ECONOMY—SIMPLICITY.

If there were nothing else to recommend the use of uncooked foods except simplicity and economy, it would be quite enough. There is nothing more complicated—more laborious and more nerve-destroying, than the preparation of the alleged good dinner. There is nothing simpler, easier and more entertaining than the preparation of an uncooked dinner. The largest eating place in New York could be operated from an ice box and a pantry, were they to abolish the cooking habit. This in all probability will be done a thousand or more years from now, when people learn the true relations between food, energy and health.

In order to gain some conception of the number of articles used in the preparation of a Thanksgiving dinner, the authors took a very careful inventory during its preparation, from the kitchen of a New York hotel to which they had entrée. The total was 192, while dozens of articles counted as one, such as catsups, sauces, mayonnaise dressings, chow-chows. Such things were composed of from two to half a dozen different ingredients, which, if they could have been ascertained, would have run the grand total up, in all probability, to 250 different articles.

Is this not a hint from which any one at all gifted with the power of analysis might draw a few deductions that would explain why it is that nearly all diseases common to civilized man have their origin in the stomach and intestinal organs?

All these food items must be carried in stock by somebody. They are first collected from the place of their growth, and brought to storehouses, factories, packing houses, mills, and cookeries, and put into casks, hogsheads, barrels, kegs, jugs, bottles, tin cans, bags, intestines of animals, and every conceivable thing that will hold liquid, powder, grain and piece matter, and are carted to some place of storage, sold by commission men, resold to jobbers, again carried in stock for a time, sold to dealers, where they are again held up and finally sold to the consumer, who has no conception of their age or where they are from, and but little knowledge of their value as food.

All this is extremely complicated and expensive. It costs money every time this vast number of things are stopped and stored, and more every time they are moved. Every day added to their age renders them more valueless as food and more expensive as commodities. Not content with this aged, unnatural pickled and preserved condition, the housewife lays hold of them and proceeds to give them their finishing touch by fire.

On the checkered highway of man’s curious doings, there is indeed nothing stranger than this. We have in this country hundreds of different articles of food which can be most advantageously used without cooking; yet the cook intrudes his art, bakes, boils, stews, broils and heats these things, until their original elements are wholly changed, until many of them are rendered almost totally valueless.

Thus robbed of their elementary and delicious flavors, the cook endeavors to make them appeal to the sense of taste by mixing, jumbling together, spicing, and using decoctions called extracts, the properties of which he knows absolutely nothing, until the original substance is so disguised that it cannot be recognized in taste, color or flavor. Those who enjoy their eating most and who have reached the highest standard of health and physical development, have succeeded in reducing their diet to less than a dozen articles.

It seems that everything in connection with the affairs of people unites to recommend this simple method of living. We all know that taste, in the selection of his food, is the supreme power that dominates man, and if he will not pervert it, but will give it a chance, it will lead him into perfect obedience of nature’s great dietetic laws.