Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/402

388 this dietary the artisan adds meat, mostly beef or mutton, and some butter. A piece of fresh and therefore not tender beef is baked, or cooked in a frying-pan, in the latter case becoming a hard, indigestible, and wasted morsel; by the former process a somewhat better dish is produced, the meat being usually surrounded by potatoes or by a layer of some batter, since both contain starchy products and absorb the fat which leaves the meat. The food of the peasant might, however, be cheaper and better; while the provision of the artisan is simply extravagant and bad. At this period of our national history, when food is scarce, and the supply of meat insufficient to meet the demand which our national habits of feeding perpetuate, it is an object of the first importance to consider whether other aliments can be obtained at a cheaper rate, and at the same time equal in quality to those of the existing dietary. Many believe that this object may be accomplished without difficulty, and that the chief obstacle to improvement in the food supply, not only of the classes referred to, but in that of the English table generally, is the common prejudice which exists against any aliment not yet widely known or tried. The one idea which the working-classes possess in relation to improvement in diet, and which they invariably realize when wages are high, is the inordinate use of butcher's meat. To make this the chief element of at least three meals daily, and to despise bread and vegetables, is for them no less a sign of taste than a declaration of belief in the perfection of such food for the purposes of nutrition.

We have already seen that not only can all that is necessary to the human body be supplied by the vegetable kingdom solely, but that, as a matter of fact, the world's population is to a large extent supported by vegetable products. Such form, at all events, the most wholesome and agreeable diet for the inhabitants of the tropics. Between about forty and nearly sixty degrees of latitude we find large populations of fine races trained to be the best laborers in the world on little more than cereals and legumes, with milk (cheese and butter), as food; that little consisting of irregular and scanty supplies of fish, flesh, and fatty matter. In colder regions vegetable products are hardly to be obtained, and flesh and fat are indispensable. Thus man is clearly omnivorous; while men may be advantageously vegetarian in one climate, mixed eaters in another, and exclusively flesh-eaters in a third.

I have not hesitated to say that Englishmen generally have adopted a diet adapted for a somewhat more northerly latitude than that which they occupy; that the cost of their food is therefore far greater than it need be, and that much of their peculiar forms of indigestion and resulting chronic disease is another necessary consequence of the same error. They consume too much animal food, particularly the flesh of cattle. For all who are occupied with severe and continuous mechanical labor, a mixed diet, of which cereals and legumes form a large portion, and meat, fish, eggs, and milk form a