Page:EB1911 - Volume 10.djvu/633

Rh the adult. Up to at least fourteen or fifteen years of age the rule should be four meals a day, varied indeed, but nearly equal in nutritive power and in quantity, that is to say, all moderate, all sufficient. The maturity the body then reaches involves a hardening and enlargement of the bones and cartilages, and a strengthening of the digestive organs, which in healthy young persons enables us to dispense with some of the watchful care bestowed upon their diet. Three full meals a day are generally sufficient, and the requirements of mental training may be allowed to a certain extent to modify the attention to nutrition which has hitherto been paramount.

Adults.—It is only necessary here to refer to the article on (see also ) for a discussion of the food of normal adults; and to such headings as (for fixed allowances) or. Different staple articles of food are dealt with under their own headings. For animals other than man see the respective articles on them.

Among numerous books on the subject, in addition to those enumerated under, see Sir Henry Thompson’s Foods and Feeding (1894); Hart’s Diet in Sickness and Health (1896); Knight, Food and its Functions (1895).

FOOD PRESERVATION. The preservation of food material beyond the short term during which it naturally keeps sound and eatable has engaged human thought from the earliest dawn of civilization. Necessity compelled man to store the plenitude of one season or place against the need of another. The hunter dried, smoked and salted meat and fish, pastoral man preserved milk in the form of cheese and butter, or fermented grape-juice into wine. With the separation of country from town, the development of manufacturing nation as distinct from agricultural and food-producing people, the spreading of civilized man from torrid to arctic zones, the needs of travellers on land and sea and of armies on the march, the problem of the prevention of the natural decomposition to which nearly all food substances are liable became increasingly urgent, and forms to-day, next to the production of food, the most important problem in connexion with the feeding and the trade of nations. As long as the reasons of decomposition were unknown, all attempts at preservation were necessarily empirical, and of the numberless processes which have during modern times been proposed and attempted comparatively few have stood the test of experience. In the light of modern knowledge, however, the guiding principles appear to be very simple.

Very few organic materials undergo decomposition, as it were, of their own accord. They may lose water by evaporation, and fatty substances may alter by the absorption of oxygen from the air. They are otherwise quite stable and unchangeable while not attacked and eaten up by living organisms, or while the life with which they may be endowed is in a state of suspense. An apple is alive and in breathing undergoes its ripening change; a grain of wheat is dormant and does not alter. A substance, in order to be a food material, must be decomposable under the attack of a living organism; the energy stored in it must be available to that stream of energy which we call life, whether the life be in the form of the human consumer or of any lower organism. All decomposition of food is due to the development within the food of living organisms. Under conditions under which living organisms cannot enter or cannot develop food keeps undecomposed for an indefinite length of time. The problem of food preservation resolves itself, therefore, into that of keeping out or killing off all living things that might feed upon and thus alter the food, and as these organisms mainly belong to the family of moulds, yeasts and bacteria, modern food preservation is strictly a subject for the bacteriologist.

The changes which food undergoes on keeping are easily intelligible when once their biological origin is recognized. Yeasts cause the decomposition of saccharine substances into alcohol and carbon dioxide, acetic and lactic ferments produce from sugar or from alcohol the organic acids causing the souring of food, moulds as a rule cause oxidation and complete destruction of organic matter, nitrogenous or saccharine, while most bacteria act mainly upon the nitrogenous constituents, producing albumoses and peptones and breaking up the complex albumen-molecule into numerous smaller molecules often allied to alkaloids, generally with the production of evil-smelling gases. These processes may go on simultaneously, but more frequently take place successively in the decomposition of food, one set of organisms taking up the work of destruction as the conditions become favourable to its development and unfavourable to its predecessor. The organisms may come from the air, the soil or from animal sources. The air teems with organisms which settle and may develop when brought upon a favourable nidus; the organic matter of the soil largely consists of fungoid life; while the intestinal canal and other mucous membranes of all animals harbour bacteria, sarcinae and other organisms in countless millions. Whenever, therefore, food material is exposed to the air, or touched by the soil or by animals or man, it becomes infected with living cells, which by their development lead to its decomposition and destruction.

Fungoid organisms may be killed by heat or by chemicals; or their development may be arrested by cold, removal of water, or by the presence of agents inhibiting their growth though not destroying their life. All successful processes of food preservation depend upon one or other of these circumstances.

Preservation by Heat.—At the boiling-point of water all living cells perish, but some spores of bacteria may survive for about three hours. Few adult bacteria can live beyond 75° C. (167° F.) in the presence of water, though dry heat only kills with certainty at 140° C. (284° F.). Destruction of life takes place more rapidly in solutions showing an acid than a feebly alkaline reaction; hence acid fruit is more easily preserved than milk, which, when quite fresh, is alkaline. By cooking, therefore, food becomes temporarily sterile, until a fresh crop of organisms finds access from the air. By repeated cooking all food can be indefinitely preserved. One of the most important functions of cookery is sterilization. Civilized man unwittingly revolts against the consumption of non-sterile food, and the use of certain fungus-infected material is an inheritance from barbarous ages; few materials of animal origin are eaten raw, and in vegetables some sort of sterilizing process is attempted by washing (of salads) or removal of the outer skin (of fruits). All preparation of food for the table, cooking being the most important, tends towards preservation, but is effectual only for a few hours or days at most, unless special means are adopted to prevent reinfection. The housewife covering the jam with a thin paper soaked in brandy, or the potted meat with a thin layer of lard, attempts unconsciously to bar the road to bacteria and other minute organisms. To preserve food in a permanent manner and on a commercial scale it has to be cooked in a receptacle which must be sufficiently strong for transport, cheap, light and unattacked by the material in contact with it. None of the receptacles at present in use quite fulfils the whole of these conditions: glass and china are heavy and fragile, and their carriage is expensive; tinned iron, so-called tin-plate, is rarely quite unaffected by food materials, but owing to its strength, tenacity and cheapness, it is used on an ever-increasing scale. The sheet iron, which formerly was made of soft wrought iron, now generally consists of steel containing but very little carbon; it is cleaned by immersion in acid and covered with a very thin layer of pure tin, all excess of tin being removed by hot rollers and brushes. The layer of tin, which formerly constituted from 3 to 5% of the total weight of the plate, has, owing to the increased price of tin and the improvement in machinery, gradually become so thin that its weight is only from 1 to 3%. Not rarely, therefore, the tin-surface is imperfect, perforated or pin-holed. Tin itself is slightly attacked by all acid juices of vegetable or animal substances. With the exception of milk, all human food is slightly acid, and consequently all food that has been preserved in tin canisters contains variable traces of dissolved tin. Happily, salts of tin have but little physiological action. Nevertheless, the employment cf tin-plate for very acid materials, like tomatoes, peaches, &c., is very objectionable.

The process of preservation in canisters is carried out as