NEW FRIENDS ON OLD PLATES.
Reading edition
The Grist That Now Comes to the Breakfast Mill Indicates That Men Soon Will Be Able to Dine Sumptuously on Cereals Which Have Been Reduced to the Constituency of Mere Mental Suggestion.
THE NEW FOOD.
I hear the scientist in grief
With all the strength he has moan—
“Why will the public feed on beef?
Why don’t they take to plasmon?
Give up your pork and venison, too,
Give up your lamb and mutton;
There’s in a penn’orth—nay, it’s true—
Enough to gorge a glutton.
“Its natural organic salt,
Its nutritive albumen
Will make the sick sound, heal the halt,
And make the palsied new men.
And it fulfils my dearest wish—
O sing its praises louder!—
You need no knife or plate or dish,
You take it in a powder.
“Buy it, and see your means expand,
You’ll spend less and you’ll waste less—
It saves the cost of cooking—and
I guarantee it tasteless,
And think as it new strength instils
And with new health you throb, you’ll
Soon take your alcohol in pills
And breakfast in a globule.”
But though for food be plasmon fit,
Its praise in me quicken
Such cravings that the thought of it
Makes me feel famine-stricken.
And think you then my meal shall be
On plasmon?—Fiddle-faddle!
The simple sirloin still for me,
And now and then the saddle!
St. James’s Gazette.
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THE HEALTH-FOOD MAN.
By Aloysius Coll.
His eyes are balls of polished steel;
His lungs are sponges dried;
His blood is bouillon-concentrate
In veins of leather hide.
His muscles creak like pulley ropes
When hurried into play;
His hair is like piano chords—
Some chords are lost, they say.
His heart’s a little globe of punk—
A house of constant gloom,
For love can never burn within,
Because there isn’t room.
His appetite has dwindled down
To fit his little food.
Till fruit is “water in a poke”
And bread is “so much wood.”
Hot apple-tarts and pumpkin-pies—
He reads of them aghast:
And waffles brown and chicken-stew
Are “terrors of the past.”
And, smiling, from his vest he slips
A tiny box of tin,
With capsules brown and pellets pink
All rattling within.
Then, with a gulp, he swallows down
His dinner from the can—
This product of the health-food school,
The Concentrated Man!
What to Eat.
✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
’TWAS EXCELSIOR.
The shades of night were falling fast
As down the café aisle there passed
A girl who bore what looked like rice,
Yet called she it by this device—
“Excelsior!”
“’Tis not ‘Sawdusto,’ she explained,
“Nor ‘Mat in Middlings,’ hulled and grained,
Nor yet ‘Near-Fodder,’ nor ‘Chew-Chew’—
This breakfast food is something NEW—
“Excelsior!”
Boston Post.