THE PREPARATION OF FOOD.

Many good women have spent the best part of their lives, and volume after volume has been written in the endeavor to tell the world how to prepare foods. The very words, “prepare foods,” suggest to the mind that they are not right; that nature has not finished her work; that something must be done to them before they are fit to convert into human energy.

It suggests that they must be fixed, mixed, mashed, smashed, bruised, ground, shredded, heated, steamed, baked, boiled, oiled, roasted, toasted, greased, sweetened, soured, fermented, raised, mushed up, wet up, dried out, or in some way changed from the way in which they were handed to us by the provident hand of nature.

The securing of food is the chief business of every living thing on this globe. The necessity of doing this has shaped to a very large degree both the body and the mind. It made for man hands suitable for plucking fruit, nuts, and things that grew above his head high up in the air and sunshine. It gave to the lion claws and tusks to catch and tear his food. It gave to the hog a snout with which to root in the ground. It gave to the stork and the crane long legs and bills. It gave to the giraffe a long neck with which to reach buds and leaves. It gave to the honey bee an organ to collect honey, a sack in his own body to carry it, and intelligence enough to make his cell in which to deposit it for future use.

In the process of ages, want creates all that is necessary. Food taken as nature made it will produce a natural being. When it is changed, mixed, distilled and concentrated, it is unnatural, and it will necessarily produce an unnatural being. For, as man is the net product of his food, as is his food, so he must be. There is no problem in philosophy more obvious than this.

It may be argued that our present methods of feeding are the product of heredity, and with the long ages we have changed the artificial into the natural. This is not true, because the ultimate end of artificialism, that is, the violation of natural law, is extermination. There is no such thing as getting used to the wrong thing.

A human being can never get used to whiskey and tobacco. They will stimulate the nervous system above par, only to drop it farther below each time they are touched. They leave their withering trail through the body and brain of the real man, and sink lower and lower each day the hopes, aspirations and emotions. They cover the faculties with a callous veneering that finally becomes impervious to the sweetest senses of the human heart.

Foods should be changed as little as possible from their elementary condition. The idea of preparing foods should be allowed to fade entirely from the human mind. It is well to remember that they have been prepared once by a supreme intelligence, and it is seriously to be doubted if the puny biped called man can very much improve them.

When the average mind thinks of uncooked foods, it is wont, it seems, to fly to a meat store, more politely called a butcher shop, for proof infallible that the scheme is wrong; and draw a picture of one dining from the swinging carcass of a cow or hog, or going to the corn bin and gnawing through a crack at an ear of yellow corn.

Instead, picture a dainty table in a quiet corner, covered with spotless linen and laden with milk, cream, egg-nog, pecan meats, walnuts, almonds, grapes, grape fruit, bananas, pears, apples, dates, figs and raisins, luscious red melons and golden cantaloupes, lettuce, cucumbers, ripe olives, celery, olive oil and a dozen other delicious things, all of which being natural, satisfy hunger, furnish the highest form of nutrition, and quickly appeal to and excite the highest sense of taste and enjoyment. It is too bad that so many good people go through the world from the cradle to the coffin, and, after leaving the maternal fount, never enjoy, never taste, one good, clean, pure, delicious meal.