to a dangerous disease, though sufficiently debilitating to reduce vitality, spirit and sexual potency, may arise from an insufficiency of either vitamine from the diet, this insufficiency not amounting to a dangerous deficiency.

Fat-soluble A is in all probability synthesised by the plant,⁠[119] and is found in green leaves and the embryos of seeds. It was first detected in butter and egg-yolk, which are still believed to be the richest sources of it.⁠[120] It is also present in oils and fats derived from the animal kingdom, such as cod-liver oil, shark-liver oil, beef fat, the fat of kidneys, heart muscle and liver tissues, herring oil, cod oil, salmon oil and whale oil.⁠[121]⁠

Water-soluble B is widespread. It has been detected in almost all the natural foods. Its principal sources proved to be the seeds of plants and eggs of birds. But since the largest deposit of it lies in the embryo, or germ, and the bran of grain, the same symptoms may be induced in the human being by a diet of grain deprived, through milling, of the embryo and the bran, as through a total absence of water-soluble B from the diet.⁠[122]⁠

It is plentiful in rice germ, wheat germ (hence the value of whole-meal bread), linseed, yeast, egg-yolk, and ox-liver. It is less plentiful in wheat bran, fresh peas, fresh carrots, dried carrots, meat muscle, milk and potatoes.⁠[123]⁠

We now come to the anti-scorbutic vitamine, which, from the point of view of this treatise, I believe to be very much more important than any of the others.

Scurvy in itself is such a distressing disease, so alarming, revolting and complex in its symptoms, that it has been for thousands of years⁠[124] the nightmare of the mariner, the explorer and all those who, for some reason or other, may have been compelled to live on a restricted diet either totally lacking the anti-scorbutic vitamine or else insufficiently supplied with it.

It is a disease attended by increasing weakness, gastro-intestinal disturbances of all kinds, great pallor, inflammation and necrosis of the gums, until they project as a soft or mushy and friable tissue, bleeding at the slightest touch. There is pain during mastication, and the saliva, usually increased in quantity and mixed with blood, may dribble from the mouth. The tongue is coated and the breath is horribly fœtid. Hæmorrhage, chiefly in the legs, near the ankle, usually occurs after the changes in the gums have begun, both legs being involved. Extensive ulcers sometimes occur at the spot where the hæmorrhage has taken place. Bleeding from the mucous membranes constitutes one of the frequent and more serious manifestations of the disease. There is also swelling of the joints, the knee and ankle joints being most frequently involved. The bowels are constipated and may be obstinately so. Circulatory disturbance and disorders of the respiratory system are prone to develop in proportion to the degree of anæmia present.

Death may occur from gradually increasing weakness and inanition, from the development of large serous effusions, œdema of the lungs, or pneumonia. A rapid end may be brought about by hæmorrhage.⁠[125]⁠

Now these symptoms are sufficiently distressing and nauseating to account for any amount of horror and alarm on the part of those who have either suffered from the disease in a mild form, particularly as deep depression is a further characteristic symptom of it, or who have witnessed others dying of it. I maintain, however—and I think authoritative medicine will support me in this—that there are a hundred weaker forms of the disease which, though not recognised as mild manifestations of it, could nevertheless be cured or removed by the very same treatment as that which cures scurvy. And I cannot insist too emphatically on this point, because not only does it affect the argument in this book, but it also affords, I believe, an interesting explanation of a great many modern disorders which are as vague as they are distressing, and as incurable by ordinary doctor’s drugs as they are susceptible to immediate modification by the time-honoured scurvy treatment.

Let me give a few instances. A friend of mine, who had reasons for relying on my judgment in matters of hygiene and diet, came to me one day with serious inflammation of the conjunctivæ, and asked me what he should do for it. The eyeballs were also a little inflamed, and there was a slight beginning of suppuration. I told him to eat at least four oranges a day for a week, and to drink still lemonade. In three days the inflammation round the eyelids had completely gone.

On another occasion a dentist whom I had consulted about some trouble with an inflamed gum told me that I had much better have the tooth removed around which the gum was inflamed, and he hinted darkly at pyorrhœa. Not wishing to lose a good tooth, I disregarded his advice, and treated myself as for a mild scorbutus. I ate plenty of uncooked vegetables, and consumed about four oranges a day. At the end of the week my gums no longer troubled me.

I am firmly convinced that whereas thousands of people to-day are having all their teeth removed owing to pyorrhœa, this disfiguring and painful operation could be avoided if they treated themselves as for scurvy, and at the same time removed from a low to a high altitude.⁠[126]⁠

The anti-scorbutic vitamine is plentiful in some of our most common food-stuffs, provided that it be not destroyed. Scurvy may be arrested and cured by raw cabbage leaves and the raw juice of swedes.⁠[127] These are the most potent of anti-scorbutics among vegetables. Raw carrot-juice and raw beetroot juice are comparatively feeble, while the potato (after half an hour’s boiling) would appear to occupy a mean position.⁠[128] Among the fresh fruits the orange and lemon easily take the first place. Dried vegetables and fruits are practically useless. Milk and meat come last in the order of merit, and have to be consumed in enormous quantities in order to afford protection from scurvy.⁠[129]⁠

Foodstuffs offering no protection from scurvy are:—Eggs, cereals, malt (dried and kilned), preserved lime juice, autolysed yeast extract, pickled cabbage.

I shall not deal with the numerous ways in which purely modern methods of preparing food succeed in killing both the vitamines of group (1) and those of group (2) in the products constituting our daily diet. Because since these methods cannot be supposed to have been used by the ancestors of the ancient Greeks, they do not concern us here.⁠[130] I shall therefore only discuss the action of heat upon these vitamines, leaving the question of prolonged or short-period exposure to the sequel.

Mrs. Rink, discussing the liability of vitamines to partial or total destruction under the influence of heat, says that this may occur in one of the two following ways:—

“(a) Prolonged exposure to dry heat (be it sunshine or an artificially raised temperature), sufficiently high to remove the moisture from a food.

“(b) Prolonged exposure to moist heat.”

Summing up, she says:—

“A prolonged exposure to heat is always prejudicial to the existence of accessory factors.

“The boiling and stewing of food is calculated to impoverish and eventually to destroy them. Roasting, baking and grilling resulting in the production of underdone meat are naturally preferable methods in this connection. Even the steaming of vegetables—an admirable means of preparation from every other point of view—does not guarantee the preservation of vitamines intact.”⁠[131]⁠

Turning now to the Committee’s Report, we find the following particular details about the effect of heat upon certain foods:—

Fat-soluble A, the chief vehicles of which, as we have seen, are butter, egg-yolk and animal fats and oils, has been shown to be gradually destroyed when the butter is exposed to heat.⁠[132] This is also true of fat-soluble A in milk, cabbages and potatoes—five such common articles of food that they might be regarded as forming the bulk of the staple diet of England.

Thus, in regard to fat-soluble A, we have arrived at a very definite result. Seeing that a deficiency of this vitamine in a diet removes the protection from bacterial infection of all kinds, arrests growth, and, in children, leads to rickets, the evil effects of cooking, on the foods containing this vitamine, cannot be too strongly emphasised. Nor should it be forgotten that in cases where the deficiency is not marked enough to produce disease, a general lack of tone, debility, depression and skin trouble (conjunctivitis particularly) will be sure to result when the compensation obtained from other foodstuffs is insufficient completely to correct the deleterious effects of cooking on the products which are the chief vehicles of this vitamine.

Water-soluble B, or the anti-beri-beri and anti-neuritic factor, is more hardy, and can survive heat very much longer than fat-soluble A. It has, however, been found that one to two hours’ exposure to 120° C. destroyed this vitamine in unmilled rice, Katjang-idjo beans, and buffalo meat. Other experiments have shown that beef heated to 110° C. for thirty minutes also loses its anti-neuritic properties, and that, generally speaking, while the destruction of this vitamine takes place very slowly at 100° C., it is very much more rapid in the neighbourhood of 120° C.⁠[133]⁠

Now bearing in mind that a deficiency of water-soluble B in a diet leads to a cessation of growth, to decline, to beri-beri, and in mild cases to a general lack of tone, debility, nervous trouble and depression, we are again confronted by an example of the grave danger which the body incurs when certain foods are cooked, or cooked too much.

In regard to the anti-scorbutic factor, the evidence is overwhelming, and seeing that, in its milder forms, when it is unrecognised as scurvy, scorbutus has a number of manifestations which are as disagreeable as they are mystifying, there is in all probability, owing to the prevalence of erroneous methods of cooking all over Europe, very much more “mild” or “undiagnosed” scurvy about than anyone, least of all the average medical man, can possibly suspect.

In the words of the learned Report prepared by the Committee whose conclusions and statistics I have already quoted so extensively in this chapter: “With regard to exposure to high temperatures, the anti-scorbutic factor is also much more sensitive than the anti-beri factor, or the fat-soluble A factor.”⁠[134]⁠

And further: “Seeing that the anti-scorbutic factor is sensitive to high temperatures, it is clear that the value of fresh vegetables and fruit must of necessity be greatly impaired by cooking. When there is scarcity of fresh food, either by actual deficiency or by difficulty in transport or distribution, it is well to realise that raw fruit and salads have a value, weight for weight, far exceeding that of cooked fruit or cooked vegetables, and that a smaller ration will suffice to afford protection from scurvy.... The bulk of the population in this country takes its anti-scorbutic food in the cooked condition, and this being so, the methods adopted for cooking become of great importance.”⁠[135]⁠

The anti-scorbutic property in milk is reduced 50 per cent. by cooking; that of cabbages is reduced 66⅔ per cent. It is probably the great quantity of potatoes that are regularly consumed by the average working family that alone compensates for the loss of the anti-scorbutic vitamine in the potato through cooking, but unfortunately experiments with raw potatoes have not been made to prove this.

The Committee’s Report gives two interesting examples of recent outbreaks of scurvy, which were due entirely to the process of cooking:—

“Scurvy broke out in a camp in Scotland in the spring of 1917, and eighty-two men were affected. At the time potatoes were scarce, but the ration contained a fair proportion of fresh meat, and 2 ounces of swedes were available daily.” (As we have already seen on p. 100, swedes are among the most potent anti-scorbutic vegetables we possess, and ought, if cooked in the proper manner, to have afforded ample protection.) “The cause of the outbreak was investigated by Professor L. Hill, who discovered that the meat was always served as a stew, the vegetables were added, and the whole cooked for about five hours. This circumstance was considered by Professor Hill to be sufficient explanation of the outbreak.”⁠[136]⁠

Another outbreak occurred in a Kaffir labour battalion in France between May and July, 1918, in which there were 142 cases of pronounced scurvy. “In this case there was a ration of fresh vegetables equal to 8 ounces daily, these were cooked with the meat and boiled for a period of at least three hours. In the opinion of the medical officer by whom the circumstances of the outbreak were thoroughly investigated this fact was an important contributory cause.”⁠[137]⁠

In an outbreak of very mild and subacute infantile scurvy which occurred at the Hebrew Infant Asylum, New York, it was found that the malady was confined to infants who had been fed for several months upon a diet of cow’s milk previously heated to 63° C. for thirty minutes. Though this diet had been found safe if accompanied by a little orange juice, the discontinuance of this ration of orange juice “as a result of the pronouncement of the American Medical Milk Commission, (1912) that for the purposes of infant feeding heated milk might be considered the equivalent of raw milk,” led in the course of two to four months to the outbreak in question.⁠[138]⁠

For future reference, it is highly interesting also to note the following fact: that⁠[139] “if fresh vegetables or fruit are scarce or absent, an anti-scorbutic food can be prepared by moistening any available seeds (wheat, barley, rye, peas, beans, lentils), and allowing them to germinate.... The seeds should then be soaked in water for twenty-four hours, and kept moist with access of air for one to three days, by which time they will have sprouted. This sprouted material possesses an anti-scorbutic value equal to that of many fresh vegetables.”⁠[140]⁠

With reference to this most important fact, it is furthermore desirable in view of what is to follow for the reader to bear in mind this additional valuable information: that the Kaffir beer, “leting” or “joala,” is “the product of rapid fermentation of partly germinated millet and is consumed quickly after preparation. The Kaffirs are in the habit of taking large quantities when living in their own kraals in South Africa, and it is believed to be a valuable anti-scorbutic.... Outbreaks of scurvy have been reported by Dyke among companies of Kaffir labourers in France, where this ‘joala’ was replaced by a second type of beer, ‘mahew,’ a fermented drink also made from millet and maize, but in the preparation of which the grain is not previously germinated.”⁠[141]⁠

Meat when it is fresh, not when it is frozen, also possesses anti-scorbutic properties, but apparently great heat or great cold destroys the essential vitamine. Very large quantities of it, however, have to be eaten in order to afford protection; hence the enormous amount of meat consumed by people who rely chiefly on meat for their immunity from scurvy in its acute or sub-acute form. It is also best eaten raw for this purpose. This is probably why the Eskimo, who suffer from such a dearth of anti-scorbutic vegetables, are not only heavy meat-eaters but also raw-meat eaters.⁠[142]⁠

The qualities of raw meat, however, are still appreciated by so-called “civilised” Europeans, and this kind of food is now recommended by some medical men, both for rachitic infants and nursing mothers.

Now to sum up the foregoing, we have seen that (1) in addition to the old and recognised chemical constituents of our daily food, there are in the products we eat certain ingredients known as accessory food factors or vitamines, which not only complete the value of the remaining compound of which the food consists, and render it profitable and useful to the body, but also constitute indispensable elements for keeping the body healthy, immune and vigorous.

2. These accessory food factors or vitamines are of two kinds: growth-promoting and disease-preventing, and a deficiency of them in our diet quickly leads to stunted growth or disease.

3. As might have been anticipated, they are found chiefly in those primary products which nature has intended as a whole food for living creatures: egg-yolk, milk and its by-products, grain, vegetables, including grass (on which sheep and cows and all grazing animals keep thoroughly fit) and, of course, such secondary natural products as honey, which serve as whole-foods.

4. The anti-scorbutic vitamine occurs most plentifully in fresh fruit and vegetables; but it may also be made to occur abundantly in seeds, if these are partly germinated—hence the great anti-scorbutic value of all beers prepared from the partly germinated grain of millet, barley, etc.

5. The effects resulting from an acute deficiency are as alarming as they must have seemed mysterious to those who could not possibly have traced them to their proper cause. We have only to think of stunted growth, wasting and decline, neuritic troubles such as beri-beri, loss of immunity against bacterial infection, and, worst of all, the loathsome disease scurvy—all ending in premature death.

6. The effects resulting from subacute deficiency are quite as distressing as the former, because though they may not prove fatal, they are less marked and less pronounced, and therefore less easy to deal with and to diagnose, and surpassing the former in the vagueness and mystery that surrounds them. We have only to think of conjunctivitis, leading frequently to blindness, general debility, depression, indigestion, constipation, sleeplessness, neuritis, rheumatism, all the unrecognised and milder forms of scurvy (from which it is certain millions of the modern world now suffer without the smallest notion of the true nature of their indisposition), loss of sexual potency and consequently of high spirits and good-cheer,⁠[143] in fact a general poisoning of the body which turns all the good things of life to naught, and blights the brilliance of the sunniest day.

7. The exposure of certain foodstuffs to heat in the process of cooking has, we have been assured on the high authority of Dr. Bell, such deleterious effects that he believes rheumatism, cancer, and a host of other ills to which the flesh of man is heir, are in a great measure due to this method of food preparation. We have also seen in confirmation of Dr. Bell’s beliefs, that some vitamines are certainly destroyed by exposure to heat, and that the anti-scorbutic are the most susceptible to this form of deterioration and extirpation.

8. It has been pointed out that the only reason why modern Europeans do not suffer more acutely (that they all suffer subacutely is fairly certain) from their wholesale destruction of vitamines, either through cooking, or through the various commercial processes by which eggs, meat-extracts, malt-extracts, meats and oils are prepared, is that, owing to the great variety of food they consume, they accidentally compensate in one direction for losses incurred in another.

9. If a people restricted to a limited number of foodstuffs, as soldiers are in camps, for instance, cook food in such a way as to destroy the essential vitamines in their diet, epidemics, as we have seen, quickly break out and men die like flies. Thus, where accidental compensation in the form of a great variety of foodstuffs is prevented by the circumstances incidental to the life of any particular community, the cooking of certain products may and will prove fatal to all those endeavouring to maintain themselves on a restricted diet. If there is partial compensation, the consequences, though not fatal, may be both distressing and alarming.

I think I have now said enough on this question to be able to return to my main thesis, and to begin to apply the conclusions at which I have arrived to my interpretation of the Prometheus myth.

If we pause to ask ourselves how it is that we modern Europeans are able to frame our dietaries upon such an enormous variety of foodstuffs, and to light, as it were, by accident upon a regimen that allows for compensation in one direction, while grave deficiencies occur in another, we must remember that modern commerce and the world trade has placed the whole storehouse of the globe at the disposal of our markets; our meals reach us not merely from all the corners of our own lands, but literally from all points of the compass. Not a day goes by, particularly in England, without the product of some foreign land, some British colony, some dependence, being offered to us at our tables. The fact is now such a commonplace, that it has ceased to be regarded as strange, much less as marvellous.

If, then, with all this variety, we are nevertheless unable to maintain ourselves in health, owing to the gross errors of our own taste and culinary methods—for thousands upon thousands are suffering to-day purely from dietetic mistakes—how much more grave must the situation be among a people who have not our variety to draw upon. The moment the great war reduced us to the condition of such a people, we realised, by being deprived of our accidental compensations, how precarious our living had been before. As I have already pointed out, the serious influenza epidemics that swept Europe during the latter years of the war were largely due to deficiencies in the diet of her people (fats, for instance), which deprived them of their normal resistance against bacterial infection.

We know, however, that all primitive peoples are, by virtue of their simple civilisations, foredoomed to a very restricted number of foodstuffs. The balance of health and disease is therefore susceptible to more rapid, more immediate disequilibration, owing to the circumstance that it may be destroyed by a famine in one particular product alone.⁠[144]⁠

But a condition equivalent to a famine may be artificially brought about, as we have seen, if the essential accessory factors in a food are persistently killed or destroyed by exposure to heat. And the effects of such destruction would be felt the more rapidly, the less extensive was the variety of foodstuffs from which a people were able to draw.

It is not difficult to conjecture the constituents composing the bill of fare of the remote ancestors of the ancient Greeks. We can frame it upon the dietaries of most primitive hunting peoples. That it was composed largely of meat is most probable—meat eaten grilled, roasted, or baked, when good-fortune provided a natural fire,⁠[145] and eaten raw at other times. To this may have been added various grasses, seeds, berries, roots and fruits, when they were available, and wild honey when it was found. It is possible that the milk of wild cattle was also obtained long before pastoral conditions were actually established, and that the milk of mares was drunk before the horse had been thoroughly domesticated.

These primitive people were certainly nomadic. Having exhausted any particular area of game or other food, they would wander into other parts of the land. They would also plan their wanderings according to the seasons, and venture further north in the summer than they would dare to go in the winter.

If, however, through some mishap—hostility on the part of another people, floods, or a spell of ill-luck in hunting—foodstuffs ran short, while actual famine might still be warded off, deficiency diseases must have been of frequent occurrence and sometimes devastating. Forced to take up winter-quarters in an area further north than was the custom, the usual supply of fruit, berries, grasses, seeds, might fall short, and disaster would quickly follow.

For centuries, if not millenniums, habit must have confirmed what appetite and taste first created, in the dietaries of these primitive peoples, so that they sought their compensating or “protective foodstuffs,” not from a knowledge of their virtues, but from a blind rule of thumb which tradition all but sanctified.

Imagine now the sudden possession by such a people of a power so far-reaching in its effects, so subversive of their whole order of life, and so infinite in its possible applications, as the means to produce fire at will.

Everything which had not been realised when chance “natural” fires had been used, could now be tried and introduced into a new order of life. We have seen that the name of Prometheus was associated in the minds of the ancient Greeks with the manufacture of pottery. It may be assumed, therefore, that among a people refusing to recognise any limits to the use of fire, thanks to the Promethean spirit which animated them, pottery was one of the first things to be produced once the means for kindling a fire at will had become a common possession.

With pottery, however, the easiest form of cooking comes into being—the cooking you can leave for hours to itself, while you go about other business, the cooking that in a sense may be called automatic and self-performing—I mean boiling, simmering, stewing and braising.

Incidentally, as we have seen, this is the worst kind of cooking, the most deleterious to the food, and the most harmful, therefore, to the body; but the tremendous ease with which it is effected, the simplicity of an operation consisting merely of setting a variety of products in a pan with water, and leaving it to the action of heat, has, I am afraid, made it the classical method of cooking ever since the Promethean crime.

All the time we were in the line on the Somme, for instance, scarcely a day passed that the food, at least of the men, was not stewed;⁠[146] but then, as the officers and men of my battery will be able to remember, our casualties from boils and scabies (a sort of dermatitis revealing at the very least a low state of resistance to bacterial infection—if not subacute scurvy itself) were pretty heavy throughout the latter months of 1916. Nor could this be ascribed to dirt alone, as one of the smartest and cleanest N.C.O.’s of the left section—now alas! dead—suffered from it most severely.

The temptation to stew, when other means of cooking are rendered difficult owing to the rough-and-ready apparatus which is available in the field, shows that it is, of all methods, the easiest. It is the line of least resistance in the culinary art.

I have, however, quoted sufficiently from the Expert Committee’s Report to show how dangerous it is, and how, even during the last war, forces not actually in the line developed scurvy after a long spell of stewed food, even though this food contained ample protection in its unstewed state against the malady.

But, as we have seen, although scurvy in its acute and subacute and frequently unrecognised forms may be the worst, the most alarming and nauseating of the deficiency diseases, it is by no means the only one. Other vitamines besides the anti-scorbutic are destroyed by exposure to heat, and other diseases are the outcome of such destruction.

When, therefore, it is remembered that the remote ancestors of the ancient Greeks were a primitive people, that the range of their foodstuffs was restricted, and that such chance compensation as we achieve to-day was certainly impracticable with them; when, moreover, we bear in mind that with the discovery of the means of fire-production not only did pottery become a possibility, but with it also the worst, the easiest, the most deleterious and utterly destructive form of cookery,⁠[147] it requires no fantastic flights of fancy to picture the results, some immediate and others more remote, of the introduction of fire-production among them.

Epidemics of the cruellest and most devastating kind probably raged for generations, without anyone being able to point to any cause save perhaps Jove’s anger. Crippledom, stunted growth, tooth-trouble, eye-trouble,⁠[148] pronounced and acute scurvy, beri-beri, pellagra, indigestion, skin disease, rickets in children,—verily, in fact, a Pandora’s casket of evils must have fallen upon these ignorant, early users of fire, particularly as the Promethean spirit would have drawn no limits to its use.

When we add to this, that the possibility of kindling fire probably induced whole tribes to face the colder months in regions which they would formerly have deserted, and that, therefore, to the natural restrictions of their usual regimen must have been coupled the common restrictions imposed by the cold of winter; when we also recollect that these people, far from connecting their troubles and illnesses with the actual use of fire, were taught by tradition merely to ascribe them to Jove’s wrath over the stealing of fire—just as the Syrian to-day ascribes his eye-trouble to Allah’s particular attentiveness to him—it is difficult to conceive of the state of utter desperation and horror to which they must have been driven. Mothers bewailing the loss of their children—or what was worse in those days, the deformity and botchedness of their children—men and girls taken away in the prime of life, sexual potency radically impaired and causing more consternation among the women than the men,⁠[149] mouths becoming unsavoury, unpleasant to look upon; eyes losing their lustre and their keenness of vision. But it is impossible to describe the picture of such misery—much less to overdraw it. And to all those who doubt that such appalling calamities are remembered for thousands of years, to all those who question the historical truth behind this mythical association of fire and frenzied suffering, I can but recommend as a pastime for a week or so the task of imagining the effect upon the primitive mind of man, of such a sudden avalanche of ills and woes. We who, to-day, are so used to illness, botchedness and ugliness, that we scarcely know ourselves as Europeans and civilised men unless we have at least one cripple, one cretin, one lunatic, one neurasthenic or one consumptive in our family; we who are so accustomed to the fœtid atmosphere of the sick-chamber, that we no longer regard our own or anybody else’s physical shortcomings with shame or disgust, and who are forced to imagine some post-mortem methods of compensation for the tragic suffering that is now quite a normal occurrence with us—we, of modern progressive Europe, can form, it is true, but a shadowy conception of the horror with which primitive man must have regarded such a shower of physical calamities as fell upon him after the first indiscriminate application of fire to food; but those of us who still have a clean breath left, those who still are healthy and robust enough to feel a frank dislike and contempt for the invalid, the “sufferer,” and the half-witted, and who regard the cripple, the cretin, the misshapen and the physiologically bungled and botched with undisguised loathing, will know what I mean, and will realise that Hesiod was an accurate though unconscious historian when voicing the tradition of centuries, he declared:—

“Of themselves diseases came upon men continually by day and by night bringing mischief to mortals silently.... For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sicknesses which bring the Fates upon men; for in misery men grow old quickly. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these, and her thoughts caused sorrow and mischief to men.”⁠[150]⁠

He who has not the flair to scent history behind this, he who is too modern, too Promethean, to believe that a scientific development that is accompanied by a decrease of vitality and health, may be an outrage on humanity, can scarcely picture the anguish which must have existed to give rise to such a tradition as this. It explains the miraculous torture to which posterity condemned the “benefactor” of mankind; it accounts for the belief in the supposed wrath of Zeus over the stealing of fire, and, above all, it reveals the relationship between the ancient Greeks’ infinite trust in their supreme deity, while at the same time they felt the gravest doubts about the civilisation which had developed in spite of his most wise and benevolent ordinances.

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