Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/21

Rh of the food question. I suppose that there is no kind of meat which is consumed so generally or in such large quantity as pork; yet, according to the chemical and physiological data, the conversion of Indian corn into pork, at the rate of one thousand pounds of corn to two hundred pounds of pork, results in a waste of practically all the protein and nearly all the starch, and gives a residuum of fat of which most people get too much in the other kinds of food which they consume. Yet it would be useless to try to abolish pork from the common dietary. I sometimes wonder if the Hebrew lawgivers were not good economists when they condemned the use of pork, or whether they were guided wholly by sanitary considerations.

Again, the present crop of wheat calls for fifty thousand tons of twine for binding it upon the self-binding harvester; the cost of binding wheat by hand was five to six cents per bushel, and it required a small army of agricultural tramps who charged almost any price when needed to do this work. The self-binder reduced this charge to not exceeding one cent and a half per bushel. This reduction, which finally took effect two or three years before the resumption of specie payments in this country in 1879, was one of the principal factors in enabling us to export wheat profitably and vastly in excess of anything previously known; and it was upon the margin of exports over imports, consisting wholly of wheat, that we were enabled to import gold in sufficient measure to resume specie payment. Yet this all turned on tying a knot by the machine instead of by hand.

Again, I will present to you my diagram of the loaf of bread, which I have frequently used in other ways. You will observe that, with wheat at about the present price, bread can be made and can be sold in a very large way at three to three and one half cents per pound; but if the bread is distributed in the customary manner by way of small shops or by delivery on the part of the bakers themselves, you will find that the price of bread ranges from five to eight cents a pound, according to the quality.

Now, in this oven made of paper, any person of ordinary intelligence who is willing to devote twenty minutes to kneading bread—which requires more muscle than it does mind—then placing it in the bread-raiser, following a certain rule, taking it out at a given time and putting it in this oven over this lamp, can make better bread at three to three and one half cents per pound than any baker's bread which can be purchased. Here are samples of the bread; you can taste it for yourselves. I devoted two evenings to learning how to make bread; and I baked these loaves, some of which I made myself, by the heat of the evening lamp which lighted my library table while I was reading my evening paper.

I have said that a saving of five cents per day per capita might