BREAD—FERMENTATION.

In considering the adoption of uncooked foods in the household, bread becomes the most serious problem with which the housewife has to deal. It has become one of the most important articles of food, and is deserving of the most serious consideration here, because of the fact that in the process of making, fermentation, one of the most deleterious processes known in the culinary art, is introduced.

The evils which follow the cooking or super-heating of all other articles of food cease with their cooking, which consist principally in lessening their food value. But bread, the so-called staff of life, is not only subjected to the devitalizing process of baking, but is infected with a germ that converts a large amount of the nutritive value of the grain into carbon dioxide poison.

The first step in nature’s process of disintegration—that is, the changing of matter back into its original elements, is fermentation. When foods ferment in the stomach, it is because too much has been eaten, or that combinations have been put together, the chemical properties of which act with violence, one upon the other. The stomach being unable to dispose of the burden, nature, in her kindness, aids in its disposition by an attempt at disintegration by fermentation or decay.

From the standpoint of him who knows the Laws that govern Health, it is indeed amazing to contemplate the means men and women have employed to harm themselves—to shorten their lives—to change their mental condition from happiness to unhappiness.

One of the quickest known methods for the accomplishment of these ends is the use of fermented foods. As an instrument for making disease, indigestion, irritation of the mucous membranes, nervousness, and troubles of all sorts in all the intestinal machinery, it is the most effective and successful thing ever employed.

People seem not to be content with subjecting their foods to a powerful heat and robbing them of their original elements—devitalizing them, changing their life-giving carbon into carbonic acid gas—changing the starch into dextrine, etc. But to make sure they are thoroughly unfit for use introduce yeast germs into dough and allow it to stand over night in a nice, warm, comfortable place, so as to be certain that the few germs will multiply themselves into millions and billions more.

We do not wish to spoil the reader’s appetite for fermented bread; but since we are discussing the subject, let us tell the truth about it. Bread rises when infected with the yeast germ, because millions of these little worms have been born and have died, and from their dead and decaying bodies there arises a gas just as it does from the dead body of a hog, or any other animal. This gas being confined in the dough, expands, and the whole mass rises. It is at this particular point that it becomes fit for baking—fit for human food. Think of it! It is at this point that it is supposed to be the proper material out of which to make the best quality of flesh and blood. It looks incredible, indeed, that such a process has found favor all these years among a sane, sensible and civilized people.

In reference to fermentation, Dr. E. P. Miller, an eminent authority on the subject, writes: “Fermentation passes through three different stages or processes. In the first one, yeast fermentation converts starch and sugar into yeast germs, and during the process carbon dioxide poison and alcohol are developed.

“In the second, acetic fermentation changes the alcohol and other substances containing it into acetic acid or vinegar.

“The third stage is putrefaction, by which the decomposition of food substances containing nitrogen, such as albumen, gluten, casein, etc., takes place by being converted into dead and putrid matter. Digestion is not fermentation and the digestive fluids are not ferments, as has long been supposed. Digestion is a physiological process, and hence should not be considered as any part of the normal digestive acts.

“Fermentation does not exist in any portion of the alimentary canal under healthy conditions. The difference between digestion and fermentation is the difference between taking nutritive material, foods, and converting them into living tissue, as takes place under the true digestive process, or taking these nutritive materials, as is done by the yeast germ, and starting them on the way to destruction, putrefaction and death.

“One is a process by which nutritive material is used for the support and maintenance of life. The other takes nutritious material and converts it into death—starts it on the way to corruption. The one is health-giving and life-maintaining, the other is disease-producing and death-dealing.”

The process of fermenting bread is exactly the same as that which is carried on in the vat for making beer, or through which the grain passes in making whiskey and through which fruit passes in making brandies and wines. It creates in the human organism the same set of conditions that is created in the production of nearly all intoxicating beverages; therefore, what seems to be the natural appetite for intoxicants is a false cry of perverted nature first created and set in motion by what we are pleased to call the staff of life—fermented bread.

The temperance people would do well to go into their laboratories and study causes instead of spending so much nervo-mental force in dealing with effects. They would be entitled to the profoundest respect of the thinking world if they would solve the question of why people desire intoxicants, instead of trying to close a few rum-shops by calling on the police.

No man or woman who will live for six months on pure, clean, uncooked foods can possibly keep alive an appetite for stimulants or narcotics. From this rule there is absolutely no variance. There can be no room in the human body, a body made of nature’s unchanged foods, for such foreign elements as tobacco and rum.

Note:—Fermented bread has come into such general use and occupies such an important position in modern cookery that we feel justified in digressing in this one instance and giving a recipe for a pure, unfermented wheat bread. See recipes.